The Lore of Prometheus

The Lore of Prometheus: A Modern Fantasy Thriller by Graham Austin-King reminds me a lot of a James Bond novel nestled into some urban fantasy. It is pure adrenaline!

“McCourt shook his head. “I'm not, John. I saw him pull the trigger. I saw the muzzle flash. And then I saw the bullet. I saw it just hanging there in the air, halfway to you. I'll never forget it, or the look on your face. Pearson died scared, but you, you had this look... I don't even know how to describe it. It was like you were taking a test or something. Like you were concentrating, but furious at the same time. So angry, I've never seen anyone so angry. And your hand, held out, like you were warding the gunshot off...”

The story starts with Carver, an ex-military black ops soldier, gambling in a casino. There is nothing incredibly unique or different with Carver. He is a man of a particular skill set trying to make his way in the world with wicked PTSD. Carver gets into some financial trouble with the wrong kind of people and ends up needing to take a protection job in Kabul to make some quick cash. By this far into the novel, you think you know where this is going, but you don't. Remember, there is a fantastical aspect of the story that we haven't discovered yet.

What could be fantastical with Carver? He sees hallucinations of his dead squad members and is destroying himself with guilt. But, that seems like that is all until you read that Carver is called The Miracle of Kabul.

“I might be a whore with a gun, but I'm an honest whore. Once I'm bought, I like to stay bought.”

The story quickly shifts to that of Mackenzie. Mackenzie wakes up in a dark room, extremely thirsty, chained to a wooden board. An absolute nightmare scenario. Austin-King does a great job here differentiating the voices of Carver and Mackenzie. Where Carver is cold and professionally detached through years of training, Mackenzie does what any average person would and screams. She shouts for help till her voice cracks. Two hoses are hanging from the ceiling; one has water and the other food. Mackenzie is like a hamster locked in a cage.

As a reader, you wonder where these two stories are going to collide. Carver is on protection duty in Kabul, and Mackenzie is... somewhere.

“What I have is some kind of PTSD. Hallucinations brought on by trauma and survivor's guilt. I've done enough research on my own, whilst avoiding support groups and therapy, to know that much. I know avoiding the help is a bad idea. Maybe I'm hoping it will burn itself out. Maybe I'm an idiot.”

Suffice it to say their stories do hit and become an exhilarating thrill ride. Austin-King pulls no punches; these two are fractured, broken, mended, and fractured again. The psychological manipulation of both of them is something. You know that Austin-King researched interrogation techniques because the scenes involving Mackenzie and Carver are well thought out, perfectly paced, and terrifying.

The question on my mind when I got to the end of the story was, “Are Mackenzie and Carver the good guys or the bad?” Maybe a little of both? They are believable characters as they fall in shades of gray instead of everything being black and white.

“We,” Janan nodded. “The others working in what we've come to call the Prometheus Project.”

Also, a great thing about the writing of this story is the lightness some scenes have. The setting can be almost savage, but the characters both have biting humor, which I appreciate. It helped stand in contrast with the book's serious tone and not pull the reader down into the muck and mire of it all. You watch these characters broken on the wheel of scientific breakthrough.

My only slight complaint about the story is that, for me, there was a slight disconnect between the story beats of the beginning, middle, and end. It did not flow as well as I would have liked from each dramatic section and felt a bit jarring. Mostly on the side of Carver. But the story beats themselves were all written very well.

The Lore of Prometheus is a brilliant take on government experimentation and the Men in Black boogeymen concept. The story is shocking in its ferocity because Austin-King holds no punches. It deals with PTSD in a real way, it deals with psychological damage brought on by trauma, it has realistic characters... it is pretty much everything you would want in an exciting book. And the finale will blow you out of the water. No, seriously, it was an edge of your seat exciting.

I hope there is another book.. because damn. I want to know more.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S THE LORE OF PROMETHEUS ABOUT?
Not that long ago John Carver was in Kabul as part of a Special Reconnaissance Regiment squad. As is too often is the case, a mission went awry and Carver watched his comrades die in front of him—he alone survived due to circumstances he could not explain.

As the book opens, he's in London and isn't dealing with his PTSD in any constructive or healthy way. Again, as is too often the case, he's trying to numb himself with alcohol, gambling, and other self-destructive acts. Like taking out a significant short-term loan from a loan shark. The loan needs to be repaid soon, and there's no way that Carver can do that.

He may be self-destructive, but there are limits. So he cashes in a favor and gets a job for a private security firm. His first assignment is to return to Kabul and train a government official's security team. The last place he wants to go is where he's known as “The Miracle of Kabul.” But it's that or meeting a very painful end in London.

