Review: Excellent and original
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 21, 2013
I have read over 70 books this year and only two of them deserve five stars. This, obviously, is one of them.All of the stories in this book take place in a fantasy world called the Endlands. Gray drops us right into the middle of this world without lengthy exposition on its makeup. We are left to put together the pieces with the many references to people, places, and events. This was confusing at times, but overall I felt that it gave the reader a second thread to follow in addition to the plot of each tale.Magic is a part of everyday life in this world and each story touches on "nine weapons of ancient magic," but the focus of these stories is character. Gray's unique voice gives us a personal view into the characters' motivations and longings.What I loved most about the book is Gray's writing style. At first, I was bothered by the multitude of participial phrases and other repetitive devices, but I quickly let go of the annoyance and read the prose in awe. Some stories read mostly like typical sword and sorcery adventures, but Gray uses some really interesting literary techniques in the rest of the book. The short novel A Prayer for Dead Kings is written in the present tense for the protagonist's point of view, even when describing events of the past. This lends to the disorienting sense of the character's feeling of being adrift in time. Another story is written from the point of view of a forest spirit, which is referred to as "he" and "him" while the humans are referred to as "it."I also really liked that some stories had happy endings, others had sad endings, and some were ambiguous.I received a complimentary copy of this book in order to review it, but I bought another anthology of Endlands stories the day after I finished A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales. While I've enjoyed many of the books I've reviewed, I've never before felt compelled to buy anything else by the author. Until now.