"...a tense, high-stakes novel that never slows down long enough for the reader to catch their breath." Infernal by Cheryl Low ~ a #Horror novel ~ #BookReview by Sam @literaryhooker
Shrouded in Mystery
The locals call it Isla de los Perdidos.
Island of the Lost.
According to the legends, those who venture onto the shores of this cursed island never return.
Abandoned
Valarie DeNola and her sister Julie have chosen to ignore the legends and the warnings. They have been selected to lead a team of explorers to the island to discover the mystery surrounding it. But once…
Time for another book review - today it is Cheryl Low's "Vanity in Dust".
SUMMARY
The Realm is an isolated city-state, sat in the middle of a barren wasteland called the Ash. Impenetrable grey clouds always hang above, carnivorous pixies are just barely held back by the city's spider-web of streetlights, and while she is rarely seen in public, nonetheless the Queen's ominous presence hangs over the entire city. When both Low and High-born alike look toward her tower, they shiver, for her wolves can come for anyone.
Vaun Dray Fen is a man with a highly-privileged life. He's one of the Queen's three children, and thus almost the highest of the High. He enjoys an aimless and lecherous existence, gliding from lover to lover and aristocratic party to party with little thought beyond the satisfaction of immediate pleasures. Like most High nobles, he thinks of little but his own pleasure. What disquiet he experiences, he can easily wipe away with another hit of the omnipresent magical narcotic known as "dust".
But, things are changing in the Realm. Vaun's aimless existence is soon to be disrupted by external pressures. There is unrest amongst the Low. The Queen, for her part, has foisted a wife on him. Vaun's sister, the princess Fay Dray Fen, has plans all of her own. And Vaun's own valet, the Low-born woman Grayc Ilan Sanaro, has ambitious desires to reshape nothing less than the political order of the Realm itself.
DISCUSSION
While Vaun doesn't realise it, he is essentially an NPC. It's only later in the book, once he comes off of the dust, that he starts to gain any agency. Even then, while he is the viewpoint character, he is not a significant motive force. It's an unusual narrative technique - imagine Skyrim if it was written from the point of view of one of the tavern keepers, perhaps. The real players in this story are probably Fay, Grayc and of course the unseen Queen.
Early!Vaun is also a somewhat-grating reading experience. While he's on the dust, he is not a very sympathetic figure. He drifts from one meaningless, empty tryst to another and acts with little regard to the feelings of others. (In fairness to him, most of the other people in the Realm are no different.) He only starts to gain any real character development once circumstances force him off of the dust.
But then, the soporific dust is the manner in which the Queen controls the Realm's elite.
Another aspect of this is the divergence between the reader's impression of the Realm and Vaun's. To Vaun, his world just is - there are no real questions concerning it. At one point, he puzzles over a story he heard about how before the Queen, apparently the city had several newspapers, with a variety of opinions. He finds this entirely-baffling - in his age "the" paper is nothing more than a celebrity gossip-rag, re-printing mindless tattle about the petty scandals and social schemes of the High. To him, this vacuous world is simply natural.
The reader, though, will pick up immediately that Vaun's world is a dark, broken place. The climate of fear that pervades the city, just barely softened by the dust. The continual cloud. The ashen wastes that surround the city. The absence of any apparent contact with any outside world. The Queen's absolute monopoly on magic. The Realm is a dystopian place, and by implication it's a post-apocalyptic one as well. Whatever happened, seems to have been linked to the advent of the Queen, several centuries before.
RECOMMENDATIONS
This book surprised me; it's somewhat outside of my usual comfort zone, but I found it very hard to put down. It is a page-turner. I found the characters a little challenging - Grayc is probably the most classically-sympathetic, and her primary motivation is revenge! However, they were engaging and I did find myself wanting to see how things turn out.
There is a certain sort of emotional intensity to them. When they're not up to their eyeballs on dust, they have a whirlwind-like quality. The author has described them as "passionate", and I really can't think of a better word.
"Vanity in Dust" leaves a few niggles open. One thing is the economics and the infrastructure - it's not really clear how a city-state with no apparent farmland is feeding itself. The technology is schizophrenic - there are cars and photography and street-lights, but people fight duels with swords and telephones are unheard of. The second book in the series actually answers this is a bit - strictly, the cars and so on are all magitech, machines powered off of magic. The High's food is apparently all magical in origin, while the Low apparently have household gardens. A lot of the first book's world-building vagueness is actually down to Vaun - being a man with no intellectual interests, he simply doesn't know anything about how the Realm works, and has never thought to ask the questions.
This brings me to another issue that may bug some readers - Vaun is an unreliable narrator. He's not deliberately-lying to you, he's just not very well-informed and has few contacts outside of a very narrow social circle of junkie-aristocrats.
The book reminds me a little of the first Mistborn novel. Vaun is a sort of reciprocal Vin - born to wealth and the appearance of power, living in a world beset by ash and continual poor weather. In both books there's a kind of twisted urbanism going on - Mistborn has Luthadel, "Vanity" has the streets of the Realm. And both worlds are dominated by a magic-using, absolute ruler who viciously-punishes any challenger. However, "Vanity in Dust" is also quite distinct from Mistborn - the sheer dissolution of the nobility, their laziness and their focus on personal indulgences give them a parasitic, venal feeling.
I've also found this book a little difficult to review, because I've had to largely-elide the highly-spoilerifc matters of Grayc and Fay. Basically, those two characters are hugely significant - arguably more important to the plot than Vaun - but almost every detail is a spoiler.
However, I can say that I've been enjoying this novel.
