The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan
Review by Jordan S.
Welcome to Guerdon. You’ll never forget it.
In fantasy literature, there’s lots of great fantasy cities. Frequently you hear fantasy readers talk about books where the cities are almost characters themselves. Camorr from Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch is the one that comes up most often. If I was going to add my own, I’d definitely add Alt Coulumb and Dresediel Lex from Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. Those cities would go along R.S. Belcher’s Golgotha and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Ilmar in my corpus for the best fantasy cities. They all feel lived in and definitely begin to fulfill that characteristic of the city being a character all its own.
Guerdon, the city in Gareth Hanrahan’s The Gutter Prayer, definitely is now on that list too.
We at Kaiju & Gnome are really big fans of Gareth Hanrahan’s writing. We did a whole week about his most recent book, the Sword Unbound, after all. I recently started going back and reading his other series, The Black Iron Legacy series, of which the Gutter Prayer is the first book and have found only a deepening of my awe for Hanrahan’s craft.
Guerdon feels like a lived-in place. There are many lives unfolding throughout the city and we get to watch a handful of them in Gutter Prayer. We get to know Cari, the mysterious young woman who is at the heart of this story. Spar and Rat, the son of a killed legend in the Guerdon underworld who has now been inflicted with one of the most terrifying fantasy diseases I’ve ever read about, and a ghoul trying to just stay ahead of everybody that’s chasing him. We are also introduced to academics, bounty hunters, and Saints (definitely with a capital-S) as we begin to realize that they are just players in a much larger story: the story of Guerdon itself. Through these characters we get to know the city’s streets, sewers, churches, its storied history and its gods. Hanrahan does this deftly and I felt myself saying “just one more chapter” over and over as I read this.
The aforementioned characters that aren’t the city of Guerdon are fantastic. I think Rat is my favorite. There’s an early scene where he ventures with a Saint into the tunnels underneath the city that might be one of my favorite book scenes ever. It was like the scene of Alf venturing into the tunnels in the Sword Defiant on steroids. It was so good I actually went back and reread that scene. Reading both scenes led me to a deeper appreciation for both of these scenes and Hanrahan’s writing craft. The other characters are fantastic as well. Cari is definitely a character I can root for and I want to know more about her mysterious past. And I can’t forget Spar, the most tragic character in a story full of them.
The plot is also great. Essentially, Guerdon is on the edge of a knife point between the mostly unseen threats from foreign invaders in the mysterious Godswar, the internal disputes amongst the various factions of the city, and its history bubbling back to the surface. Cari, Spar and Rat find themselves reluctantly thrust into the middle of this by forces beyond their control and have to either survive or get swept away in the ensuing maelstrom. Oh and don’t forget the multitudes of ancient eldritch gods that over the millenia have vied for Guerdon and might still have eyes for conquering it.
I also want to talk about the capital-W Weirdness of this book. It’s one of those fantasy books that adds something new to the genre and Hanrahan adds those things in abundance. We get sentient candle-men, the best fantasy worms-beings since Dune, and some of the wildest fantasy deities this side of Malazan. I’ve seen this book mentioned on Reddit in threads about trying to find books that have a similar vibe to Bloodborne, and while I normally am skeptical of such posts, I definitely see it this time. Hanrahan comes from a background in creating Lovecraftian tabletop roleplaying games (specifically working on Pelgrane’s Trail of Cthulhu) and that shows in this book. As someone who occasionally wanted a bit more weirdness in Sword Defiant/Unbound, this book definitely scratched that itch.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m already a big fan of Hanrahan’s but this has only deepened my admiration for his craft. Between the plot, the characters and the setting, this book is one of the most intriguing and exciting books I’ve read in a long time and I’m excited to see where this series goes next.