Picked this book up because the author was doing a signing at a local bookstore.

I'm very glad I did.

The books is loud, rough and obnoxious, but above all a lot of fun. Even in scenes that would normally be depressing and dark, an undercurrent of snark shines through.

Nota importante: questo libro, e questa trilogia, seguono le vicende della prima trilogia di Sykes.
Una nota importante, a mio avviso, perché se non ci si fa attenzione ci si ritrova in un libro denso di riferimenti a eventi passati, il che può essere un po' irritante.
Va detto comunque che detti eventi passati sono riassunti abbastanza bene, o almeno ci vengono raccontati a grandissime linee, così da non ritrovarci totalmente spaesati in questa storia.

Una storia che, superato lo smarrimento iniziale dovuto alla mancata lettura dei primi libri, si rivela piacevolissima.

Un classico party di avventurieri -un leader guerriero, la sua compagna non umana e letale guerriera dei boschi, l'invincibile guerriero Dragonman ultimo della sua specie, il ladro dai mille segreti, la guaritrice e il giovanissimo mago dai poteri molto più grandi del suo giudizio- arrivano nella grande città di Cier'Djaal seguendo il potente chierico Miron Evenhands (che, a quanto pare, li aveva assoldati nei libri precedenti per svolgere un importantissimo lavoro) per farsi pagare la lauta ricompensa pattuita.
Solo che questo Miron è arrivato in città prima di loro e non si vuole far trovare.
E già entrare in città è dura: è una città che si basa sul commercio, e che non accetta al proprio interno metaumani come quelli che fanno parte del gruppo.

Un gruppo di invidualità che spesso se ne vanno per conto proprio, incuranti degli altri.
E che riescono sempre a finire nel centro degli eventi.
Come arrivare in questa città proprio mentre la gilda dei ladri è impegnata in una guerra aperta con una misteriosa setta di fanatici religiosi imparentati in qualche modo con i demoni (demoni che, scopriamo, hanno antichi legami anche con Lenk, il leader del gruppo, incredibilmente in grado di uccidere queste creature). O finire in mezzo a due enormi culti guerrieri stranieri in stallo da sempre, scatendando la tanto attesa (da loro) guerra.

Ogni membro del gruppo ha la propria storia ben delineata, i propri timori, le proprie motivazioni.
E se Denaos è quello con i maggiori legami con la città, visto che ci ha vissuto a lungo, il protagonista è senza dubbio Lenk, con la sua stanchezza per questa vita, e il suo desiderio di riporre la spada per vivere una vita pacifica come tutti gli altri. Una vita che sembra essergli però negata, seguito com'è da una scia di morte senza pari. Questo senza contare il vero dilemma del ragazzo, Kataria, la sua compagna, che in una città civilizzata di umani non potrebbe mai vivere né venirvi accettata.
Abbiamo il punto di vista umano della guaritrice desiderosa solo di aiutare il prossimo, ma vessata da una misteriosa maledizione.
E quello straniero di Kataria, dibattuta tra l'amore per Lenk e l'alienità del suo mondo, o di Gariath e la sua visione del mondo e degli umani.

E che dire di Dreadaeleon, il ragazzino mago, potentissimo e inesperto, fuorilegge per i suoi stessi simili per via dell'utilizzo fatto del proprio potere ma desideroso di apparire come un eroe a dispetto della propria codardia?


Ottime caratterizzazioni dei personaggi, un'ambientazione ristretta e oppressiva, quasi come una corsa contro il tempo. Che è ciò che realmente è, come si scopre a un certo punto quando veniamo a conoscenza della macrotrama della trilogia.
Un libro che è chiaramente solo l'inizio della storia, ma che si conclude perfettamente

Spoiler

con la dissoluzione del gruppo, una cosa abbastanza inaspettata e molto interessante per il proseguio

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The pacing is odd, at times hard to follow. Sykes handles world-building haphazardly in the first few chapters. Sometimes his metaphors really don't work, and the narration can be horribly overwrought at times.

