The Last Smile in Sunder City

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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I think this could be my longest post ever, and I'd still leave things left unsaid, you wouldn't believe the length of my notes for a book of this size. I'll try to hit the most important points. To fill in whatever lacunae appears below, you should probably also read what was said over at Witty and Sarcastic Bookclub, The Tattooed Book Geek, Grimdark Magazine, and FanFi Addict—they're what convinced me to buy the book.

“So, you're a Man for Hire?”

“That's right.”

“Why don't you just call yourself a detective?”

“I was worried that might make me sound intelligent.”

The Principal wrinkled his nose. He didn't know if I was trying to be funny; even less if I'd succeeded.

“What's your relationship with the police department?”

“We have connections but they're as thin as I can make them. When they come knocking I have to answer but my clients' protection and privacy come first. There are lines I can't cross but I push them back as far as I can.”

THE LAST SMILE IN SUNDER CITY

I made my way east along Fourteenth Street without much hope for what I might be able to find. Professor Edmund Albert Rye; a man whose life expectancy was already several centuries overdue. I doubted I could bring back anything more than a sad story.

I wasn't wrong. But things were sticking to the story that knew how to bite.

and

There was a hangover on the horizon, along with something else. Something sort of stupid.

A devil was sitting on my shoulder whispering the kinds of things that stopped working on me years ago. I was only in my thirties but I was old. You don't measure age in years, you measure it in lessons learned and repeated mistakes and how hard it is to force a little hope into your heart. Old just means jaded and cynical and tired. And boy, was I tired.

* Which is, admittedly, the point of redemption.

THE LAST SMILE IN SUNDER CITY

Maybe nobody gets better. Maybe bad people just get worse. It's not the bad things that make people bad, though. From what I've seen, we all work together in the face of adversity. Join up like brothers and work to overcome whatever big old evil wants to hold us down. The thing that kills us is the hope. Give a good man something to protect and you'll turn him into a killer.

noir

Post apocalyptic fantasy of a sorts. Luke Arnold introduces us to a fantasy world where the magic is suddenly gone. He asks the interesting question on what happens to all the fantasy creatures that relied on magic?

Sunder City is a place that used to be the industrial heartland of a magical land, churning out magical artifacts from the magical fires beneath it. When the magic goes out, the city remains but its industry is gone. Fetch Phillips is a man for hire - a kind of private investigator. He is brought in to investigate the disappearance of a vampire. There are some strong Dresden vibes here, even if the setting is quite different, with the fantasy noir stylings.

Interspersed in this noir tail is the story of what lead up to this magical apocalypse, what makes someone (something?) a monster and plenty of interesting world building. Luke Arnold has a wonderful light humour to his writings (like the best noir) and this is an eminently readable, creative and fun take on a genre bending tale.

The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold is a fantasy novel about sin, redemption, and hope. The story follows a man-for-hire named Fetch Phillips. Fetch is a human working in a town full of mystical creatures. Humans are hated, and for a good reason. However, in a redemptive bid to atone for past sins, Fetch's job and his sole purpose in life are to help non-humans, usually in the form of PI work. Through this work, helping one creature at a time, Fetch seeks to help atone for the wrongdoings in his past, his greatest sin. His sin destroyed the world and magic with it.

“A good man is made through a lifetime of work. Great men are made by their monsters.”

The world now no longer runs on magic. There used to be a great river of magic that flowed underground and seeped out to all the various creatures of the world. Thus, the world used to be full of magical creatures, mystical entities, as well as joy and pain. The world and the creatures in it had purpose and drive, glory, and beauty. Now that magic has been ripped from the world; it is a sad shadow of its former self. Magical creatures who used to stand tall and shimmer in the glory of the magic that infused them, are rotting. Dragons fall from the sky in dusty, scaled heaps. Trolls that had been made of as much soil as magic have stopped moving and ceased to exist. Elves that used to live forever, either fall to dust from rapid aging or now have to look mortality in the face as they know they are going to die.

The day the magic stopped was the day that hope and the future inexorably changed. Magic was ripped from the world by jealous humans, and it is a sin that humanity will live with for the entirety of their existence.

“I'd seen plenty of things break in my lifetime: bones, hearts, and promises. This woman was breaking right in front of me. I watched as she somehow vacated her own eyes. The waves of hatred lulled to nothing. The door closed.”

Now Fetch has been given a job, find a missing vampire. Vampires have been withering away to dust since the Coda(the day the magic stopped).
However, this vampire is much beloved and missed by the magical community. Fetch's patron wants to know what happened to his friend. As Fetch delves deeper into the case, he discovers that the vampire might have disappeared due to something nefarious. It is Fetch's job to figure it out.

Through a series of interactions, Fetch begins to piece together the timeline and what might have happened; things become so much bigger than a missing vampire. And, in doing so, maybe help find a small grain of piece for himself. Maybe give himself a little hope in this tortured and busted world.

