The Blacktongue Thief

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The field of 21st century horror offers the reader an embarrassment of riches, with gifted new masters lording over their several fiefdoms; Nevill has his kingdom of gloomy thickets and dread elder deities well in hand, and you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone weaving darker nightmares with smarter, more beautiful prose. These main themes, paired with the author’s direct writing style, prompt the reader to draw their own conclusions about the worth of war, and who really profits from it. Brisk pacing, loads of snark, punchy dialogue, stylized characters, and unrelenting scenes of gaga mayhem. I had a fine fighting knife on the front of my belt; in a tavern fight, it would turn a geezer inside out, but it was useless against chain.

Richard Swan’s villains get even nastier and stronger in this brilliantly-paced follow-up, and we dive much further into magic and the occult.

Sesta, one of Kinch’s contacts with the Taker’s Guild, is a ruthless Assassin-Adept, skilled at both magic and murder, so confident that she treats Kinch more like a pest than a tool, even when insisting he follow the terms of his assignment. If the atmosphere I just described feels a bit like a renaissance festival, it should come as no surprise. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience.

Many know him as comedian Christophe the Insultor, something of a cult figure on the renaissance festival circuit.Take, for example, how Kinch describes the qualities of iron: “Iron is to free magic what cold water and laughter are to male arousal. Her favourite authors include; Tolkien, Jen Williams, John Gwynne, Joe Abercrombie, Alix E Harrow, and Fonda Lee. It bit at the glaive’s head twice, easily avoiding Pagran’s jab and not seeming to notice my missed arrow—these things don’t move predictably, and at twenty paces, an arrow doesn’t hit the instant it flies. One of the most fascinating aspects of Kinch’s world is the impact the Goblin Wars have had on the human population.

As a result of how much I enjoyed listening to that novel, I found it difficult NOT to hear Buehlman’s voice in my head as Kinch and helped me to enjoy the novel to a greater degree.

Simply put, Buelman’s latest novel is a raucous laugh followed by a punch in the gut—it’s brilliantly wild and full of heart. Beside me, Nervous cried out, “ Awain Baith,” Galtish for “death-bird,” and dropped his bow and ran, his older sister turning tail with him, leaving me the only archer in the trees. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy books with low-key subtle magic because I do, but on the other hand I love to see the fantasy genre celebrated for its fundamental use of magic and myth, to see it revel in it. Luckily, she was skinny—fit for palisades, as soldiers say, so she was less of a burden than she might have been.

The Blacktongue Thief is fated to steal a lot of reader’s hearts with its charm, humor, intensity, and unrelenting fun.Walked off with it while a mate argued with a music student about whether his singing at a tavern had been in key. While we get Kinch’s introspection and his assessment of his own character, we see him against a company of strong female characters. A fabulous thing, that, but it took her a summer to make it, and it only works for an hour before it’s just a stick again. I woke myself out of just watching it and thought I should probably nock another arrow, but the corvid was already moving at Axe, whose name was actually Jarril. It was a voice laced with subtle sarcasm, cynicism and a nonchalant tone, it had the effect of making me care for his character before I even truly began to know him.