Many fantasy novels published in recent years are not really what I would call fantasy, although it is hard to know how else to categorise a story set in an imaginary world.
Yet there is too often something flatly prosaic about these never-never lands, and even some quite entertaining adventures just don’t come close to touching the yearning for the strange and magical that is surely this genre’s primary appeal. But just as I think that I never want to read another “first in a brand new series”, along comes Sea of Ghosts, a truly fantastic tale.
If Mervyn Peake and J. R. R. Tolkien are the two magnetic poles of classic fantasy, there is no doubt which one attracts the author Alan Campbell. It was obvious from his first novel, Scar Night — with its emphasis on vampiric immortality, blood, sacrifice and a particularly unpleasant religion — that he wasn’t interested in depicting a cosy fellowship or noble heroism.
His new novel, the first in a projected series called “The Gravedigger Chronicles”, is no less grotesque and violent than his first, but impresses as a more accomplished and original achievement. The villains are still over-the-top caricatures of evil, but the main characters are more complex and interesting, and his invented world (as in the best fantasies, a character itself) is one of the most bizarre, fascinating and dangerous it has been my pleasure to encounter.
Although there is hardly anything about this exhausted world of toxic seas and deadly entropic sorcery that could be called pleasant, the story grips like a vice, filled with mystery and action, and there is a rich vein of black humour running through the strangeness.
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Sea of Ghosts by Alan Campbell, published by Tor, 437pp £16.99; To buy this book for £15.29 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134)