Max Gladstone’s Craft Series began over a decade ago with Three Parts Dead, a sprawling, intricate, thrilling epic fantasy about a young necromancer, her brilliant magician-mentor, and a burned out, exhausted priest of a recently dead god working together to resurrect said deity before his death could renege on the contract he had with his city. Since then Gladstone’s work has only gotten better, showcasing the fragile status quo of a world where humanity waged war on gods and those gods lost.
In the world of the Craft, magic is the fundamental soul-stuff of the universe—baked into reality, treated as law, solid and ephemeral both. Across six books, readers have encountered undead kings turned bureaucrats, bankers investing soulstuff into artificial gods too big to fail, and lawyers whose arguments in court literally become the difference between life and death. Gladstone has explored much across these books as faith and progress rises and falls in a delicate dance since the God Wars. But this time, in Dead Country—the seventh book in the Craft Series, and the perfect entry for new readers—Gladstone and his world are going back to war and nothing will be the same again.
Tara Abernathy fled her home of Edgemont years ago, pursued in violence by those she had grown up with, attempting to harm her for her use of the Craft. She never thought she’d return. But with the death of her father, she does return—older, wiser, and more powerful—to a place she thought she’d scrapped out of her marrow. But you can never entirely get rid of your home or what it was to you. Something stirs in the wastes around Edgemont, a thread of Craft that is familiar and new all at once, and Tara will have to decide if she will be the champion her old home needs to survive. And she will also unexpectedly become a teacher and mentor to a wayward young woman named Dawn in the wastes, who much like Tara, carries pain and power within her.
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Dead Country
Gladstone makes the world of the Craft Series continue to feel both familiar and fresh, bringing us out of the densely populated cities where Gods and Craft tensely coexist and into the wastelands, where the worst of the God Wars left cracks in the firmament of reality. The people of Edgemont have no love for either pole of power, eschewing the Craft as evil and having no Gods to rely on. Its people are scrappy and insular, living on the edge of ruin constantly as threats come in and out of the wastes around them, infected by the reality-warping curses, magics, and infections of the God Wars’ detritus. There is no love lost between them, who have only ever wished to survive and stay put, and Tara, whose hunger for knowledge, adventure, and a world that scared the majority of her community. From page one, it is uneasy prospect, returning home. Not just to put her father to rest, but to knowingly walk back into the constricting grip of a place that not only never understood what she wanted, but instinctively tried to douse the fire within her.
With only her grieving, strong mother, a childhood friend turned possible romantic partner, and Dawn, the young Craftswoman in the wastes with rage in her heart, Gladstone piles problem upon problem on Tara’s shoulders, crowding the maze of her heart with obstacles mental, emotional, physical, and magical. The best part of watching Gladstone set up all these hurdles for our heroine, is that it is satisfying on two fronts to watch her navigate them. For new readers, learning about the Craft as they read, they get to watch Tara step up in a way that the legend she earned for herself has never had to, while older fans get to watch her embrace a part of her that we’ve not seen in some time, both getting the same result from different angles: a protagonist who has gone toe to toe with deities, wicked magicians, and otherworldly threats now has to keep her feet in the earth and meet other people where they’re at, for better or worse.
Gladstone masterfully weaves the rise and fall of Tara’s homecoming, building on the mythos of the Craft as we’ve known it, and deftly bringing a six-books-long threat to the foreground in slow, looming movement. Using new characters like Connor and Dawn to push and pull Tara from redemption to condemnation of her old home, Gladstone is able to not only continue to plumb the depths of one of his best and oldest characters, but he also brings more nuance and complication to a world on the brink of enormous, and possibly dangerous change. Dead Country is a character-focused novel of going home again, reckoning with your past (the good, the bad, and the Craft), and deciding who you will be in the days to come, for they will be darker than you can imagine. With certain cracks of the heart healed, but with new threats unleashed, Gladstone uses everything at his disposal to deliver a stunning entry as we move into the second act of The Craft Wars, and much like Tara, I’m more than ready to see what’s next.
Dead Country is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
Read an excerpt here.
Martin Cahill is a writer living in Queens who works as the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Erewhon Books. He has fiction work forthcoming in 2021 at Serial Box, as well as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Fireside Fiction. Martin has also written book reviews and essays for Book Riot, Strange Horizons, and the Barnes and Noble SF&F Blog. Follow him online at @mcflycahill90 and his new Substack newsletter, Weathervane, for thoughts on books, gaming, and other wonderfully nerdy whatnots.
