Scar Night

[sawyl]

A few weeks ago, I read Scar Night by Alan Campbell. Here, belatedly, are a few thoughts.

The city of Deepgate is suspended over a vast abyss by 99 foundation chains, each one named for one of legion of angels who founded the great city. At the heart of the city lies the Temple of Ulcis, where the priests exercise supreme spiritual and temporal authority over its citizens, and where the bodies of the dead are lowered into deep to reunite their blood — their very souls — with the God of Chains. Life in the city is not easy for its inhabitants. The poorer neighbourhoods are constantly on the verge of collapsing into the abyss, the pollution from the forges and from the poison kitchens is terrible and, once a month, in the dark of the moon, a single soul is taken at random by the rogue angel Carnival.

Within the temple lives Dill, the last descendant of the angelic herald Callis. With his role made obsolete by the invention of the airship, the earthbound Dill has little to do except mooch around and get in the way. When he finally comes of age, he is given a set ceremonial duties to perform and assigned a new tutor, an assassin called Rachel, who is to teach him about diplomacy, poisons and swordplay.

Elsewhere in the city, a number of bodies, including an underclass girl called Abigail, have turned up drained of their blood. Mr Nettle, desperate to rescue his only daughter's soul, heads of in search of the killer. After initially assuming that the killer must be Carnival — the crime matches her modus operandi — he is soon pointed in quite another direction by a foreign thaumaturge.

I really enjoyed Scar Night. I liked the plot, I loved the characters, I adored the setting, but most of all, I delighted in the way that my expectations were constantly confounded.

At the outset, I assumed that I knew how things stood: angels are supremely good and vampiric characters are bad — they drink blood for goodness sake, how can they be other than evil? But hang on a minute, doesn't the story of an angel fighting with his creator sound a bit familiar? And didn't Dante say something about a fallen angel cast out from heaven burying himself in the center of the earth to be as far away from God as possible? I also thought I had a clear understanding of the world — an anachronistic place, where angels rub shoulders with airships and chemists contend with conjurers — but hang on, what's this? A giant mining machine of mysterious origins and mountains made of a mysterious substance that probably isn't terrestrial.

Very much my sort of thing.