Her name was composed of seven syllables which blended together in a symphonic burst of seeming melody when uttered by even the most banal of tongues. It was a perfect name for a perfect person. She was in a room which, like herself, was perfect. A perfect ceiling, perfect doors, perfect furnishings, all enclosed within perfect walls.

She pushed herself along those perfect walls, molded atom by atom in a perfect shape conceived by a perfect mind. And as she went she felt those perfect walls tremble beneath her perfect fingers and for the first time within her breast she felt the groping pangs of what beings long before her time would know as fear. In this fear she went, finding her way in a world which slowly went mad about her.

She came to a stair of gold and she went down it, curving down and down into the depths below.  She followed some grown instinct which told her that to delve deep below the surface was to find safety. The further down she went, the safer she would be. But today those instincts were betrayed as the rumblings grew and the halls through which she passed quaked and shuddered. And the fear grew within her.

This perfect place was falling from her. Though the walls were yet around her, seemingly unperturbed, she could feel the betrayal rumbling through her feet and into her legs; passing through attentive nerves which strained for any sign of the source of the insanity which plagued her world.

Through a door which opened even as she thought of passing through it, through another hall and another door, and into a wide place where other people stood or sat or ran. Her legs began to carry her faster. There was no sense, not even instinct, in her now – only the need for movement, the vain hope that there was someplace to which she could retreat and leave this place behind her. But the halls were endless. The corridors and passages and fretted rooms soared past her, one leading to the next with perfect grace and endless options.

The fear was still growing within her and now she felt the floor surge beneath her and she tumbled. This perfect woman, who had never known pain before, stumbled and fell and agonies coursed through her. Baffled and confused by this new, sharp sensation which seemed to both catch at her and rip through her at once, she looked down with wide, naïve eyes at the floor. Never had its rigid surface failed to yield before her, but now it seemed a shine had left it. It was cold and hard, and she knew it would never accept her in a warm embrace again.

Searing with betrayal, she pushed hard against her new enemy and lifted herself back to her feet. Now her pace had quickened once more as she raced with destiny, fate nipping at her heels. Her legs became a blur of motion and, though it took a seeming eternity, eventually she began to feel the pains of strain in her sides and in her feet and legs. Tears streamed down her face, but she could not bring herself to stop. To do so would be to admit this strange new reality and imbue it with purpose and truth. So she ran and ran and ran. There was no seeming end to her flight from the inevitable, her daunting fight against that which she could not see and could not hope to comprehend.

She might have continued thus until her death, but that she came into a room which stopped her. Here, among the golden columns and the silver walls, a group had gathered. The shaking was growing in intensity once more, but curious to see why these others had accumulated she slowed her weary feet and stopped beside them. They were a solid wall of flesh, their backs to her, surrounding something unseen upon the floor. With the uncaring abrasion belonging to those who had never mingled in a crowd, she forced her way through them.

What she saw was an impossibility. It could not be. It should not be. And yet she could not deny that it was so. Unless she was mad. Her mind seized at that vain straw, but she pushed it back down through force of will. This was not madness which confronted her. It was a dire truth. She knew that, could sense that, though she could not begin to grasp the true enormity of what confronted her.

A black gash had formed across that floor, here in this corner among the gold and silver. A dark maw which had claimed the perfect contours of this perfect world, crushing unspoken assurances which had lasted generations beyond the memories of those who now stared down at its daunting presence.

Around her the woman could hear the muttering of those gathered, a seemingly grisly undertone to the monstrosity which gaped before her. She felt the world spin about her in a daze and she let herself trail into the warm feeling of denial which beckoned to her, but all too soon she was jolted back to the cold realities which surrounded her by the massive shocks which rattled the chamber in which she stood. The blind panic of her fear clutched at her and she fled.

But now there was nowhere to flee. Wherever she went the impossible was being made possible. Perfect, indestructible things were falling to pieces all about her. The unseen, unguessed at technology which ran her perfect world had begun to fail for reasons which her people, trapped by their own design in perfect chambers beneath a world which had proceeded apace without them, could not begin to suspect.

Now the rooms and hallways through which she had run tossed her like a rag from her feet and, try as she might, she could not find the strength or balance to rise again. Great cracks appeared in the walls about her. Reality had become a fantasy, fantasy a reality.

She heard the screams of others, and knew – in a distant, unclear way – that her own voice had joined them. A loud crack resonated and, looking up, she saw that the ceiling was giving way and crashing down toward her. Then there was a bright flash of light and she knew no more.

