The Blood Debt
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In a remote city on the edge of two worlds, where blood has power and water is more precious than freedom, three far-flung friends unite on a quest to save their families. Sal Hrvati’s estranged father has brought more into the world than the woman he loved. Instead of saving her from the Void Beneath, he has summoned an unknown creature—a creature with a mission of its own and a past that stretches back to the beginning of the world. The quest to find both of them entangles Sal and his companions in a hunt for magical treasure on the floor of the Divide, a mighty crack in the earth inhabited by creatures that are not remotely human. Desert landscapes and dirigibles feature in a fast-paced fantasy that combines romance, adventure, and humor with an original take on magic. The Books of the Cataclysm take inspiration from many arcane and mythological sources. In positing that this world is just one of many "realms," three of which are inhabited by humans during various stages of their lives, it begins in the present world but soon propels the reader to a landscape that is simultaneously familiar and fantastic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A baffling situation gets more complicated in the second entry in Australian author Williams's Books of the Cataclysm series. A far-future Earth has been shattered into different, isolated zones where magic has replaced electricity and where humans uneasily share space with ghosts, golems and animated statues. Two young men, Sal and Skender, who were friends in the first book, The Crooked Letter (2006), undertake separate quests to rescue parents from the results of stirring up arcane turbulence, especially by creating a potentially dangerous homunculus that brings two souls back from the void. The motives of the people around Sal and Skender are unclear or questionable; their own long-term goals are uncertain; and the action breaks off before anything has been resolved except that they'll follow the homunculus's trail. The detail of Williams's imagined world and his characters' concern with the moral consequences of their actions compel interest, though readers will have to wait until the final installment to see whether all the pieces fall into a coherent, satisfying whole.
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