Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. A while back, I read Howard Andrew Jones’ novel LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND, the first book in his Hanuvar Chronicles, and thought it was one of the best novels I’d read in years. I bought the sequel, THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD, as soon as it came out. And there it sat, unread, for some reason that I can’t fathom.
But no longer. I’ve read it now, and there’s no second-book-in-a-series slump
in this one. Not hardly. THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD is absolutely fantastic.
For those of you unfamiliar with Hanuvar, he’s the former military commander of
the nation of Volanus, which has fought a series of disastrous wars against the
Dervan Empire. This conflict finally ends with the destruction of Volanus and
the dispersion of the surviving Volani, most of them as slaves, across the
empire. Hanuvar is thought to be dead—but he’s not. He’s still alive, and he
has a plan. He’s going to find all of his countrymen who still live, free them
one way or another, and take them to the colony he’s established called New
Volanus. This campaign of freedom, waged mostly by stealth and subterfuge, gets
underway in LORD OF A SHATTERED LAND and continues in THE CITY OF MARBLE AND
BLOOD.
That name refers to Derva itself, the center of the empire, and Hanuvar will be
in more danger there than ever as he tries to carry out his epic plan.
As you may have figured out, this is all based very loosely on the wars between
Rome and Carthage, and Hanuvar is inspired by (you can’t even say based on because
they’re too different) Hannibal. And the scope of the story Jones is telling is
so vast that he employs a brilliant strategy: each “chapter” in these books is
actually a novella, telling a separate story with a beginning, middle, and end,
but they all fit together to form a continuing narrative that builds momentum
as it goes along. This also allows Jones to tell different kinds of stories as
the overall tale progresses. One of the chapters in the first book, for
example, was a pure heist story—Donald E. Westlake or Lionel White in a
sword-and-sorcery milieu—and in one point in THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD,
Hanuvar is called upon to function as a detective and solve a murder. In
another chapter, Hanuvar and some of his friends and allies pull a very neat
con job. Jones doesn’t neglect the sorcery, though, as there are plenty of
ghosts and demons and zombies and assorted otherworldly threats for Hanuvar to
deal with.
All this is told in clean, compelling, fast-moving prose. Hanuvar is a great
character, as is his part-time sidekick, a young actor and writer named
Antires. The world-building of this alternate Mediterranean world is extensive
but handled so skillfully that the storytelling never gets bogged down in it.
If you’re a fan of sword and sorcery, alternate history, epic fantasy, or
anything like that, you just can’t do any better than this series by Howard
Andrew Jones. This one is available on Amazon in e-book, hardcover, paperback, and audio editions. I've already bought the third book, SHADOW OF THE SMOKING MOUNTAIN, and I promise it won’t take me as long to get around to
reading it.
Now, on a personal note, most if not all of you know that Howard Andrew Jones
passed away earlier this year, another one taken much too young by cancer.
Howard and I weren’t close and never met in person, but I considered us
friends. We interacted on Facebook and traded occasional emails, brought
together by our shared fondness for Ki-Gor pulp novels and John Benteen
Westerns. I can only echo what everyone else who knew him has said: he was a
great guy. It’s selfish of me, but I’m glad I have quite a few of his books
left to read, including the third Hanuvar novel. I only wish there were going
to be a lot more.
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