Plasma seared away at the world which had once belonged to her and others like her and soon that world was no more. Soon after that, the sun which had shone unseen over that world for untold millennia finished its throes of death and exploded in a scintillant array of light which could be seen from one end of the known cosmos to the other. Of the woman and her people, a people who had lived longer than collective memory itself, no trace was left. Their legacy was nothing. Their world was nothing. They were nothing. All that remained was a void of memory, and the empty stretches of the universe that beckoned, unheard and unanswered.

The trickiest part of finding an audio book is that it has to be both a good book AND have a good narrator. What I’ve discovered is that it’s much easier to find a narrator you like and browse the corpus of books they’ve done looking for other titles that look appealing than it is to look for appealing titles and then just hoping that the narrator will be good.

Enter Ray Porter, who consistently elevates everything he’s involved with. (I’ve previously listened to his presentations of Dennis E. Taylor’s Bobiverse and Peter Clines’ Threshold series among others.) I’m browsing through the literally hundreds of audio books he’s recorded when I suddenly discover that I already own one of the books he’s done: A Pathfinder Tales tie-in novel called Death’s Heretic by James L. Sutter.

Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure how I acquired it. It must have been part of a bundle or a free book-of-the-day deal or something. But, in any case, it had been sitting in my Audible library untouched for several years at this point.

And that’s a pity. Because this book is really good.

HIGH FANTASY NOIR

In form, Death’s Heretic is a noir detective story in a fantasy setting.

Over the years, I’ve read any number of such stories. Often they have a steampunk veneer. Many of them take place in crapsack worlds. But a lot of them are just literally Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler with a veneer of magic and a smattering of fairy wings lightly dusted over the affair.

Death’s Heretic, on the other hand, stands out from the pack by truly owning its identity as a D&D… err, sorry… Pathfinder novel. Rather than trying to limit its scope to some “noir” subset of Pathfinder, it instead embraces the totality of Pathfinder’s cosmology and interprets it through the lens of a noir story.

Let me see if I can explain the difference: Whereas a typical “D&D noir” novel would open with a dame walking into a detective’s office and saying that her dad was killed by a fireball spell, Death’s Heretic opens with an angelic representative of the Goddess of Death requesting assistance because someone was killed and, when they attempted to resurrect them, they discovered that their soul had been kidnapped from the afterlife.

There’s also a dame, but you can see the difference. It’s not just that there are more fantasy elements being thrown into the mix; it’s that the fantasy elements are being allowed to fundamentally alter the nature of the story. It’s one thing to set a noir story in a weird, selective version of Waterdeep that somehow ends up looking like 1930s San Francisco with the serial numbers filed off, and it’s another to take the totality of Waterdeep, frame a story there, and truly see where it takes you.

Sutter pushes the envelope in other ways, too: He actually divorces himself quite strongly from noir tropes in general by setting the story not in some fog-drenched metropolis, but rather in the sun-drenched empire of Thuvia. Strong elements of pulp fantasy are also naturally pulled in as part of the setting. And that’s just the beginning, as Sutter relentlessly cranks up the dial as the narrative progresses.

BUT ALSO…

Death’s Heretic has more going for it than just novelty and creativity, though. Sutter just writes a legitimately good novel: The characters are interesting and multidimensional. He takes the time to weave together a number of interesting themes revolving around mortality, immortality, and the nature of faith.

Ultimately, this is one of those reviews I write specifically to call attention to something really nifty that I think is (a) not well-known enough and (b) that people would really enjoy if they knew it existed.

So now you know.

I hope you have a great time with it.

GRADE: B-

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

George R.R. Martin has a reputation for indiscriminately killing his main characters.

The popular conception is that he has this reputation because deaths are random and capricious. But this is not he case. His reputation for unexpected lethality is actually because he uses character death as a way of introducing radical reversals into his plot.

(For an in-depth discussion of reversals, check out 3-Point Plotting by John Rogers, the creator of Leverage. I also discuss it over here, but the short version: It’s the moment when the story you thought you were experiencing becomes a completely different story. It’s when Die Hard stops being a film about a guy trying to fix his marriage problems and becomes a hostage situation; it’s also the point where it’s revealed that Die Hard is a heist and not a hostage-taking.)

Martin has proven to be a master of making you think that he’s telling Story A only to dramatically reveal that Story A is never, ever going to happen. “Ah, this is the story of how Ned Stark saves the kingdom from the forces of corruption and– Oh. I guess not. So it must be the story of how Ned Stark’s son avenges his– Oh. I guess not. Well, then it must be– Ah, never mind.”

What makes this work particularly well is that these moments of reversal — rather than just being random — are completely logical and fully justified. It’s not just the author screaming, “GOTCHA!” It’s brilliant writing.

But the motherfucka is still gonna kill you off.

