Review: The God Eaters, by Jesse Hajicek
#81: The God Eaters by Jesse Hajicek:
Ash felt the weight of the gun, the heat of Kieran's body at his back, his own anxiety and arousal, the chemical reek of the river, the last rays of sun on his cheek; it all melded into one thing. Frighteningly real and beautiful. I always pick the strangest times to be happy, he thought, and tightened his finger.
The gun roared.
Synopsis: In a steampunk, alternate-history version of the Old West, two men go on the run from the government, and escape to each other. While still getting shot at.
When skinny, geeky Ash Trine's arrested for distributing anti-government propaganda, he's sent to Churchrock, a maximum-security research facility/prison where government agents torture him in the name of progress. If not for the assistance of Kieran Travarde, Ash's assassin-outlaw cellmate, Ash likely would've died after the first day. He also would never have escaped, or have found a love he's willing to die for.
As the two men scurry across the baked and lightning-scorched plains of a Midwest at once strange and eerily familiar, they're dogged by agents of a corrupt government theocracy and treacherous ghosts from Kieran's lonely past. Powerful otherworldly forces are also in pursuit, threatening to shatter the pair both from without and within. And the further they run, the harder they fall for each other, discovering that they're two halves of the same soul seeking to reunite. With every setback, every ambush and betrayal, they each draw strength from the chance at the thought of just one more day of falling in love.
It's very much a story engaged in boundary-crossing: it's steampunk, but it's also a romance, and it's alternate history but it's also a Western and a mystery and pretty much this is what speculative fiction should be. This book is one of the best arguments for the very existence of the term.
The worldbuilding here is breathtaking; the author spares no expense in painting a lavish, heartbreakingly cruel obstacle course for the protagonists to navigate. Throughout the story, Hajicek displays a gutsy willingness to deal honestly with his protagonists, even when that means a roll of the narrative dice that sends them both deeper into harm's way.
One complaint that could be leveled at this book is that the mythology underpinning this world is at times ladled out with too heavy a hand, and readers might wish that the time spent explaining the system in detail was instead devoted to more of Ash and Kieran together. But that's really a minor quibble with a book of this quality. I just keep getting distracted by the love story.
Ash felt the weight of the gun, the heat of Kieran's body at his back, his own anxiety and arousal, the chemical reek of the river, the last rays of sun on his cheek; it all melded into one thing. Frighteningly real and beautiful. I always pick the strangest times to be happy, he thought, and tightened his finger.
The gun roared.
Synopsis: In a steampunk, alternate-history version of the Old West, two men go on the run from the government, and escape to each other. While still getting shot at.
When skinny, geeky Ash Trine's arrested for distributing anti-government propaganda, he's sent to Churchrock, a maximum-security research facility/prison where government agents torture him in the name of progress. If not for the assistance of Kieran Travarde, Ash's assassin-outlaw cellmate, Ash likely would've died after the first day. He also would never have escaped, or have found a love he's willing to die for.
As the two men scurry across the baked and lightning-scorched plains of a Midwest at once strange and eerily familiar, they're dogged by agents of a corrupt government theocracy and treacherous ghosts from Kieran's lonely past. Powerful otherworldly forces are also in pursuit, threatening to shatter the pair both from without and within. And the further they run, the harder they fall for each other, discovering that they're two halves of the same soul seeking to reunite. With every setback, every ambush and betrayal, they each draw strength from the chance at the thought of just one more day of falling in love.
It's very much a story engaged in boundary-crossing: it's steampunk, but it's also a romance, and it's alternate history but it's also a Western and a mystery and pretty much this is what speculative fiction should be. This book is one of the best arguments for the very existence of the term.
The worldbuilding here is breathtaking; the author spares no expense in painting a lavish, heartbreakingly cruel obstacle course for the protagonists to navigate. Throughout the story, Hajicek displays a gutsy willingness to deal honestly with his protagonists, even when that means a roll of the narrative dice that sends them both deeper into harm's way.
One complaint that could be leveled at this book is that the mythology underpinning this world is at times ladled out with too heavy a hand, and readers might wish that the time spent explaining the system in detail was instead devoted to more of Ash and Kieran together. But that's really a minor quibble with a book of this quality. I just keep getting distracted by the love story.