We Are The Dead

We are the Dead - by Mike Shackle

If I could liken a book to a song, then I would liken ???We are the Dead??? to ???Bleed??? by Messhuggah. Hard, uncompromising and totally bloody brilliant. This is the first book in Mike Shackle???s ???The Last War??? Trilogy and I don???t know what to say. This book is something else.

The usual path for a fantasy book is to culminate in that final climactic battle. However, Mike Shackle takes a totally different view and thinks it is a good idea to start the book with the ultimate battle, and in this world the Evil Empire wins. They don???t just win, but they pulverise the good guys and then rout the rest of the country.

Well, that took me by surprise, I must say! Where on earth do we go from there? Urm, I???m not sure. It???s a good job that Mike Shackle does.

We are the Dead is a book about oppression, rebellion and survival. It???s about how normal people survive in extreme circumstances and the choices they make when placed in an impossible situation.

I really enjoyed this book. It is a gripping narrative that has you guessing what on earth is going to happen next.

I have got to say that Mike Shackle has done something different with We are the Dead and I loved every minute of the ride that he took me on.From beginning to end, this book never lets up.

The book starts with a student, Tinnstra on the verge of completing suicide due to her disgracing herself in some way for an unknown misdemeanour. We learn that she is at military school in the country of Jia, training to be an elite soldier called The Shulka, just like her father.

We then cut to the north of the country, where the army of Shulka are prepared to meet the Egril, an undisciplined, barbarian army. As we learn, the country of Jia was the home of magic and the Jians overcame the Egril at some point in the past. However, the magic disappeared long ago and now the Shulka, a set of elite warriors, protect the country from invasion..

What happens next, nobody is prepared for. Jax, the leader of the Shulka, believes that this is going to be an easy battle. However, the best laid plans and all that. Subsequently,the Jians learn the Egril are not what they seem. They are a highly organised machine that have magic, monsters and weapons that can destroy the Shulka with no chance of fighting back..

Believe it or not, that is the first forty pages, the first forty pages. Whaaat?

What comes next is a tale of oppression and fear. All the heroes of the land of Jia have been decimated and there is no one left to fight for the people. The Egril are cruel and rule with a hand of terror.

The Egril have got to be the best set of fantasy villains that I have read. They are truly horrible and Mike Shackle writes so well that the feeling of oppression is palpable. They dehumanise the people that they rule and treat them worse than animals. They have no qualms about killing anyone for the slightest thing and regularly do. As you read the book you can almost smell the fear that the inhabitants of Jia live with every day.The Egril are brutal and use this brutality with great abandon.

As we move through the story we are introduced to the characters. Now don???t be expecting heroic magic and sword wielding heroes that will ride in on a white charger and save everyone, coz it ain???t gunna happen. In this book, most of the characters are unlikeable or have a fault running through them so wide the sea would be swallowed.

We meet Tinnstra in the first instance as she is preparing to end her life. And it is at that point we realise that Tinnstra is so consumed with fear that she is willing to withdraw from everything, even life. We have Dren, a bombastic teenager who is willing to send anyone to their deaths without a thought. Dren has no care, and we see this early on when he coerces a young mother to be a suicide bomber and kill a load of people that he believes are collaborators with the enemy. He has no regard for life at all.

There are other characters, like Jax, the leader of the Hanran, who was broken in the first assault by the Egril and has arm cut off, and then there is Yas, a single mother whose husband was killed horrifically by the Egril, leaving her to bring their child into the world.

Throughout the book. The characters develop in many ways and experience life changing events. They all go on their journey and all change in ways they cannot imagine. I found this to be a strength to the narrative in that whilst you may not like the characters initially, your relationship with each individual character changes throughout the book.

The pacing of the narrative is supersonic. Mike Shackle writes with a clipped prose that does not waste a word. HIs descriptive prowess is brilliant. Sometimes a little too brilliant, particularly when we get to a scene with Jax and Darus (an Egril Chosen who has been imbued with power, and the fifth pov in the book). This made me squirm, really squirm as the violence that Darus meters out on Jax is gut wrenching.

