I received an ARC of this book from the author, Darrell Drake.
A Star Reckoner’s Lot is an ambitious work of historical fiction funded by a Kickstarter campaign partly on the strength of its unique setting: the Sasanian Empire, sometime in third to seventh century Iran. I love historical fantasy, and I’m among the growing crowd of people clamoring for more diverse fantasy settings, so I was excited to see how it turned out.
Unfortunately, ASRL could really have used a few more deep edit passes before it went to press. There’s absolutely a great and unique book here, but the published draft doesn’t do it much justice.
Drake has an extensive list of research sources, something I love to see from fiction authors, particularly in fantasy. Not a lot of it seems to make it to the page, though. There’re only a few short slice-of-life ethnographic bits, and the plot is a timeless mythological conflict rather than a particular historical situation. There’s one bit of dialogue about a truce between Iran and a neighbor, and it’s literally played as a “it’s the Middle East, they’re always fighting about something” joke. :/
Otherwise. . . well, it’s no Hild. Drake posted a few stunning Iranian vistas on Twitter after I read the book and claimed they were settings in the book, but I didn’t pick up on that from the environmental descriptions. There’s no mention of the Roman Empire or the Silk Road trade, or any of the more particular things I don’t know to name their absence. There’s a rebellion and a war, but they’re marginal to the plot and treated pretty anonymously. Place and material culture and language are not a priority. Drake chose to emphasize mythology over history. Which is fine, if a bit of a disappointment given that the marketing definitely signals the opposite.
Rather than a detail-oriented historical novel, it’s more of an adventure fantasy in the tradition of Howard. Not deep or poetic, just a fast plot and lots of fun action. ASRL also evokes Howard in its mythological stature and demon-haunted near-east setting. That comparison is too harsh, though; Drake is a much better writer than Howard, both in his ideas and his prose, which is competent and often achieves clever wording and inspired imagery. I just wish it had been applied more deeply to bring out the strength of his setup here.
The narration in general is wry and distant, never passing up a cheap pun and rarely shifting in tone to really dig into the emotional travails and backstories of its characters--all compelling in outline, but not sufficiently brought out by the text. It’s full of English idioms and puns that would only bother a pedant if they were rare but are so abundant that they push out a lot of the particular flavor of the setting.
The plot is full of false starts and loose, flabby arcs. Ashtadukt is a star reckoner: an itinerant demon (div) hunter in the vein of a Witcher or a Mushishi, which is one of my favorite setups for fantasy. But the craft of star reckoning and the ecology of divs are both thin on flavor, context, and detail, and the one-off div hunting stories that fill the first half of the book lack setup, starting off with some bland dialogue summarizing situations that should shock or simmer and build. Several of these episodes diverge pretty strongly from the tone and pattern of the rest of the book, and ultimately bite off more than they bother to chew. And the main plot emerges from those vignettes expecting us to be concerned with a larger pattern of events touched on only tangentially.
The most annoying part is that Drake clearly has a vivid imagination for shock imagery, and the divs ought to have been an example of another one of my favorite fantasy tropes: the inhuman, hyperviolent, body horrific demon army. It would have been the perfect place for something like the grindhouse horror sensibilities of Jesse Bullington, another historical fantasist who writes comparable work.
That goes double for the main twist of the plot, which hinges on sexuality in a dramatic and shocking way (though it still doesn’t explain the odd fixation on incest). There are a few scraps of potent imagery, but it feels like he’s holding back on really indulging in the creative grotesque sex behavior his audience deserves. And the lack of cultural context feels particularly keen here. It’s nice that Ashta is a sex-positive character throughout the book, but there’s never anything to understand it against when it becomes a relevant plot point.
The twist itself is a very bold choice, and again, in outline very nice and dark and emotionally rich, but it would have gone over much better with some added context. It hinges on some major elements of both the protagonist’s backstory and the worldbuilding in general that were neglected in the first half of the book, where they ought to have been set up. My impression is that several of these backstory elements were elided because they seemed more powerful as revelations, but that seems misguided, given how flatly the twist actually landed.
The bright spot, besides the potential, is Waray. It’s clear that Drake feels the most affinity for her: his hobbies inform her activities, and her egg-hunting is the richest source of place detail in the book. She’s an off-kilter quirky sidekick, verging on catchphrase territory at times and maybe not the most progressive presentation of mental illness ever, but largely landing a likeable and enriching characterization that brings life to scenes whose other characters can be fairly bland speakers. Her backstory is presented with no more depth or detail than Ashta’s, but that makes it just right for a poignant and layered side character.
ASRL is not the subtle, grounded historical fantasy I hoped it would be going in, but its ambitions in culturally-rich monster hunting, dark and mature character arcs, and demon army grotesques are almost more exciting. That’s why it’s a bit a shame that it feels so underbaked. Regardless, Drake is writing stuff I want to see more of, and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.