As another example, consider Tyrion’s trial. Once you realize that the trial is rigged, Tyrion seems doomed. Lots of stuff piles up to make that a virtual certainty (even after Tyrion demands trial by combat)… and then there’s the game changer when Oberyn agrees to be his champion. The narrative impetus appears to be that Oberyn will change the outcome, defeat the Mountain, and Tyrion will walk free. There’s a whole potential plot flowing out of that which makes a lot of sense (House Martell allying with Tyrion, Tyrion vs. Cersei in cutthroat politics, etc.).

And then just as that locomotive is starting to build up some momentum… Martin yanks it away again.

There’s a couple of reasons to do this:

First, by this point in the narrative we’ve all started recognizing the reversals. If Martin doesn’t throw some fake reversals / double reversals into the mix, the reversals themselves will become purely predictable. If he wants to keep you off-balance (which he does, because an audience getting too far ahead of the plot is the absolute death of narrative ninety-nine times out of a hundred) he has to mix it up.

Second, this process has a really significant impact on a lot of different characters and a lot of relationships between characters. And it does have a lasting impact on how events play out.

So there’s both a procedural and a dramatic reason for things to play out like this.

The most recent trailer for Fox’s latest attempt at a Fantastic Four movie has successfully convinced me to NOT watch it in the theaters. The trailers seem really dedicated to the idea of selling this new film as being virtually identical to the 2005 film, which I consider somewhat baffling considering the almost complete failure of that film. (The only thing I liked about it were the family dynamics, particularly those between the Human Torch and Ben Grimm.)

This also caused me to ruminate on the difficulty movie and TV studios seem to have in adapting Doctor Doom. A common refrain is that you can’t just put the bad guy in a face-covering mask, which prompts a wide variety of efforts to work around that “problem”. This is also something I find baffling. (And I can see that Darth Vader agrees with me, because he’s scratching his helmet.)

I also note that it’s become quite fashionable to give Doctor Doom superpowers, usually by linking his “origin” to the same accident that creates the Fantastic Four. This doesn’t baffle me (I can see the appeal of narrative conservation that motivates the decision), but it’s nevertheless wrong, in my opinion, because it undermines the contrast between Doom’s approach to power and Reed Richards’ approach to power (which also, of course, echoes their approach to science). It also tends to result in creators conflating Doom’s experimental error (which results in his face becoming scarred) with Richards’ experimental error (which results in the creation of the FF), which is another huge mistake: If Richards is responsible, then Doom’s rage towards him is justified. If Doom is responsible, Richards no longer bears the burden of what he’s done to his family. And, in either case, you lose the (often-overlooked) thematic contrast between how Richards and Doom reacted to their failures.

In any case, I suspect that the new Fantastic Four franchise isn’t going to work out. Which I suspect means that about 5-10 years from now we’ll see either Fox or Disney trying to reboot the franchise again. That gave me cause to consider how I would adapt the FF to film. And it also made me think about how you could do justice to Doctor Doom (particularly because he’ll have been fairly significantly screwed up twice at that point).

I think the key is to realize that Doctor Doom is the evil Iron Man: He’s a scientific and engineering genius with immense resources at his command (as the leader of a small country) and he has a legion of Doombots to do his bidding (which makes the comparison with the MCU Tony Stark particularly appropriate).

So if I was Fox and trying to figure out how to use the Fantastic Four to launch a superhero franchise, the first film I’d greenlight wouldn’t be Fantastic Four. It would be DOCTOR DOOM. The FF wouldn’t even appear in this film (although Reed Richards might appear in flashbacks). This movie basically says, “What if Tony Stark came out of the cave and decided to use his Iron Man suits to conquer the world?” It would be a film about a supervillain in a world with no superheroes. Which means that Doom wins. He wins a lot. By the end of the first movie he basically controls Europe and has declared war on the United States and China simultaneously.

The elevator pitch is: It’s House of Cards in a superhero universe.

It also carries with it the advantage of doing something with superheroes that we haven’t seen in the cinema yet, which will help our hypothetical reboot stand out from both the previous FF failures and the crowded field of other superhero properties.

The second movie is FANTASTIC FOUR. It starts about midway through the first film with Reed Richards working on some top secret project for the U.S. government. As the threat of Doctor Doom grows in Europe, however, Richards’ security clearance is suddenly revoked because it turns out he used to be college roommates with Doom. So Richards — along with Ben, Sue, and Johnny — are forced to sneak back into the research facility and launch the experimental vehicle (which, of course, goes spectacularly wrong and they all get exposed to cosmic rays). And so now, about midway through this film, you’ve got a superhero team who can go up against a supervillain in full ascendance.