Angela Slatter’s The Crimson Road comes out on February 11. I’ve read, and loved, Slatter’s previous novels: All the Murmuring Bones, Path of Thorns, and The Briar Book of the Dead. But those novels, and the upcoming one, float on top of a deep well of characters, stories, and worldbuilding. Slatter wrote a whole bunch of short fiction before she started publishing novels, and I had read exactly none of it. So, in order to properly appreciate The Crimson Road, I decided to revisit the three novels I’d read, and read all the short fiction as well.
I started by re-reading the three novels I mentioned above, via audiobook. The narration on all three is absolutely stellar, by the way. Often, audiobooks by the same author tend to go for the same kind of narration, but these three they were all strikingly different. Miren O'Malley is given a strong Irish accent for All the Murmuring Bones; Asher Todd, educated governess that she is, gets a very educated upper-class English accent in Path of Thorns; and Ellie Briar gets an English accent much more appropriate to the deep countryside. Re-reading them I was able to appreciate the different connections among them, as well as get a better sense of the deep well of lore I was completely ignorant of.
So I set about curing that ignorance. I read, in order, Sourdough & Other Stories; The Bitterwood Bible & Other Recountings; Of Sorrow & Such; No Good Deed; The Tallow-Wife & Other Tales; and The Bone Lantern.
These books trace the history of the unnamed land of Breakwater, and the cathedral city of Lodellin, and Silverton, and the Darklands. This goes back centuries from what I think of as the “present” in the Sourdough universe, the time of the 4 novels (though the Tallow-Wife anthology is also roughly the same timeframe). Some characters, either through their own magical nature or the application of witchcraft, come in and out of the stories down through the centuries.
The central theme of the entire universe is around the repression of women. This does not mean that women are powerless; far from it. But it means that the power of women must be stealthy and hidden, for all it can still be deadly. Many of the protagonists of Slatter’s stories aren’t good people. Many, many of them do terrible, spiteful things. But they’re all extraordinarily human (even if only figuratively) and it’s impossible not to empathize with them at the least.
These are also some of the most quintessentially gothic books I’ve ever read. Plenty of people think they do gothic. Slatter isn’t gothic, though; gothic is Slatter. Or at least wants to be.
I really can’t recommend this universe strongly enough.
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