Review: Among Serpents

Among Serpents by Marc J. Gregson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trilogies are very much a YA thing (although a bit of a recent trend has been a move to duologies--a two-book series--which is most likely a move to reduce costs). Since I am definitely a completist reader, if I enjoy the first of a series I will almost always buy the succeeding books. Even so, a good part of the time second books in a series suffer by comparision, as they have to keep the momentum going without giving too much of the game away for the concluding book.

Thankfully, that isn't a problem with this second book in the Above the Black series, which advances the plot in breathtaking fashion, with some truly magnificent battle scenes that had me clutching the book in fear, racing through the final chapters to see what would happen and who would live.

This is a secondary fantasy world with a strong SF feel--there isn't any "magic" as such, or wizards and/or sorcerers. Indeed, the implication is that many of the huge beasts that inhabit the Skylands are genetically engineered. There is a clash of societies and philosophies, the Skylands with their brutal Meritocracy system and their insistence on gaining power by "rising," which pretty much means stomping on everyone else; and the Below, with their demands for sacrifices for the "greater good" (although the Below Council, what little we see of them, seems as corrupt as any Archduke of the Skylands). The worldbuilding sometimes stretches credulity--the monster our protagonist Conrad of Elise has to kill is called a "gigataun," which is a mile-long sky-floating dragon without wings, and we also have "gorgantauns," which are hundreds of feet long in their own right, and various other kaiju-like beasties that end in "-lon"--but for the most part it is internally consistent. We also find out more about how the Skylands were created, hundreds of years ago when the "Eagle Empire" broke away and used their antigrav crystals to literally lift cities and tear huge hunks of the countryside right out of the ground and float them into the sky, creating islands that the people of the Skylands now live on. Then the black acid clouds were created to keep the Lantians of the Below confined to a wrecked planet and forcing them to live underground in deprivation and poverty, while those of the Skylands hoard all the resources.

Our protagonist Conrad is now captain of his own skyship, the Gladian, and is struggling to balance the brutal way he was raised by his father and the compassion his mother tried to teach him. He is forced into the war with the Below by his uncle, King Ulrich, who had his father murdered and banished Conrad and his mother to the "Lows," the poverty-ridden and downtrodden section of the Skylands. The first book, Sky's End, was a good character study of Conrad, as he found a family in his crew aboard the Gladian and began learning to love and trust others.

With the world and characters established, this book has the opportunity to ramp up the plot and raise the stakes--and wow, does the author deliver. The battle scenes in this book are absolutely stunning, and the pacing is excellent. There aren't quite as many character moments in this book, but Conrad does manage to repair his relationship with his estranged sister Ella and even has a bit of romance (although that element isn't foregrounded, thank goodness--Fourth Wing this is not) with one of his crewmembers, Bryce. Conrad hates his Uncle Ulrich but is forced to work with him to save the Skylands. In the end, the monstrous gigataun is defeated, but Ulrich works a bit of treachery and kills nearly all of his rival Archdukes and Highs--the leaders of the various aristocratic families of the Skylands--thus setting himself up as perhaps a worse monster than the just-defeated gigataun.

This is a breathtaking rocket ride of a book that will definitely whet your appetite for the concluding volume. I for one am not going to miss it.

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