Katharine Kerr // Voyager // Out Now

In a nutshell: Dwarves and Men unite to lay siege to the fortress of Zakh Gral, the newly built bastion of their mutual enemy, the Horsekin, in latest instalment of long-running fantasy saga.

Review: This is the thirteenth book to be published in Kerr’s Deverry cycle. Viewed by its author as akin to a play, The Spirit Stone is in those terms act IV, part 2, while the paperback edition’s cover announces it to be Book Five of the Dragon Mage, a title not shared with the hardback, which is rather confusingly described as Book Two of the Silver Wyrm. Clear? Good.

A quick snoop on Amazon shows even long-time readers to be confused by it all, with one offering a warning to his fellows not to inadvertently purchase the multiple editions offered by Amazon under different titles - they are, we are advised, the same book. Further confusion surrounds exactly which volume in the series this is, with previous announcements having indicated it would be the last (it isn’t, honest!), though a further volume, The Shadow Isle, is apparently now scheduled. All this is sadly indicative of a book where the amount of homework required of the reader, rather than any particular merit of the work itself, is likely to prove the deciding factor in enjoyment or otherwise. That the book has no chapters, only parts, is less confusing, but frankly irritating.

All the fantasy staples are present from the outset - a vaguely prophetic epigraph, a long-lived, diminutive ‘Mountain Folk’, an unsympathetic barbarian enemy, the Horsekin, a couple of dragons, a city in a mountain that strangers aren’t permitted to enter, a foreboding fortress on a clifftop and a growing threat out in the ‘Westlands’… That’s about the shape of it really. The inevitable historical influence is also present, though worn perhaps a little too plainly on the sleeve. The book’s claim to be ‘rooted in Celtic mythology’, the author’s encouragement to the reader to refer to Aeneas’s How to Survive a Siege for further information and a pronunciation guide which gleefully announces the fictional language spoken throughout the book to be ‘a member of the P-Celtic family … closely related to Welsh, Cornish and Breton’ is predictable, sub-Tolkien stuff and not really as clever as it thinks it is.

Epic fantasy series of this kind are like buses - there’ll be another one along in a minute, probably two or three all at once. This is typical fare; stick with it if you’re already aboard, but there’s little here to warrant the new reader hopping on. Wait for the next series, and get on at the start instead.

This review originally appeared in issue 3 of Death Ray magazine.