But he writes antagonists better than anyone else I can bring to mind. There are a lot of non-humans, and he introduces them all at once, but the cast itself is a reasonable size. Only once did I stop and think "wait, I am supposed to know who this person is?" Which is pretty good for fantasy these days.

The main cast is utterly engaging, and wholly realized. The enormous tension between them is neither overwrought or contrived - it's exactly what it needs to be. And the ending, of course, is awesome. It's a hard trick, to pull off a properly foreshadowed surprise ending. Sykes did it. I can't wait for more.

The City Stained Red is a fantastic book that has everything. Comedy, tragedy, a big dragon-man and a fallen God. If you read a synopsis, you would be forgiven for thinking this is Dungeons and Dragons fan fiction, a rogue, a warrior, a cleric and a mage. Still, it is so much more than the sum of its parts. The author has a fantastic ability to take a fantasy trope and twist it into something almost unrecognisable and all the more enjoyable for it.

The setting is superb, a middle eastern city with giant spiders, warring gods and a thriving underground of thieves and murderers, but it is the characters that really light up the book. Deep, complex and flawed in a way that so few characters in fantasy ever are. They are good(ish) people making terrible decisions for understandable reasons, and they are great fun to read.

There were a couple of bits so wonderfully written that I had to stop reading to show the wife. Sykes has a turn of phrase and a way of making the scenes that jump off the page and drag you in.

The City Stained Red is a fantastic read. The minute to minute story beats keep the pages turning while the overarching plot gets darker and more menacing. It is packed with brilliantly deep and interesting characters that surprise and delight in equal measure. As soon as I finished the book, I ordered the rest of the series. Now if you'll excuse me, I have The Mortal Tally to go and read...

There's a piece of advice that people creating stories with multiple main characters (especially cinematic universes) often forget. The audience has to care about EVERY character, and not just them in isolation, they have to care about the relationships between them.

This is by no means any easy feat. The most common criticism I hear about Game of Thrones is that readers frequently say that they don't care about half the characters. Almost any Marvel or DC fan will tell you that there are characters that they just don't care to watch. And these are stories that will define a generation.

So I hope I'm really selling how good this book is when I say that I care about all of these characters. I care that they stick together. I care that they survive. I care that they desperately need to shut up and listen to each other for once. I care about whether or not they become better people because I can see bits of myself in each of them.

While the story does take a little bit to get started the humor does distract until the dramatic meat of the tale begins. I cannot wait to see where these characters end up.

actual rating: 3.5

This took awhile for me to get into but I'm going to assume that's on me because I didn't read the first trilogy so I had to spend a lot of time remembering who all the main characters were. I definitely recommend the audiobook for helping with this because the guy who does it has unique voices for all the characters so that really helped. This one leans a lot more heavily on high fantasy tropes than Seven Blades in Black but still a pretty interesting and fun read overall. Definitely gonna check out the next book.

Well, color me disappointed. There was promise. I like Sykes' voice; good humor, good dialogue. It only gets 2 stars though because the plot was basically nonexistent and the ending was very underwhelming. I won't be reading the next one.

This was my first book by Sam Sykes, and it was a good introduction to his works. The book opens with a band of adventurers (read: mercenaries) on a mission to collect the payment owed to them by their latest employer. They follow him to the city of Cier'Djaal, where they plan to collect what they are owed and get on with their lives. For Lenk, the leader of the band, that means retiring from the advenutrer life and finding somewhere to settle down in peace. For the others, collecting their money means other things. What they find when they get to the city is not a simple matter of finding the man who owes them, but navigating a complex, biased society that is on the brink of all out civil war. Despite their efforts, they get pulled into the conflict.

The setting is a fairly typical fantasy world, essentially a Medieval city with many of the usual details. Instead of lords and kings, there are the fashas, who control the silk trade that brings the city its wealth. There are merchants and tradesmen and peasants. Religious factions compete for followers and power. Non-humans, here known by the all-inclusive deragatory term oids, are looked down on by almost everyone. There are two radical groups who create chaos with random attacks that often spill into full battles.