“He was three times my age and starting over. I don't think I ever got started in the first place.”

The story is told through a series of interactions, both now and in the past. These interactions in the past created Fetch in the present, and we slowly understand why. Arnold did a great job showing how different Fetch was before and after the Coda. Before the Coda, Fetch was wide-eyed and naive, dealing with his strange upbringing and marveling at this world full of monsters. After the Coda, Fetch is a broken man. He nurses a deep wound and is wracked with guilt that is slowly disintegrating him, much like vampires slowly sloughing away. There is a dark melancholy in the way that Arnold writes this story. Often when authors attempt to use this type of tone, it can come off as trite. Trite and pretentious, but Arnold used it as a means of showing the desperation of the situations that Fetch and by extension Sunder City are in, and it is a useful way of communicating it. The Last Smile in Sunder City is a sad Sam Spade type story, but underneath all that sadness is a small gem of hope. This hope allows the reader to feel something aside from the grief and inevitability at the destruction of magical life. At the beginning of the story, the little light of hope is seen flashing briefly in the characters from page to page. Always other characters than Fetch. Fetch is fully immersed in his mental anguish. But by the end, and through some excellent writing, hope the most elusive of emotions comes shining through for a few moments. Things might not be ok. Matter-a-fact, they probably won't be. But, there are things to be hopeful about. There are things to find a small bit of joy in even if it is something as little as a good cup of coffee.

There are good things, and The Last Smile in Sunder City demonstrates that. It is a great read, sad at times, and hopeless, but it still propels the reader page to page with hope for the future. Arnold has demonstrated great skill in weaving an emotionally realistic tale, and I am looking forward to the next one.

I was so excited about this and now I'm incredibly disappointed.
The world is a place with all sorts of magical creatures, but then suddenly magic disappears and so everyone is struggling. Except humans, who are becoming more and more dominant as a species when before they were the lowest of low. Fetch is a detective in Sunder City, where recently both an old vampire and a young sired disappeared.

On paper this sounds like a good read and something fun I would enjoy, but the painful one-sided nature of the story bothers me more than I can say, along with the attitude of the protagonist.
So here is the thing. This won't be a spoiler because they keep repeating this from like page 10, but basically magic didn't disappear because of some happenstance, but because humans were jealous of everyone else and wanted to steal magic, damaging the source of it in the process. Because humans are assholes. The shittest of all creatures, but also fuck them for wanting to change that. It's evil to dislike that they are looked down on, it's evil when they want to change it and it's even evil when they form isolated cities when they can live by their own rules without treated like scum.
Fetch keeps repeating these things. No matter what human do, they are the bad guys. No matter what they try to make a place for themselves, fuck humans. The funny thing? Fetch is human. The One Good Human, look at him, he HATES himself ans is ashamed of being human as he also keeps saying. So he must be a good guy, right? Because he hates himself! That's the only good way.
Every human character is an asshole, except wonderful, self-hating, self-pitying Fetch, who drinks to deal with the fact he is the same species as those nasty, disgusting humans.
Man, is this tiresome, the whole phenomena of virtue signalling through hating your own people and loudly declaring that you all are shit. Yes, I find it pathetic and stupid in real life (hello, Twitter, look at me being a good INSERT IDENTITY HERE unlike all the others). Why would I read this?

I don't even care about the mystery when the character and his thoughts annoy me so damn much. I quit it halfway in because I won't torture myself. Nah.
The prose is extremely weird as well. Most of the time it's straight forward gritty crime writing style, which is fine, but then these random, weird things are thrown in about the devil smiling in the moonlight and such. Why? It all feels like it happens without a reason, just to sound cool.

Started off as a potential 5 star book but then the initial intrigue wore off a bit, and while still solid, not yet a favorite.

A standout positive: the worldbuilding. I barely care about worldbuilding half the time, but this one did it wonderfully and I could perfectly imagine the world while barely a few pages in.

I also really liked the characters, and especially the side characters. Fetch himself is also great, though can be a bit infuriating (so much self-hate!) but in a way it's understandable and just a part of him. I do hope there's some progress in the next ones to learn to move on.

As this was the first book of the series, there's a lot of back and forth between present time and flashbacks, as well as suddenly a bunch of paragraphs about the world's history. Some of those prevented the flow of the story a bit.

Even though I wasn't super gripped by it, I'm still curious enough about the sequel and intend on checking that out. There is a lot of potential here and I hope the next ones takes advantage of that.

A world where elves, vampires, humans, etc. live together...yes please! I was most hooked by the exploration of the species and the society of the book's main timeline (in fact I ate it up), but Arnold spent a lot of time in flashbacks or explaining the history. This wasn't really relevant to the plot and seemed like info dumping for world building purposes. In the end made it felt like two different books. Fans of the Dresden Files might want to pick this up to see if it works for them.