Horns of Ruin by Tim Akers – review

Eva Forge is the last Paladin of the dead god Morgan.  She is a warrior, raised to the sword from her childhood, and she is watching the Cult to which she is dedicated dying by slow inches all around her.  She accompanies one of the leaders of her cult on a mysterious mission to enlist the help of another cult, only to have things go horribly wrong.  The leader is kidnapped, and no one seems to know what has happened, other than a large section of the City of Ash was destroyed in the process.  Eva has to muster all of her courage and strength and every bit of the arcane knowledge she possesses to unravel the mystery and save the leader of the Cult of Morgan, all while trying to protect a young woman named Cassandra, who seems to hold the key to the whole mess.

This book reads like an action fantasy movie.  Something is always happening, it seems, on every page.  There are a lot of fights, both verbal and physical; explosions; chases; and, of course a kind of clumsily brutal investigation–though the character of Eva Forge would be the first to admit that she is a warrior, not an investigator, and she is chiefly motivated by revenge.

If you’re hoping for a lot of deep characterization, this probably would not be a book for you. Eva is a warrior. Period.  She has little patience for anything else, and she is the epitome of a worker whose job is her life.  Though, to be fair, in a universe where the way of the warrior is actually a full religion, such fantacism by devotees is not that unreasonable.  Eva clings to the things that she knows, determination and fighting, to solve her problems while the world that she knows crumbles all around her.  She never even slows down once she begins to realize how far underwater she really is as the conspiracies unfold.  Everyone around her is an antagonist, which means that it isn’t really worth her time trying to get to know them, either, and since the story is told from her perspective, that type of storytelling really works for her point of view.  She is far more concerned with actions than she would ever be concerned with personalities or words.

That said, Tim Akers creates an amazingly compelling world.  The City of Ash is built on a deep, wide lake that was formed when humans overtook the native race known as the Feyr, who, in turn, had overrun another race known as the Titans.  Ash remains floating because of the workings of huge machines that are tended by the Cult of Ammon–whose God is also dead because he is the one who killed his own brother, the god Morgan.  The brothers, Ammon, Morgan, and Alexander ascended to godhood through great feats of intellect and strength, and their followers can invoke the memories of those deeds to give themselves powers.  As Eva tries to find out exactly what happened to the leader of the Cult of Morgan and tries to stop the slaughter of the remains of their Cult, she discovers more and more about both the history of the three brothers and the history of her city.

The plot flows between events, and the connections are easy to follow, which is good, because there is a twist at the end that brings the whole book together and gives the reader a real moment of understanding.  There aren’t a whole host of characters to sort out, which is also a blessing, becuase the reader does need to pay some attention to what happens over the course of the book in order to fully understand what just happened.  The ending isn’t a total surprise, or one of those tidy wrap-ups that just seems to come out of left field, but readers won’t necessarily see it coming until they actually get to those pages.

I did really enjoy the book.  The chapters were short, which made it easy to get to a good stopping point when I had to put the book down.  Even though Eva isn’t necessarily all that likeable, she is compelling.  Everything she does has reasons behind it, even if those reasons are largely emotional rather than logical.  The technology in the book was interesting and unusual, and I would have liked to have read a bit more description of it, but that could very well have gotten in the way of the plot.  It’s a good story, if one I’d definitely classify in the category of Summer Blockbuster Read–again, it’s an awful lot like being able to read a really fantastic, action-packed popcorn flick.

There is a lot of violence in the book, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it graphic.  Akers doesn’t make an attempt to wax poetic about the spilling of blood, which rings true to the character of Eva. She kills people because it’s necessary, not because she enjoys it.  She does enjoy the battle, but the goal is to win, or at least emerge alive, not necessarily to kill her opponent. I’d probably recommend this book to more guys than I would to women, largely because of all of the fighting sequences and the way the book is plotted.  I’d even consider it a good recommendation for teen readers, as there’s not a whole lot of truly objectionable material to be had in the book, and Akers writes some truly inspired similies (I refuse to point them out on the grounds that I’d like readers to experience the joy of discovering them on their own in the context they were written).

All in all, my only real complaint here is that there isn’t more. I’d hope that this could become a series, especially if part of that series included the story of the brothers themselves and their ascent into godhood.  What Horns of Ruin reveals over the course of its plot feels like mere sketches of what Akers has available to tell, and I do think that what he’s created is well worth sharing.