What is SPFBO 9?  This is  a competition where authors of self-published fantasy can enter their work. The objective to find a winner out of the 300 entries submitted.  Ten judges (or judging teams) each receive 30 entrants.  Each judge/team will eventually submit one finalist to the second round where a winner will eventually be decided upon. Check out Mark Lawrence’s post here to look at this year’s entrants, judges and allocations list.  Also, check out this page to see all the lovely finalists and the scoreboard for Phase 2 of the competition.

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This is one crazy book indeed and, I won’t beat about the bush, I had a really good time reading this.

Seat belts on please because I have no idea where this review is going to take me, to be honest, it took me about 25% of the book to actually start to understand the basics of the place and the main character – and even then, lets just say my grip was tenuous at best. But, regardless, I was hooked.

Firstly, can we discuss character driven stories – because this is certainly that.  Secondly, dysfunctional families – yep, here in spades. Thirdly, a very intimate style story told by a person who is autistic.  Fourthly a genre defying tale with scifantasy based in a post-post apocalyptic world filled with fascinating creations and a creepy fog that turns those that get caught in it into a ghost version of themselves – a zombie if you will.

The story is told by Petre Mercy.  Petre ran away (well, rode away on a cyborg horse if you want to be pedantic) about five years ago.  Driven to despair by his family, the politics and the backstabbing, not to mention that he didn’t have the means to withstand the constant barrage of fierce rivalry.  He has now been called back to the fold following the death of his father – the King.  Petre is one of four quadruplets now embroiled in a possible civil war over the succession to the throne.  And, in spite of the fact that Petre was really seen as the weakest link it seems that his siblings are now all keen to have his support.

That’s really the main gist of the story although it unfolds in a slightly less straightforward way than I’ve portrayed.

So, Petre.  Well, as it happens, I really liked this character.  He made me laugh.  He’s wicked.  He’s addicted to some kind of muscle memory inducing drugs that give his body more strength and the ability to act more quickly than he would otherwise be capable of.  I would say that Petre is really an unreliable narrator in some ways because he doesn’t seem to have any realisation of his own value to the family – but that’s my take and yours could be different.  Fortunately, I liked Petre, which in turn makes it a lot easier to like the book – because you spend the entire story in his head with all the ensuing chaos, paranoia and sometimes close to hysteria as you can get, thoughts.  He doesn’t always see the full picture – therefore we, the reader, don’t always see the full picture.  I think this is a risk on the part of the author but for me it worked really well.  It does give a much narrower focus, you see things only from Petre’s perspective, and as I mentioned, he doesn’t always understand everything, but it’s consistent – it just needs you to join up a few dots for yourself.  And, fortunately, Petre is still learning as the story progresses and sometimes he remembers stories and events quite differently than his brothers or sister – like I said, slightly unreliable narrator – although, that being said, I think people often have a different memory of an event than others that were present.

The world is one creepy messed up place.  It’s a strange mix of new and old.  Things are not necessarily explained, for example, what is the weird fog that turns people into zombies?  I don’t know and for me those sort of details felt irrelevant to the story.  The real beauty of Petre’s narration and the fact that he is often unaware of the bigger picture is that we don’t have serious info dumps.  He does provide us with some details, he sometimes clearly listened to his lessons, but, for the most part, and I would say this goes for the pacing as well, you’re pretty much meant to hit the ground running with this one.  I really like the element of not always being told everything that’s happening exactly as it happens, I like the speculation this leads to inside my own head that, okay, is often times wrong but is enjoyable nonetheless.

The writing is really good.  I will just mention though that this is grimdark, yes there is humour and snark but it can also be brutal, it can be a bit ick and there’s some colourful cursing.  For me the author hit the right tone.  I like books that make me smile and I love books that make me laugh, particularly if that breaks up what otherwise would be a very dour read.

Basically, at its core, this is a book about family and the way we interact, fight, scream, laugh, cry. Of course, the stakes with this particular family are what makes their story so interesting.  I found this unique and enjoyable  and I look forward to reading more by this author.

My thanks to the author for providing a copy for review.  The above is my own opinion.

My rating 8.5 of 10 stars or 4 of 5 for Goodreads