I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more attention for Max Gladstone’s Dead Country on this subreddit, so I’ve decided to post a review after finishing the book yesterday.
Gladstone’s Craft Sequence is a series that (simplifying greatly) incorporates concepts from corporate law (think bankruptcy, antitrust, hostile takeovers) into a magic system called the Craft. The first six books cover events following “The God War,” a conflict in which human practitioners of the Craft overthrew previously unchallenged gods and then created elaborate corporate structures to govern the use of magic.
Dead Country is the seventh book in the series and is the first of a trilogy of books that Gladstone intends to conclude the main story arc outlined in the first six books. Tara Abernathy, one of the three main characters of the series, returns to her hometown after her father’s death and is then swept up in the town’s struggle against cursed raiders.
The main plot of the book is a Western-style town-defense story, with pretty generic elements. Tara, who practices the Craft, is regarded with suspicion by her former neighbors. She has to contend with this prejudice while facing off against a completely unsympathetic enemy. This part of the book is well-written—Gladstone does a good job of writing short scenes where Tara struggles and succeeds to gain peoples’ trust. As a reader who often struggles to visualize battle scenes, I appreciated his descriptions of physical space and location, which made it easy to follow the action. And Gladstone does a great job of showing how resentments and separations from home can affect relationships—Cavanaugh, Connor, the Pastor, the Braxtons, and Tara’s parents all feel like deeply real people whose desires and hates could be our own, or those of our own parents and friends.
The secondary plot of the book focuses on a major plot point that’s developed over the series. Tara has learned that the planet that the series takes place on has been targeted by some predatory, unspeakably powerful extraplanar force. In this book, we see speculation as to the nature of these creatures—Tara’s research suggests that they are demons from creation myth—and then, near the end of the book, seemingly explicit confirmation. There’s a sequence near the end of the book where the characters see a glimpse of the future where the world is under attack, and while it’s appropriately epic, it also removes much of the mystery. Furthermore, near the end of the book there’s a sequence where one character describes the exact nature of these world-ending creatures: elder races that have discovered the Craft and, through its capitalist efficiency, have transformed into star-traveling consumers. It’s not clear whether this description is accurate, but it feels thematically appropriate given Gladstone’s critical stance towards capitalism in this and other books of his.
I found this second theme to be somewhat distracting. While the ending of the book intersects very cleanly with the end-of-the-world plot, its involvement in the plot until about 80% of the way in is as a burden on Tara’s mind. We are not told whether other characters, like Kai and Caleb but also secondary characters like Elayne, Kopil, Temoc, and Izza, are aware of the threat. This isn’t a huge issue—Gladstone clearly intends the focus of the book to be on Tara’s experience—but it is a tonal shift from the last three books in the sequence chronologically (Full Fathom Five, Four Roads Cross, and Ruin of Angels), which feature a larger ensemble cast.
Finally, the book features a new character, Dawn, who I found to be a fresh character with perplexing implications for the series. For the majority of the book, Dawn, a farm girl who Tara rescues from a raider and who can use the Craft, is a stereotypically eager apprentice. I felt as though Dawn’s presentation was somewhat tropish: she is naturally talented, but her trauma makes her feel Tara’s alienation from her home more acutely. Much of Tara’s attention in the book is devoted to prevent Dawn from making bad decisions. Still, Dawn’s character development is written well, even if there aren’t any huge surprises (until Chapter 27, anyway).
Chapter 27 is a turning point for the series. Tara discovers earlier that the source of the raiders is a godlike entity that has emerged out of the Craft, not—as the gods of the setting normally do—out of human social relationships and beliefs. Professor Denovo, the antagonist of the first book, had captured and tortured this entity before the events of the first book in an attempt to learn secrets to save the world from the world-eating creatures that Tara only recently learned of. The entity, after Denovo’s death, was trapped in his lab and used the raiders to kill Tara’s father in an effort to learn more about her—the one person, to the entity’s knowledge, who was able to escape from Denovo. In the finale of the book, Tara is about to sacrifice herself to stop the entity’s use of the raiders, but is then saved by Dawn. A strange fade-to-black follows. In Chapter 27, Tara realizes that Dawn has somehow merged with the entity, and is now effectively a god of the Craft itself, able to shake off Tara’s own magic. Dawn is deeply traumatized—we learn, without much surprise, that Dawn suffered physical abuse before her family was killed by raiders—and now has internalized the suffering of a godlike creature with world-ending power. She’s unable to handle Tara’s revelation that Denovo’s fall was just the product of people working together, and resolves to dominate the world by force in order to never be helpless again, whether against Craftsmen or extraplanar creatures.
Chapter 27’s revelation is conceptually strange. As a lawyer, Gladstone’s writing has always been fun to read because of the way that he integrates corporate law into the magic system. Even the gods obey laws of debt, equity, and fiduciary duty. Dawn (the new entity) seemingly doesn’t. The book suggests that the Craft entity emerged out of random interactions in the global Craft market. This seems plausible, but is more analogous to fears of artificial intelligence rather than fears of capitalism. In other words, it’s easy to see an analogue in Real World Law to every magical concept used in the series—except this. It’s difficult to imagine a runaway legal concept in real courts that functions independently of human direction, whether from corporate officers or judges. Even faceless, centuries-old corporations with their own agenda are controlled by boards, officers, and courts. I suppose that one plausible framing of Dawn is that she is the ultimate corporate entity without restraints—no human direction or oversight needed. But, with the limited exposition given to her, it’s hard to say whether that’s an accurate characterization (or closer to the mark), rather than a now-familiar story about artificial intelligence taking over the world. This part of the book gave me strong misgivings about the series, despite Gladstone’s strengths as a plotter, because of how “struggle against omnipotent AI” elements have taken over other recent fantasy series (ex. Robert Jackson Bennett’s Founders trilogy).
All in all, I liked Dead Country. Gladstone’s writing keeps getting better and better (at one point, Tara humorously chastises herself for using excessively evocative internal dialogue, one of Gladstone’s characteristic writing devices). It’s introduced a high-risk, high-reward plot device into the series. Regardless of how the rest of the series pans out, this was a strong entry with better focus than the last couple books of the series, which featured many, many characters and grew increasingly lengthy. Dead Country is probably my second favorite book of the series, somewhat behind Last First Snow.
I wouldn’t recommend this book as an entry into the series—there’s just too much plot to catch up on—but if anything that I’ve highlighted sounds interesting, than you should absolutely start reading (in publication order)!
