Angus surveyed the carnage in the alley, knowing this was but another escalation between his people and the Fae, a shadow of things to come. His private war had arrived in Twilight City, and he’d need every able body he could get to fight it.
–Sean Crow, Valhalla Steel
This is one of those special instances where the author and I know each other. We’re friends who were in the same writing group. Sean has read my drafts, and I’ve read his. So I got to see a few chapters of Valhalla Steel long before it came out.
Now before you start thinking, “Well, this is going to be a biased review,” know that Sean and I are openly critical of each other’s work.
Just look at the description of our writers group on FaceBook:
People sharing what they wrote from the depths of their soul so others can crush and annihilate it. Thus, masterpieces are crafted and authors are born.
I’ve laughed in Sean’s face when he’s written something bad, and he’s returned the favor. It’s what good friends do.
Sean and I both delve into the realm of fantasy and sci-fi, but we come at the genre differently. I’m more noble-bright while he’s more grim-dark. I drive my protagonists through hard times so they can become better people and face a brighter future. Sean is steadily building up a heaping boneyard of slain characters and is ever affixing their severed heads to pikes.
Despite our different approaches, I found myself thoroughly enjoying Valhalla Steel.
It’s a story about “the members of Valhalla Steel, a gun-running clan of Vikings guided by their leader, Angus Jarlson.” Set in the fantasy/sci-fi mash-up of Twilight City, Angus and his followers are caught in a turf war with chem-dealing Fae.
Valhalla Steel is advertised as a collection of short stories, but it follows one overarching storyline. (So I would argue that it’s more of a novella.) Point of views shift from chapter to chapter, as different characters get their chance at center stage. But all the stories gravitate around a single character–Angus–as he rises to prominence in Twilight City and continues in his fight against the Fae.
Angus, as an imagined character, has an interesting origin. Sean developed him and has used him extensively in Dungeons-and-Dragons-esque campaigns. (If you saw Sean, you wouldn’t guess him to be that kind of nerd. Rather than a pasty basement dweller with an eternal Cheeto mustache, he’s built more like an MMA fighter.) Over the countless hours of tabletop gaming, Angus’s backstory grew, and Sean got to know his character inside and out.
And that’s what makes the story so strong: the main character’s depth.
As Angus battles enemies from without, he also battles his demons from within. So great is the guilt of his bloody past, it’s hard to tell if he’s the good guy or the anti-hero. (Or maybe even the villain.) He’s hard to pin down. His complexity makes him very human and intriguing.
Not only does the story possess a main character with depth, it also takes place in a world of depth. Twilight City–“the grotesque monstrosity…where lives [depart] the world like clockwork and souls [can] be exchanged just as easily as creds.” As the story progresses, a string of details forms a vivid picture of a city humming with new tech and old magic. As a reader, I got the sense that only a few of its secrets had been revealed to me. There is more to Twilight City beyond the pages of this book.
(To what can we tribute this depth and complexity? Tabletop gaming strikes again. Sean developed this cyberpunk world in the midst of his nerdy campaigns.)
Part of what brings the city to life is the illustrations by Anthony Valiukonis that accompany the story.
My only critique (a small one) is that Sean tends to focus too much on action-heavy scenes. Bloody action at that. True, there is a chapter that takes place in the quiet setting of a library, but even this scene has a flashback to battle.
Don’t get me wrong. Sean knows how to write a good fight scene and has the practical knowledge of combat to ground it in reality. But I would’ve liked to have seen more chapters that didn’t involve one of the characters ending up as a bloody pulp–if just to see Sean write something outside his usual fare. (Maybe in the follow-up collection of stories, the work-in-progress Quenched in Blood.)
That being said, Sean is definitely playing to his strengths. I was drawn into the story and couldn’t put the book down. Valhalla Steel proves itself to be a high adrenaline mashup of fantasy and sci-fi that climbs to the top-rung of its genre.
What books have you read lately? Any that mix genres?
Please share in the comments below.