A good book (with some flaws)

Death Mask follows The Long Moonlight (reviewed here). Xerdes the thief is now a fugitive, on the run from the criminal empires he brought to a fever pitch, and his path lies across a vicious, potentially supernatural desert: a mysterious foe behind; sand-drakes around him; and a vicious array of new enemies coming towards him. The story maintains the same energy and style as its prequel.

Razorfist’s prose has kept to the essence of its style in the previous book, though it’s more matured and effective here, without the occasional disjunctions that harmed that prose. His style is a memorable combination of slightly florid and terse. Many of the sentences feel like they have space or breath around them or inside them, silent punctuation for the words themselves, as if they hang solid in the mind. Overall, this leads to a style which is at once deliberate, decisive, and quick-paced.

The plot progression, like the prose, is terse, allusive, and far from slow. The best description I can think of is that each plot beat arrives like a blow to the ribs, one the attacker pulled back just a little farther than necessary, just far enough to be a display: thud-thud-thud-thud, rather than thudthudthudthud.

The story maintains the same tone and voice I observed in The Long Moonlight, reminiscent of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories but a little more energetic, a little less discursive as to backstory. Razorfist has real skill here.

Before getting into the cons, a quick warning on profanity: the book does not flinch from the occasional sexual reference, including a few (not particularly graphic) sexual expletives in the dialogue. If you find such crassness offensive, beware. I myself would make different choices in my own writing, but I do not think that the book itself handles the question with impropriety (the characters, well the characters are definitely flawed).

The cons?

Despite the small improvement in the prose, I think The Long Moonlight is the better book for two reasons. First, I’m bothered by the Wraith which chases Xerdes in this entry of the series. I won’t elaborate fully on this issue, as that’d be major spoilers, but I’ll just say that the narrative does not make clear to me whether Razorfist understands that casually decapitating somebody with a rapier (something the Wraith does in the first chapter) is a superhuman feat.¹ As a result, I don’t know what that feat was intended to communicate.

Second, Xerdes seems to me to have much less genuine connection to the plot of this story. His character development seems almost parallel, though the two do connect at a few points, but the plot in general lacks the visceral connection to Xerdes that was present in The Long Moonlight, particularly as it entered its final acts. Xerdes’s heart-struggles and his plot presence seem almost divorced; the plot could be any physically wearing experience in the desert, and the substance of the character development would not seem much altered.

Perhaps my understanding here would be altered by a second read-through. Certainly you must not take this as a death-knell problem. The story is still excellently plotted; the character development is understated, as per Razorfist’s style, but affective; the world is intriguing (though I did not read the 60% of the hardcover which is appendices giving lore).

I recommend you read The Long Moonlight first, of course, but if you like the first book, the second is worth picking up. It’s not a perfect book, and I’ve read books with much greater impact, but it’s a good story with some real substance to it.

God bless

1. It takes effort to cut a head clean off with a two-handed cutting sword, whether a longsword or something of the like. A single-handed, thrust-optimized sword- that wouldbe at least close to superhuman. ↩︎