Scar Night

From Barnes & Noble

This is Alan Campbell's debut novel, but his credentials to create exciting action fiction have already been well established: As a Grand Theft Auto designer, he concocted riveting story lines for millions of video fans. This launch volume of his ambitious dark fantasy trilogy exhibits his skills at crafting vividly imagined, fast-paced narratives. It is unlikely that readers will soon forget this novel about Deepgate, a quasi-Victorian city suspended precariously over a seemingly bottomless pit.

Publishers Weekly

Campbell sets his stunning debut fantasy in Deepgate, a town wreathed in chains that keep it hanging suspended over a bottomless abyss, peopled by worshippers of Lord Ulcis, the god of chains, and tormented by a mad angel named Carnival. The author, who was a video game designer, renders Deepgate beautifully. It's a complex city of creaking metal links, stone and shadow, inhabited by priests, assassins and the boy-angel Dill, who will lead a journey into the abyss in a desperate attempt to save the city. Campbell has Neil Gaiman's gift for lushly dark stories and compelling antiheroes, and effortlessly channels the Victorian atmospherics of writer and illustrator Mervyn Peake as well. This imaginative first novel will have plenty of readers anxiously awaiting his follow-up. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Suspended by huge chains over a supposedly bottomless abyss, the city of Deepgate looms as a bastion of the Church of Ulcis, protector of the souls of the dead and leader-to-be of an army of souls that will reclaim Heaven for its own. Deepgate is also home to two angels, one an untried youth, the other a maddened murderer, yet together they possess the means to uncover the alarming truth that exists within the abyss. This first novel by the designer and programmer of the Grand Theft Auto video games revolves around a fresh fantasy premise, featuring memorable characters, a multilayered plot, and graphic and intense action scenes. Not surprisingly, Campbell's world building is a visual delight, and his series opener belongs in most fantasy collections. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

First of a dark Dickensian fantasy series from video-game designer and UK resident Campbell. The city of Deepgate hangs suspended on chains above a bottomless abyss, partly as a tribute to Ulcis, the god of chains, and partly for protection against marauding barbarians. Church teaching instructs that Ulcis will one day lead an army to batter open the gates of heaven, closed since Ayen ejected the other gods and angels-the latter became archons, defenders of Deepgate. Ulcis, at the bottom of the abyss, claims all dead bodies and the life-force of their blood, or soul. Recently the barbarians have been severely weakened by diseases and poisons rained upon them by Deepgate's powerful fleet of airships. Ironically, the brilliant but vengeful Poisoner Devon is dying of the very poisons he helped create. If, however, he succeeds in producing "angelwine," an elixir brewed from blood and souls, he might achieve immortality. Church leader Presbyter Sypes allows Devon's project to continue, despite the murders Devon must commit to make angelwine; Sypes hopes to use the elixir to cure Carnival, an insane vampire-angel who descends upon the city every Scar Night to claim the soul of another victim in order to sustain her own immortality. Carnival's counterpart is Dill, a timid, innocent angel and last descendant of the city's battle-archons. Dill's tutor is the young assassin Rachel Hael. Another plot strand follows the hulking Mr. Nettle, whose daughter was one of Devon's victims, as he attempts to reclaim Abigail's soul and bring her back to life. Gory and violent, underpinned with dubious logic, inventive and eye-filling, yet for all the hard work, it doesn't really get under the skin.