Shannon 's Reviews > Scar Night

Scottish author Alan Campbell - best known for his "involvement" in designing the popular game Grand Theft Auto - spent ten years, on and off, working on his debut novel Scar Night, the first book in the Deepgate Codex. For fans of "steampunk" fantasy writer China Mieville (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council), Scar Night is a solid, original addition to the subgenre.

The city of Deepgate hangs suspended by chains above the Abyss, its foundations built by Callis, the angel Herald of the god Ulcis who was cast out of heaven by God (his mother Ayen), who sealed it against him, and the Ninety-Nine, his angel companions. Deepgate is a creaking city of iron and steel and brick, of grime and mould and ash. The city is more-or-less ruled by the Church, and has nearly succeeded in squashing the heathen races who live in the desert lands around the Abyss. But there are only two angels left: an untested boy, Dill, the last of his line, forbidden even to fly; and a half-mad woman three thousand years old called Carnival who drinks the souls of the citizens of Deepgate every Scar Night (full moon).

Someone else is murdering citizens now, though. Someone else is draining the bodies dry of blood, so that they cannot be blessed by the church and cast into the Abyss to live in the city of Deep with their God, Ulcis. Carnival is suspected by most who know about it, but Presbyter Sypes, the old man who runs the Church, knows the truth.

The mystery of who is stealing souls is revealed about a third of the way through, but it's not the crux of the story. It's not a mystery novel, after all, and the truth of what lies at the bottom of the Abyss is what really drove me on to finish the book. There are elements here that remind me of Mervin Peake's Gormenghast, spliced with His Dark Materials blimps and Perdido Street Station thaumaturgy. The hideous god Ulcis, consuming the flesh of the corpses thrown into the Abyss, reminded me strongly of the lard-like cannibal in Ian M. Banks' Consider Phlebus. I liked the less-than-angelic angels, surviving off the souls of mortals, and I loved the strength and fighting spirit of Carnival and Rachael, an untempered Spine assassin (a group of emotionless killers who hunt Carnival through the millennia - unsuccessfully). I thought at first Dill was a little boy - from the initial description of him and a reference to 6 years being "almost half his age" made me think he was about 12. But he's actually 16. He has promise, though. I was pleased that Adjunct Fogwill Crumb was not a typically horrid administrator; despite his perfumes and silks he was not petty in the slightest. The poisoner Devon's motives were understandable. None of this I had a problem with.

My main complaint, and the reason why it took me a surprisingly long time to read this book, is with the descriptions of Deepgate. I just can't picture it. I don't get the mechanics. The foundation chains hang vertically, but are secured to the lip of the Abyss. Why do they not then just hang down the sides of the abyss, how do the hang down the middle of it? Millions of smaller chains create a kind of net between them all. But I just can't see it. How are stone and brick and tin houses, some of them huge like the Church's temple, held up? How are cobbled streets kept together? Gardens and trees and fountains - and layers? The city is in layers, is it not? I'm sure it was described thus, but how do you get from one level to another? Is it above ground level or beneath the rim? How deep does it go, how wide? Are there roads leading onto solid ground? Even when sunlight is included in the descriptions, all I see is darkness. And when I can't satisfactorily picture the landscape a fantasy is set in, I struggle with the story because it has no solid backdrop against which to play out. It's like there are details missing that would have given me the key I needed to visualise it properly - details perhaps lost between drafts. Very frustrating.

The writing could have done with some tighter editing, especially on comma placement, which too often threw me off. (I thought I had an example of this but now I can't find it, sorry.) But there's a lot of potential here, with Campbell still finding his feet a bit, and I do want to read the following books.