Shadespire:

Main Review:

Having slugged my way through Paine, I wanted something a little less cerebral for my next read. The book I settled on was the novelisation of a board game that was itself a spin of a hugely expensive tabletop war game – high-brow I know. I’ve read a lot of the Warhammer books over the years. They might vary in quality quite drastically but they’re pretty much always easy to read, and it’s always much cheaper to read a book about huge armies fighting than is to buy enough toy soldiers to do the battle yourself. But whilst I went into Shadespire not expecting much, I still managed to be surprised about how un-gripping a story it was.

One big issue with the book, right from the get-go, is its protagonist. In a setting dominated by god-beasts, legions of undead and magically altered super soldiers, I can see why Reynolds opted to make the main narrator, Seguin Rayner a humble mortal man. But the issue is, he’s blander than white bread – your typical “rough and ready” soldier without a shred of personality beyond ‘a bit grim’. His role throughout the novel seems to be to go from one location to another to justify another faction from the board game being introduced. Whilst this works to give the reader a chance to meet the various major figures in the setting with an eye to buying the models, it also means that readers who are more familiar with the lore will likely not bother getting too invested in those characters who they don’t recognise from the game lest they go the way of Padmé Amidala and get killed off solely because they’re ‘not in the original’.

The book is thoroughly generic throughout: there’s your standard dark forces in an evil city, and honesty the plot just sort of bubbles away by itself in the background as we move from set piece to set piece – like the recent Tomb Raider movie but without the style or panache of Alicia Vikander being involved. Even when the book fully commits in its final act to a plot of mind-bending time travel and characters with mysterious real identities it does so in such a clunky way that it is more aggravating than interesting.

Although it’s probably clear at this point I was less than impressed with the book, I do have to admit that there were a few elements throughout that I found somewhat interesting. The main one was roughly 2/3s through the book when two of the characters paused and remarked that they felt like they were in a vast arena and that everything they were doing was for the entertainment of mysterious yet powerful figures. Within the context of the story it could easily be put down to them discussing the ghosts who used to rule the city before it was cursed – but I couldn’t help but consider it a sly moment of meta humour, with the characters lamenting their roles in the board game this book is designed to appeal to players of.

The other neat thing I noticed in the book was that there seemed to be a lot of references to The Lord of the Rings, particularly in the dialogue. Lines such as ‘this foe is beyond any of you’ and ‘come not between the reaper and his harvest’ popped up from time to time – close enough to make the connection but still unsure whether it was deliberate or just a similar style – and then a phantasmal creature of great power kept saying ‘I see you’ to the various characters in the story just like a certain dark lord did.

The main question I took away from the book was who the intended audience was meant to be. Being explicitly marketed as the book of the game, I feel like it was meant to be for newcomers to the setting who had made their first steps with Underworlds and wanted to know more about the wider world. There’s plenty of world building throughout, with exposition being dropped in during most conversations, often with a trademark ‘everyone knows X’ comment. But so much of the book is so shallow that I imagine most seasoned fans would be more than a little put off by the book. On the other hand, if I was just taking my first steps into the high fantasy setting of the Mortal Realms, I reckon reading Shadespire would go a long way to killing my enthusiasm and turning me off reading any of the other offerings. And to me, this would be a massive shame, given how gripping, exciting and just plain fun some of the other offerings are.

My second thoroughly underwhelming book in a row – if you’ve got a book that you adore and think I need to read then let me know! I always love hearing from you.