Carver doesn't want to think of the incident—and will put in the effort to distance himself from it. But there's a group more determined to find out exactly what happened. They're well-funded, organized, and single-minded. They want to be able to explain people like Carver and the abilities they seem to have—and will take extreme measures to find that explanation and hopefully replicate those abilities.

REALITY CHECK
The early chapters have Carver in London and then in Kabul. Those chapters have a gritty realism that I'm not used to in Urban Fantasy. In terms of setting, atmosphere, and characters—it's like they stepped off the pages of a top-notch military thriller. More than once I had to ask myself, “We're getting to the fantasy elements, right? Did I forget the blurb—this is fantasy, isn't it?”

And sure, at a certain point, there's no question—this is a Fantasy novel. But up until that right turn into Fantasy, Austin-King could've turned left and given us a perfectly serviceable (possibly very good) thriller full of true-to-life details.

You don't see that very often and I wish I did.

EMBRACING THE AMBIGUITY
I took several Creative Writing courses and workshops in college, in the decades since I've forgotten almost everything that my instructors or fellow students said about my workshopped pieces. But some of those comments I'll carry until I've run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. One of those concerned a supernatural event in one of my stories, a student (who was 50x the writer I was) argued that I should leave it ambiguous as to what happened, let the audience decide what the nature of the event was—it would be more effective. I saw his point about that scene, but the story hinged on that being a supernatural event—the rest was meaningless if that scene had a naturalistic explanation.

That came to mind as I was thinking about part of what Carver experiences. To keep it as vague as possible, we know that he can do certain things and that other characters can do other inexplicable things. But there are some things that could be an expression of his PTSD or could be paranormal in origin. It is far more effective, like the man in my workshop would say, that we don't know what's going on there. The scenes in question are very different depending on how you interpret those experiences. And I've enjoyed debating the interpretation with myself, I imagine I'm not alone.

Along those same lines, there are a couple of explanations given for the rest of what Carver (and just about everyone else) experiences—magic or “fringe” science thing worthy of Walter Bishop (and the door is open to other explanations, too, I think). Not only does Austin-King not give us an answer, he really doesn't even explore the idea, debate the issue, or anything. It's almost as if the text doesn't care—it certainly doesn't matter for what we need to know. That's the way to do it.

I'm certainly not saying that McGuire, Hearne, Butcher et. al are wrong to say “magic” or that those like Jackson Ford who have a more science-y take on it are making a misstep—like me, their stories depend on a certain take on the idea. The Lore of Prometheus on the other hand shines in the lack of certainty.

WHY I ALMOST DNFed THIS
There was a significant portion of this book that focused on people other than Carver and those in his immediate sphere of influence.

The theory embraced by those who are trying to understand his abilities is that those abilities are first and most easily manifested at emotional extremes, at the point of exhaustion where the subject's mental barriers are most likely at their weakest. We've all seen things like this in various guises. To get the subjects to that point, they're isolated, caged, only given the barest essential food and drink—essentially tortured.

And there's a lot of that depicted. And not only did I not enjoy those portions of the novel, they just about drove me to stop reading. If I'd bought the book or checked it out of the library, I probably would have. But I'd agreed to this post, and that only comes through reading the book.

The first several chapters were fine, the last few chapters were better than fine. But I'm just not sure about that large middle section. Act II, if you will*. Was Act III worth working through that? I've had at least five answers to that in mind as I wrote this post. I think I'm going to leave the question unanswered. Some readers will think Act III pays off well enough to justify the second act. Others will absolutely disagree. Others will think I'm over-reacting and Act II isn't that bad.

* I'm not entirely certain that this fits the three-act structure, but let's use that for the sake of argument, okay?

As for me? It surely might have been worth pushing through. But I just don't know.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT THE LORE OF PROMETHEUS?
Well, I'm just not sure.

Can I see where a lot of people would like the novel and Austin-King's writing? Absolutely. I've talked about some of the reasons for that above. Can I see where people wouldn't enjoy the novel? Absolutely. But I've spent most of a week trying to decide what I think of the novel and I'm not sure. I'm probably going to spend a few more days wrestling with that. Maybe the fact that I'm spending this much time on the question rather than just shrugging it off and moving on says more than a definitive answer reached immediately after finishing.

It's an interesting premise, well-executed, with compelling characters, gripping action, and a very satisfying ending. I'm sure of that. I'm confident most readers will see that. I'm just not sure what I think about the novel as a whole. If you find this intriguing, you should give it a chance.