The characters are interesting and well-rounded, if a little predictable in pesonality at times. Lenk, the battle-weary leader, can be a bit self-pitying and morose. The theif, Denaos, puts on a devil-may-care attitude. Asper, the priestess, is the moral compass of the group, if a group of mercenaries can have such a thing. And the rest have their tropish characteristics, also. Still, the development is there, and the dynamic of the group works well. It is apparent they know each other well, and the relationships are complex and real. The plot moves along well, with only a few slow spots. When the frequent action occurs, it is fast-paced. There is a fair amount of humor sprinkled throughout the story, which fits in well and adds to the character's personalities. The ending is satisfying, if perhaps not completely tidy.

This is a good read for anyone who enjoys sword-and-sorcery fantasy.

08/14/15: Richly complex plot, great writing, fascinating characters. Full review TK.

08/24/15: See this review and others on Around the World in 80 Books.

I fell for Sykes’s “Buy My Book” gag twice. Once to get the ebook and the second time as the paperback version. This tome is 600+ pages, so I read the ebook during commutes. The beginning was tough to get through. I was confused by the 6(!) characters that made up the Adventures: Lenk, Kataria, Denaos, Asper, Dreadaeleon, and Gariath. Though, as I continued reading and got more of a sense of each of their strengths and weaknesses, I understood their roles in society and within the group dynamics. But 200 pages of plot exposition is a lot. In some ways, I wish I had read the Aeon’s Gate Trilogy, a precursor to this series, just so I could understand why these random people/humanoids were on this journey together. It’s explained vaguely throughout in tidbits and more succinctly in the last chapter, though I would have wanted it explained earlier. We’re starting this book at the end of one of their adventures, so there’s a lot of backstory that was left out. Clearly they all had history together, trust each other (for the most part), and had a great team dynamic when called for. And that’s what made me like, or rather understand, these characters. I wouldn’t say that I liked every single one of them and I think the intention was that they weren’t supposed to be liked. They made decisions that might not be the best, followed their instincts, and generally wreaked havoc. They fell into a demon war, of course they are not perfect.

I’m a huge fan of worlds in fantasy that have multiple gods and actual religious figures that are prominent in society (and maybe at one point actually helped the people who worshiped them). The religious element was very strong in this novel, even a member of the adventurers, Asper, is a Priestess who struggles with her own faith. However, most of the gods have vanished and the only things left are violent demons bent on destruction. The City Stained Red is VIOLENT. In the first few scenes where readers are still trying to get their bearings, a demon emerges from a swelled belly of a fanatic. Later, in a trip to the outskirts of the city, Gariath encounters a Tulwar (another humanoid-type being, you’ll understand if you read, there’s a lot of different types of “people” for lack of a better word) who slices off the arm of a human with barely a thought. Toward the middle/end of the book, in one of the more creepy scenes, a giant massacre and house fire destroys many lives. And there’s plenty of violence in between. Why do people even want to live in this city? Mostly because they have nowhere else to go, the city is the only place where they can feasibly live, even if their life might be cut short by a simple robbery.

But of course, it’s not all violence. There’s a balance where we have moments of humor and amusement as the companions adjust to life in the city as outsiders. The Couthi (bug-like creatures with a painting for a face) provide comic relief in the beginning and in places of dire circumstances. Of the more non-violent acts are the three sex scenes in the book. I feel like I haven’t seen enough of these in fantasy books. Generally, a lot of books seem to lead to a kiss. And I was pleasantly surprised that this was not the case. Sykes handled them well. They fit the tone and characters who were in them. He discusses this and other things in a recent Rocket Talk podcast with Erotica/Romance writer, Tiffany Reisz, so I felt that I sort of knew what to expect. It’s apparent that he took just as much time with these scenes as he would any of the others (violent/non-violent). I don’t want to dwell on them too much. They were good and fit the needs of the characters.

As a long time Twitter follower of the author, I’m glad I finally read his book. The writing was strong and detailed so that it built the world, set the tone, and made for an excellent read. Looking forward to reading The Mortal Tally, which comes out in March 2016. If you’re curious about this book, I suggest reading this comic which basically sums up the first few chapters and gives you a sense of what to expect.