I just finished reading Bring the Fire by Craig Schaefer, book three in his Wisdom’s Grave trilogy.
This series was great. Archetypal characters discovering that they are, in fact, archetypes, and trying to break out of the mold. Demons in spaceships, Han Solo motherfuckers in inter-dimensional space, and world-hopping reincarnating sorcerer queens. This trilogy has everything that I wanted, and this last book in the series brings it to an immensely satisfying conclusion.
It was great, though I do have to say that there was a small fly in the ointment for me.
Without spoiling anything too much, the cosmology of this multiverse that Schaefer’s built over the course of his novels is explained in this book, and it’s…bad. God is incompetent, suicide is the answer to at least one question, heaven is a failed experiment, and most humans are naturally depraved monsters, given basically any amount of freedom from the usual rules. It also contradicts some minor details from earlier books, but they’re small enough to let slide with the wave of a hand (especially because they’re small enough that I’m not sure if I’m remembering them from Schaefer’s work or from a different long-running urban fantasy series).
Let’s talk about heightened worlds and themes for a minute, shall we?
Most urban fantasy is about a thin veneer of ordinary life hiding a world of monsters and magic. In Schaefer’s urban fantasy, that thin veneer of normality also hides a lot of wealthy elite murder cults (two or three in this trilogy alone, many more in other series). In this universe, it seems like the second anyone gets any kind of wealth or power whatsoever, they immediately become perfectly fine with watching torture porn live while enjoying a nice three-course meal with their spouse. Which is a great justification for some pulp action as the hero bursts through the door and starts laying down some carnage, but the explanation of the cosmos in Bring the Fire makes it seem like it might be a flaw in the human race causing this weirdly high number of heinous villains, rather than the genre conventions.
The argument could be made that similar villains exist in real life, and this is just a heightened version of the world we live in. In real life they’re generally not going to be cannibals and torture artists, but this is fantasy, baby, and the world is supposed to be heightened to a fantastic degree. If the hero steps into a classy restaurant full of preening moguls and sleazy producers, it’s more fun if those people are also red-mouthed cannibals. When you want to show how a woman degrades herself in order to advance in a world dominated by men, show her literally destroying pieces of herself with surgery on her own brain. Or make the private club of rich white men into a cult that literally hunts the poor for sport. This sort of thing, this heightened genre wildness, is the reason I primarily read sci-fi and fantasy to begin with. This is where the magic is at.
That said, the explanation of heaven and god in this book kind of…not ruins that fun, but leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It’s not that it goes against some Judeo-Christian vision of the Almighty–again, this is fantasy, who could possibly give a damn–but it does condemn the human race in a way that makes everything else feel hollow and pointless. Condemn really is the right word to use, too; judgement without hope of appeal. The experiment was tried, and failed, and all we’re left with is evil apes duking it out on a giant ball, to paraphrase a line from a game I’ve been playing recently.
The rest of the book, and the rest of the series, is fantastic. Genrebending urban fantasy where the protagonists are capable of being just as grim and dark as the villains, everyone has a conspiracy, and very occasionally a little redemption is possible, just to spit in the face of that misanthropy I mentioned earlier. Those occasional redemptions and moments of genuine magic are the reason I keep reading Schaefer’s urban fantasy work, rather than giving them up as too bleak. Sometimes, things do work out, and Thomas “ugly, brutish, and short” Hobbes can go fuck himself. Those are the moments that make it all worth it.
Well, that and the gunfights with demons. I really can’t get enough of that shit.
And the character development, actually, which was very pronounced over the course of this trilogy. Vanessa Roth’s arc in particular was absolutely fantastic, going from timid housewife trying to learn magic in secret to defy all of the men who controlled her life, to the most wicked witch-queen to ever curse a motherfucker. She does some terrible things along the way, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t cheering her along all the while.
If there’s anything that you should take away from this review, it’s this: this series is great. It pays off on ~20 books of worldbuilding, explains all the weirdass conspiracies that have been lurking in the background and being all vaguely sinister for years and years, and leads to an absolute dynamite climax. This is the sort of thing that every long-running urban fantasy series (and there are a surprising number of them) would love to be able to do. It’s Schaefer’s Avengers movie, and he pulls it off.
Wisdom’s Grave makes me want to write my own urban fantasy series, which is just about the highest praise I know how to give.
Here’s to the next crossover trilogy, in another ten books or so. I hope this plot comes back around again, because I dearly want to see more of Vanessa Roth and Marie Reinhardt. The witch-queen and her knight-commander. Congratulations, ladies: you’ve transcended the First Story, so now you get hyphens.