Bloody Rose By Nicholas Eames

Bloody Rose

By Nicholas Eames

I reviewed Mr. Eames first work Kings of the Wyld just last year in December, so I'm not going to rehash too much here. Kings of the Wyld was Mr. Eames first novel and he knocked it right out of the park, delivering us a world where adventuring heroes, called mercenaries because they heroed for money, were treated like rock stars and their bands were discussed and viewed in much the same way we view rock bands. One can certainly understand why when you see how the older characters describe the state of the world: where Centaurs hunted human children on the outskirts of villages, where any sound in the night might be a creature coming to tear apart your house apart to get to you and your family... Where the girl you love might be taken right in front of you by a wyvern one night not even fifty feet from your home. In such a world any man willing to fight creatures the size of a person's home with nothing but brass balls and steel swords probably should be treated like a damn rock star. Especially if he survives and goes out to do it again. Of course, it wasn't that kind of world when Kings of the Wyld took place and you can't even really see that kind of world in Bloody Rose. Which in a way is a monument to the mercenaries of the past generation, they fought so hard that there was no longer a need for them. However, society still wants it's hard fighting hard-partying rock stars and there is always a stream of young dreamers willing to provide just that.

By the time we get to Bloody Rose's day, mercenaries fight in arenas battling enslaved and tormented monsters for the entertainment of increasingly bloodthirsty crowds (Gross). Those free monsters who survive must exist in the hidden cracks and margins of human society or end up sword fodder for a weekend's spectacle. Where monster races once fought to erase human habitation and destroy human civilization (and possibly cause our extinction), now monsters gather into hordes out of the simple realization that if they don't wreak destruction on humanity... They won't survive humanity. I suppose I could shrug and say this is the end result of picking a fight with a species out of your weight class; after all, most of these creatures wouldn't have a damn drop of pity if the shoe were on the other limb. But, I have to admit that Mr. Eames does a good job of pulling empathy out of his readers for creatures who would consider them nothing more than a good source of protein. It's one thing to kill something because it's hunting you and your loved ones. It's another thing to drag it kicking and screaming out of it's home and start tormenting it, before killing it to provide cheap entertainment (which is also something that wouldn't happen if the shoe was on the other limb). Which is what a lot of mercenaries have become. Where once going on Tour was slang for hitting the borders of human civilization and fighting back the savage wilderness step by bloody step, it's now slang for going from city to city to slug it out in arenas as freelance gladiators against half starved and abused monsters. While mercenaries are still hard-boiled killers, you can still be killed by a half-starved and abused hydra, after all, they aren't everything their forefathers were. Or at least most of them aren't.

Bloody Rose and her band Fable are bound and determined to be everything that Saga (her father Golden Gabriel's band in the last book) was and more. However, they're hampered by the fact that the monsters that her father built his legend on are mostly gone - mostly because he killed them - and fighting in the arena is the best she can do. The stomach-churning cherry on top of all of this is the fact that the story she's best known for, is how she was rescued by her Father and his band in their last wild ride. When you desperately want people to consider you a hero, it burns when your biggest story is the one where you're cast as a damsel in distress. Especially since she didn't spend that time cooped in a tower moaning about her inevitable death but took command of an entire city and fought out a siege against an overwhelming force for months. Of course, none of the songs mention that. Another factor in this is that Gabriel wasn't that great a Father, grand gestures aside, and Rose damn well knows it. So their relationship has a lot of baggage, which to be honest is going to come standard with any parent-child relationship. The blunt fact is you don't have a life long relationship with someone, especially one as close as parent and child without getting some carry on luggage here and there even in the healthiest relationship. This wasn't the healthiest of relationships, this was a Dad who never got over his glory days and often drank to much and a wild child who could barely be restrained because at least that way someone was paying attention to her. Then we have her bandmates. Bruin is a shape-shifting shaman whose destructive self-image is tearing himself apart (HAHAHA! Shape shifter with self-image issues. How droll!). Cura is a summoner who’d rather weaponize her fears and tragedies than deal with them in any way shape or form. Freecloud is Rose's Druin lover who will follow Rose anywhere and grew up so starved of contact he cannot figure out how to put up healthy boundaries in his relationship (Rose isn't a terrible partner, being faithful, loyal and attentive to his physical well-being but she isn't a stellar one, often unthinking riding roughshod over his emotional well being in pursuit of outdoing dear old Dad). Interestingly enough all of these issues have roots in their family and parentage, I would say more but it would be spoilers. Frankly Fable, like any legendary rock band, is a mental and emotional hot mess looking to boil over into some 3rd party’s face if it can get paid for it. That's not even touching our viewpoint character.

