Dead Country

I read the first installment in the Craft Sequence, Three Parts Dead, a few years back. And though I have most of its sequels waiting in my Kindle library, for some reason I never got around to reading them. Too many books to read, as always. So when it was announced that Max Gladstone was returning to the Craft universe with a new set of novels meant to bring the saga to an end and that Dead Country was a good entry point for newbies, I reckoned that it would be easier to jump back into it by reading the author's latest instead of going back to read the earlier ones.

Is it truly the perfect entry point, as the cover blurb implies? Well, not necessarily. The Craft Sequence is comprised of six novels that total nearly 2500 pages, so there is a lot to this series that would be completely lost on newbies should they elect to start with this one. If you remove the massive info-dumps meant to bring readers up to speed, mostly regarding how the Craft works, to be honest Dead Country is little more than a novella. Hence, since you can download the first 3 Craft Sequence volumes for about the same price as Gladstone's newest, I would suggest that readers unfamiliar with this series begin with the very first book instead of this one. Though efforts were obviously made to make it more accessible, Dead Country works better for fans of the original material.

Here's the blurb:

Since her village chased her out with pitchforks, Tara Abernathy has resurrected gods, pulled down monsters, averted wars, and saved a city, twice. She thought she'd left her dusty little hometown forever. But that was before her father died.

As she makes her way home to bury him, she finds a girl, as powerful and vulnerable and lost as she once was. Saving her from raiders twisted by the God Wars, Tara changes the course of the world.

Dead Country is the first book in the Craft Wars Series, a tight sequence of novels that will bring the sprawling saga of the Craft to its end, and the perfect entry point to this incomparable world.

Though this is a relatively short work, weighing in at only 239 pages, Gladstone's worldbuilding is still impressive. Would likely have been even more so had I read the entire Craft Sequence before reading Dead Country. The only caveat being that most of the details come to you via those aforementioned info-dumps. But his depictions of the Badlands, the edge storm, and the Crack in the World were particularly well-done. The author's prose creates an arresting imagery that gives life to his tale.

The story is told from the perspective of Tara Abernathy, main protagonist of the very first Craft Sequence installment. Her father died in an attack led by curse-twisted Raiders and she's returning home to attend his funeral. As a teenager, accused of witchcraft Tara was driven out of Edgemont by a mob bearing pitchforks. So it's not exactly a great homecoming for her. Even less so after she saves a young girl from a Raider in a nearby village which was put to the torch, only to realize that she can also use the Craft. Seeing much of herself in Dawn, she reluctantly agrees to teach her the rudiments of the Craft until the girl can be sent to the Hidden Schools or elsewhere for proper training. But what was meant to be an in-and-out that would see her leave Edgemont as soon as her father is buried takes a turn for the worse when Tara is forced to help the community who kicked her out repel another attack from Raiders. And when the town's priest is abducted during the battle, feeling responsible Tara will have no choice but to attempt to rescue him from the Raiders' camp. Alas, what she finds there will have profound repercussions on her and the world at large.

It's a decidedly linear tale to begin with, predictable for the most part. Max Gladstone's narrative manages to keep interesting what is not really original, but there is something about Tara, Dawn, and Connor that keeps you turning those pages. Thinking back, it may have been to lull readers readers into believing that they knew exactly where the story was going, only to pull the rug from under them at the very last minute. For indeed there is an unexpected curve ball at the end that makes for a much better ending than I expected. I just wish the rest of the book would have kept me a bit more on my toes.

Given the size of this work, there are no pacing issues throughout. Other than those huge info-dumps, nothing affects the rhythm of the narrative. The tale moves at a good clip and you'll reach the end of the novel/novella quickly enough. If only there was more material to give Dead Country more depth. . .

The final verdict: 7/10

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