The other thing is that Mike Shackle writes action scenes that are so cinematic it is like having a TV in your head.He is totally unflinching in describing the violence of the situation, describing each sword stroke and the damage that results. At times, it reminded me of something from a Wachowski brothers film.

He does not fluff the brutality that the oppressors meter out to the citizens of Jia. Nor does he make any judgements on the lengths the characters will go to, to get their freedom. And this is something that struck me throughout the story. Our ???so called??? heroes do some nasty stuff, and I mean the types of things that a war crimes committee would have a field day with. However, the character???s are not held to account for the actions that they take and you understand the decisions that they make.

Despite it being a war torn country, Mike Shackle builds a rich world. Whenever the book moves to the different cities in the country of Jia you get a distinct difference in the environments that the characters inhabit. Shackle describes a world with a rich history, giving you all the background you need to picture the environment and the people that inhabit it.

As I have said before, Mike Shackle???s books have placed themselves firmly in my all time fantasy favorites and this series deserves all the praise that it gets.

A difficult book to rate. There are many fundamental flaws with this one - the characters are unlikable, the prose is somewhat naïve and clunky, and there is a lot of telling going on. The first half the book was a real struggle with this. The book follows multiple POVs, but the dominant one is probably Tynnstra. The idea of a coward as lead character in this style of fantasy (which btw is at grimdarkest end of grimdark) is a nice idea, but the constant statements that she is a coward without really developing the whats and the whys of it just ends up deeply annoying. Cowards can be written well (Flashman and Rincewind are two examples that come to mind) and it is possible to write them in ways where it is possible to relate and understand their cowardice. Tynnstra is just a coward, with no ulterior motives explored at all.

The one dimensionality of the other characters is also there. The villains are evil for no apparent reason except to be evil. The noble soldiers are also not really explored in their motivations. The shallowness of the characters is offset dramatically against the viciousness of the world they live in. A conquered country with an invading force that cares little for their new subjects is a vivid setting that really is brutal.

The saving grace for the novel is its second half. Here the pace picks up, the action picks up, the characters start to show some better development and suddenly the story becomes alive. The prose is still clunky at times but the tension and the stakes become more exciting, the telling is reduced and the whole thing is much more readable.

This is very grim and very dark. There are plenty of triggers in the text. It is also not the best prose. But there is enough excitement to help provide some good entertainment.

3.5 stars. A somewhat predictable plot with fully serviceable characters, in a story that was really well written and well edited!

The plot was solid and perfectly good, though if you're looking for something unique... maybe look elsewhere. I loved the grittiness of the story; it's dark in tone (extremely explicit torture scenes, one attempted on-page rape scene, etc.) which made the events believable to read about. Nothing groundbreaking, I think parts of the plot were pretty convenient, like

But overall the plot achieved what it set out to do—showing events of a rebellion unfolding through the POV of characters from all facets of this rebellion/war, in a grimdark narrative.

The characters were also perfectly adequate, though as a character driven reader I don't think they were all that special. Each character was unique, though their character traits felt one dimensional and lacking of nuance. I think writing characters that are very morally complex is an opportunity to be taken when writing a grimdark story; but even the character development of certain protagonists fell slightly flat for me.

Dren is a character who has good intentions, but is insanely asinine and egotistical in the beginning. His characterization sees development and he eventually comes to the right side, as you'd expect, but the character development from point A to point B felt too linear. The characters were good, but not great because they were lacking complexity despite being otherwise written relatively well for who they are.

I'd recommend this book to adult fantasy readers who are looking for a grimdark story that feels familiar, or are new to this fantasy subgenra. I thought the characterizations and plot were completely adequate; though it was lacking a certain ‘je ne sais quoi' which makes me think this story won't be all that memorable for me. And a big shoutout to the author's prose and whoever edited this book, because the writing was really polished!