Our viewpoint character is a young lady named Tam, a 17-year-old girl who is deeply afraid that she will spend the rest of her life living with her Father serving drinks to mercenaries in a bar run by retired mercenaries. She's the daughter of a retired mercenary, whose Mother was a bard. Now bards didn't loom large in the last book because Saga couldn't keep a bard alive if the fate of the world depended on it. Bards are people who are both members of a mercenary band and not members because their job isn't to fight, it's to watch. A Bard is supposed to observe everything that a band does and then immortalize it in song and story, making them a combination of reporter and hypeman. Tam's mother was a great bard and unfortunately is a dead bard (Mustn’t make 3rd edition jokes…). Tam has lived her whole life with her Father working overtime to keep her from being like her Mother. So, of course, she has gone out of her way to be like her Mother and when a chance to join Fable comes along? She jumps on it with both feet. The difference between Tam and the other members of Fable is that her relationship with her parents is more or less a healthy one, if haunted by the fact that one of her parents died a violent death in the very profession she dreams of joining. So it never occurs to Tam to want anything but to follow in her Mother's footsteps. She does that by joining Fable and joining their half-insane pursuit of fame and glory because they believe if they can truly do something legendary, something beyond anything else that no one else as done... Then they can finally know peace. So when a noblewoman on the edge of civilization offers them enough money to sate a Dragon's greed to kill a monster that no one believes even exists... They leap on it, calling it one last job. Because it's better to go fight something called the Dragoneater (!) than sit down and confront your psychological issues (I'm just gonna comment these men and women would fit right into your average Marine Unit and leave that on the table for y'all). With Tam being our viewpoint character, we are forced to confront all these issues from the outside and watch as they are peeled open by events outside of the band's control. So often we're left with events that Tam doesn't know the full significance of but can only communicate to us, which does leave a lot in the reader's hands. This is directly opposite of the last book where Clay knew the significance of pretty much every event and the context behind it. Here instead of being introduced to the narrator's old friends, we're meeting them alongside Tam and learning as she does.

The last book was about brotherhood and coming to terms with your life, and the people in it. This book is about confronting your parental issues and learning to grow past the baggage and the trauma of your childhood. It’s about learning to accept the flaws in your parents and seeing them as either the good people who screwed up or the terrible people you don't owe anything to (Well shucks, I could write multiple volumes on that). There are both kind of parents in this book, which makes it deeply true to life despite the magic and fantastical monsters and deeds running loose. It's also about growing past your parents, which is something that is easier said than done. Most people think that means surpassing them on some physical level like Rose does. I honestly disagree with that, I think it means learning to live your life with your own goals and achievements as your measuring stick without locking yourself into some kind of frantic battle to surpass them or gain their approval. That doesn't mean you stop loving your parents (But it *can* mean that), but it does mean you stop making them the center of your existence. The characters in this book grapple with achieving that by pulling together and providing the support they each need... While having massive wild parties and murdering things with their bare hands and magic powers. Of course, that's not the only thing going on here, there's also the plot of Tam and her new friends realizing that they might be the monsters here. As someone finally starts asking ‘what glory is there in killing captives in a cage?’. Is this the only way that humanity and monster races can interact? Of course there's also a massive horde of creatures looking to burn human civilization back to the roots so they can get some breathing room and the slow realization amongst the band that there's something even darker and more dangerous than a creature nicknamed Dragoneater out there. Something that's back because the sins of your fathers will be visited on you and when your Father is Golden Gabe, well that's a lot of sins coming over for a meet and greet so buckle in.

I have to admit I am really into this book because of just how much is going on in it. Each of the characters here is on their own rather fraught personal journey while their civilization shudders on the edge of an explosion. Each journey has its own consequences and payoffs some of these journeys end in screaming, blood, and confrontation and some of these journeys end quietly in the middle of the night with quiet but heavy conversations. Meanwhile, the larger events wrap and intertwine with these smaller events as they feed off of one another. Also, there is an amazing amount of brutal violence, weird amazing creatures that only fantasy can give you and epic world-ending battles and confrontation. Mr. Eames has convinced me that he has a really bright future in the writing world and I look forward to seeing more from him. Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames gets an A. Go to take a look, trust me.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders.