K. J. Bishop

Fleeing the ruined Copper Country to escape the ghosts of their past, a healer and a killer struggle to build new lives in the city of Ashamoil, but they soon discover that past continues to affect the present and the future, forever transforming the world around them. Original. 20,000 first printing.

The Etched City

Mark Wadley

A surrealist celebration of violent, beautiful squalor set in a unique, densely textured swamp city with more opium dens than hospitals. More fantasy should draw from Decadent lit & art like this book does.

This story and its city, Ashamoil, sit comfortably alongside Harrison’s Viriconium, Mieville’s Bas Lag, and VanderMeer’s Ambergris, all of which I’ve really enjoyed for their pure imaginative strangeness if not for their prose (this is a Mieville jab). I hate using this description because it's so overused, but the city is certainly a character here — almost moreso than the actual main characters — and I have a real appreciation for this kind of lived-in setting, where you can feel all the life happening outside the frame.

It's a pretty psychedelic story, full of wild images: A lotus blooms from a man's navel. An artist’s work develops from the grotesque to the depraved. A priest hatches butterflies from his palms. A widower gets revenge with an axe that fills its wounds with flowers. But even with all its capital-w Weird trappings, The Etched City is ultimately an intimate portrayal of flawed people seeking some kind of absolution, of facing their violent pasts and trying to move toward something better.

The language gets a little overblown sometimes, and some of the Gen X sideshow goth vibes haven't aged all that well. But this is a pretty remarkable first novel, and I'm surprised it hasn't stayed in the weird fiction conversation like some of its contemporaries.

Sunyi Dean

Simply brilliant. 

It does require a lot of patience, this novel, since around 60% of it is setup for a series of events which, at the beginning, seem to bear no relation to anything else that is going on. 

My advice is to read it as you would read a Wolfe book: by which I mean, sit back and enjoy the exquisite prose, and stop worrying about what you are supposed to be focusing on. The author has a goal, the story does go somewhere, and everything is included with a purpose.

I fear that we are losing the ability to read books like this in the mainstream, despite its relatively recent publication (although it's been 11 years since it came out--not that recent I guess). I notice that many readers and writers want to be able to see a book's direction, from the get go, which always puzzles me. Why on earth would you want to read something where you are basically invited to guess the thrust of the narrative in advance? 

Enjoy the surprises, the allegories, the musings, the carefully constructed scenes. 

Oh, and the head hopping. I'm loving that. I love books which break rules in this way and I think the head hopping here is brilliant.

Vladimir

Fleeing the ghosts of their violent past, two former revolutionaries - the roguish, rakish Gwynn and the taciturn Raule - escape from the ruined and deserted Copper Country to the tropical city of Ashamoil. As they salvage new lives from the rubble of the old, they discover that the ghosts of the past are also the ghosts of the future. 'Scenes among the most mystifying and astonishing I have found in a fantasy' MICHAEL MOORCOCK, Guardian 'A brilliant first novel' Locus

Magnus Dahl

Moray Lyle McIntosh

K.J. Bishop

“Combine equal parts of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series and Chine Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, throw in a dash of Aubrey BeardsleyandJ.K. Huysmans, and you’ll get some idea of this disturbing, decadent first novel.”—Publishers Weekly Gwynn and Raule are rebels on the run, with little in common except being on the losing side of a hard-fought war. Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor . . . a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just—and lost—causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom . . . “The plot, with its stories-within-stories and its offhand descriptions of wonders and prodigies, brings to mind the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.”—Locus

The Etched City

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