Bookpost Special: House of the Rain King

 

(Disclosure: Author gave me an ARC and asked me to write a review.)

House of the Rain King is a good fucking book. That’s the short version. Book good. If you are reading this blog you are in the target audience and I feel confident that you will have a decent or better time.

The long version is more like this: House of the Rain King is a story about a secluded valley along the Tile river. Every century or so the Rain King returns to the valley, bringing a catastrophic flood with him. At the height of the flood he marries a saint of the birds, and when he departs the waters recede and people rebuild. The titular House is a monastery dedicated to the Rain King, and preparing for his return, and this is the lucky year when the Rain King shows up with a band of fairies (and the mercenary Sparrow Company) in tow. Things progress from there.

There is a sense of grubby realism pervading the book, a thematically appropriate muddiness that serves as its backbone. Nothing quite lives up to ideals. Shit happens for reasons no one could have predicted. People die in stupid ways. Some things never get resolved, or only manage to reach anticlimax. Characters make mistakes and bad decisions but they don't make them because they're suddenly, inexplicably stupid. People are somewhere between good and bad; mostly decent, but scuffed at the edges and bent and dent from transit through life.

It’s not grimdark, though I don’t know what I would call it instead. Probably nothing: genre designations are prisons, and House is good precisely because it isn’t playing to genre conventions. While the Sparrows are very much in the tradition of the Black Company and the Bridgeburners, they’re less heightened than the latter and less wallowing in the mud and blood and guts than the former.

The world is built with a light touch, and that’s what makes it all sing. The pieces work together in harmony: nothing is so alien as to require excess exposition, but the familiar is not treated with the contempt of tropes recited out of obligation. It’s focused on a single valley, the people who live there, their beliefs and history, and doesn’t wander down side roads. The only lore is localized, and that is a wonderful change of pace.

The characters are another highlight: they are well-fleshed out and enjoyable to read, but the thing I love most of all about them - and probably the book as a whole - is that the characters speak and act like real people. There’s a naturalism and a lack of performativity to the dialogue; characters having experience and knowledge is treated as a given. They react to things as would be appropriate to who they are: the teenager who has spent his entire life in the valley is familiar with its flora and fauna and hidden places. The veteran mercenaries are going to snap to attention and get to work when trouble shows up, because they’ve done it before.

We see this to great effect in the dungeon-delve section (there’s a dungeon-delve section, by the by, it’s very good) - the Sparrows have looted tombs before, and on encountering an unfamiliar enemy they jump right into revising their strategy as soon as they figure out what’s going on. No wasted time, no talking in circles, no waiting for the convenience of a plot beat to get them out of it. Right to business.

It’s extremely refreshing. You’ve all seen my complaints about YA-ified spec fic in my bookposts, House is a shining example of what can be accomplished when that trend is avoided.

Actually, thinking about it now, House of the Rain King feels like a pre-D&D fantasy novel. Which is a wild thing to say considering it is D&D as fuck. Straight up late G+ era OSR goodness, I could absolutely see Skerples writing up the central dungeon. But it’s D&D as fuck without being married to the trade dress of D&D, if that makes sense - like it feels like a book that a D&D adventure would be based on, rather than a book that is based on a D&D adventure.

 

Yeah, that's probably the best way to describe it.

 

Book good, go read it.