What to say, what to say…I’m sure having David Tennant prancing around on my television isn’t helping my focus any. Recently got myself addicted to Doctor Who and I can’t seem to stop.

Whoops. Digression.

Okay. The Steel Remains by Richard K. Morgan caught my interest with two sentences from its jacket copy:

“Some speak in whispers of the return of the Aldrain, a race of widely feared, cruel yet beautiful demons.”  [Ohhhh, my favorite!]

“But with heroes like these, the cure is likely to be worse than the disease.” [Beautiful demons and anti-heroes? Oh, squee!]

I’d also heard some great things about Morgan’s sci-fi Takeshi Kovachs novels. Steel Remains is his first foray into fantasy, but I won’t hold that against the book. Not much, anyway.

The Steel Remains follows Ringil Eskiath—though we do get the view points of Egar, the leader of a nomadic warrior clan called the Majak, and Archeth, a half-Kiriath left behind by the rest of her advanced, immortal race when they fled the world after the war with the Scaled Folk just over a decade before the opening of the book. All three of them met during the war and its aftermath, and as the book progresses their paths are leading them back together. Ringil, cynical, quick to anger, estranged from his family, haunted by a past trauma, and homosexual in a world that punishes such people with a gruesome public execution, is an unwilling hero recruited to track down a cousin who was sold into slavery. His search brings him into the dangerous world of a newly bourgeoning slaving industry, and to the dwenda (aka the Aldrain)—a mysterious race of gorgeous immortals with a plan that could doom the world.

“Could” being the key word, here. By the end of the book I wasn’t so sure whose side to cling to, whose motivations were misinformed, who it was that had been wronged. And that was fantastic, truly it was. I love that kind of ambiguity. I also liked the flexible portrayal of sexuality, which is such a rare thing in fantasy. Morgan handled it with brilliance, though I will say there is a whole lot of graphic male-on-male action. If that sort of thing makes you squeamish, best not read this one. But it was rather hott (two t’s intentional), in my opinion.

Unfortunately, the above is all I really liked about the book. It has some fresh ideas, it’s a page-turner, but there was just something missing. Well, not something, a few things.

Character Development: Besides Ringil and a certain dwenda, the characters are utterly forgettable. I couldn’t even remember the names of Egar and Archeth—I had to look them up. And I finished the book just two weeks ago. If they’d been minor characters, I wouldn’t think much of it. But they aren’t. They each have POV chapters throughout the book, yet I still forgot their names.

Plot: The overarching story involving the Kiriath, the Aldrain, and the ancient past is wonderfully intriguing and suggestive of depth, but the main story of Ringil saving a cousin he barely knows from slavery simply because his mother asked him to feels forced, contrived for the purpose of getting the larger story started, and seems to contradict who Ringil is—a man who angers at injustice, yes, but who is also estranged from his family. I still don’t get why he agreed to do it.

Writing: Where to start? The inner dialogue is often convoluted and hard to follow. There are many useless flashbacks that elaborate on scenes that happened a few chapters earlier. This could work if it was from a new character’s point of view, thereby shedding light on something that was missed before. But what Morgan does is essentially fade out of a scene, return to that same character later, and have that character think about what just happened wherever that scene was and about what was said by whoever it was they were with when the chapter ended. It makes the narrative feel haphazardly wrought and amateurish. And then there is the thing that drove me absolutely bonkers: I do believe if you did a word search of this book, the most frequently used word would be “fuck” (I’m exaggerating here, but you get my point). I’m all for some good cursing, but this is just overdone. It became distracting. It’s in almost every piece of dialogue and inner dialogue—regardless of character, race, age, sex, class, or place of birth—and therefore serves no purpose beyond itself. Fuck, fucker, motherfucker, fucking fuck fuck. No, seriously. It made my eyes roll and destroyed any hope the dialogue had of feeling natural. But that’s just my opinion.

Ending: By the end of the book, I just didn’t care much for Ringil. [SLIGHT SPOILER in white] In fact, the character I did care about died. This may have been intentional; this may be due to my own affinity for the darker side of things. Either way, it doesn’t inspire me to pick up book two, The Cold Commands.

So, do I recommend the book? No, not really. But I wouldn’t say it isn’t worth reading either—because it is. It was a good book while I was reading it, but once I put it down… *shrug* It didn’t stay with me.

Best Line: The sun lay dying amid torn cloud the color of bruises, at the bottom of a sky that never seemed to end.

Worst Line: He was going back to what he used to be, and the worst of it was that he couldn’t make himself regret it at all. In fact, now the whole thing was in motion, he could hardly wait. [A bit heavy handed for me.]

Some Favorites: “Common men make a distinction between gods and demons, but it’s ignorance to talk that way. When the powers do our will, we worship them as gods; when they thwart and frustrate us, we hate and fear them as demons. They are the same creatures, the same twisted unhuman things.”

Thunder rattled at the chained doors of the world.