Review: Wonderfully Gritty Steampunk with Amazing Characters
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 19, 2014
Mongrel had been sitting, gathering dust on my Kindle for quite some time. The first time I tried to read it, I just wasn't in that "mood". Having been chosen for me in the LGBT Fantasy Group challenge, and having just finished Third Daughter, an awesome (and diverse) non-Eurocentric steampunk novel, I was finally in the mood for something that stylistically reminded me the brilliant Michael Moorcock's 'Dancers At the End of Time'.That is a VERY good thing.I love books that dump me into an unfamiliar world and make me want to be there. The world of Mongrel did just that. While there were definitely parallels to a more middle-class/lower middle-class London, the towns with such amusing names as Taintwell and Purinton sound as if they could be actual English villages. In this world there are Pures--humans with no special powers and Mongrels--not fully human and with powers unknown. The Pures fear and discriminate against the Mongrels. No shock there, right? But it's far worse than mere laws as Fanule and Will discover. There's a even grimmer fate in store for the denizens of Taintwell.Fanule Perfidor the Dog King, his friends/allies are finely drawn and feel like real people, not fantasy beings. Fan is a wonderful hero--loyal, loving and yet beset by his own personal demons. He doesn't dwell upon them and when his people need him, Fan takes great risk to lend his assistance. His power makes him the most feared of the Mongrels, which also makes him a target. It takes a certain something for me to like a vampire character, considering what most of fiction has reduced them to, but Clancy Marrowbone (wonderful name that) has joined The Fountain Pen Diva's highly exclusive pantheon of favourite undead, populated by such notables as Atta Olivia Clemens, The Count Saint Germain, Lord Akeldama, Sonja Blue and Shori (along with dear Lestat of course). And normally, I look askance at M/M romance in which one of the characters is slighter/shorter/weaker/etc. than the hero (that trope is quite problematic when done incorrectly), but Will Marchman was evenly crafted. He was just as strong and passionate as his half-human/half beast lover.The steampunk world was gritty and grimy, which led to its sense of realism. The steam has to come from somewhere, coal. It's going to be dirty. The sex is sweet, hot and written in a wonderfully florid style reminiscent of Victorian erotica with a sort of tongue-firmly-in-cheek manner.There are two other novels, which can be read alone, and I think I deserve a second helping of my darling Clancy Marrowbone.