Arctic Light

Thinking more about the Daniel Blackland series ...

I already inflicted the first of these thoughts on sovay in email, but now that I'm thinking more about it, I just keep coming up with freshly painful angles on the way that one quote from California Bones echoes through Dragon Coast in a number of the Gabriel and Max scenes.

One of the things Sovay and I were talking about in email is how Max and Gabriel's later developments are foreshadowed or at least thematically echoed in some of what happens to them early on, and I feel like this is a good example of that.

Spoilers from California Bones through the end of Dragon Coast.

( I was rereading the Max and Gabriel scenes in California Bones... )

Sooooo apparently I am writing not just one but THREE Daniel Blackland fics for various squares on my h/c bingo card. (Full disclosure: one of them was written a couple of days ago but on hold because it involved a point of canon in a book I hadn't read yet ... and a good thing I waited, too, since I was completely wrong about it.) So I now have one finished, one mostly finished, and one that's only an idea at this point but is going to be very short.

I read Greg van Eekhout's California Bones this weekend, the first book in his Daniel Blackland trilogy. It's very good - wildly creative urban fantasy/alternate history in which "osteomancers" consume the bones of extinct animals to absorb their powers, whether it's a real-world ability (swimming and breathing underwater from an aquatic creature, strength of a mammoth, etc) or a magical one: dragon bones for flight and fire, the bones of an invisible mystic serpent to avoid pursuers, etc.

The La Brea Tar Pits are consequently the magical equivalent of a major oil strike, leading to a vastly altered world in which Southern and Northern California are independent countries, LA is a canal city a la Venice, and also a horrifying dystopia in which magicians eat other magicians to consume their magic, and the city in general is a dystopian police state.

The book is a heist novel, with the protagonist and his friends trying to pull off an impossible break-in of the vaults of the city's absolute dictator, the superhumanly powerful Hierarch.

Of course, in my classic way - h/t to rionaleonhart for describing this phenomenon perfectly - I immediately found the worst person in the canon and made a beeline for them. This is not, fortunately, the Hierarch, who is a straight-up villain, but rather, the Javert-like character who is hunting the heist gang, and his partner, a human hound who can smell magic.

I still wasn't that far gone and in fact was kind of uncertain whether I wanted to go ahead and read the next books in the series, because they are pretty dark, so I checked out the fic on AO3 and found that:

a) All of it features my problematic faves, so clearly I'm not the only one who latched onto them. (And in fairness, I can see why; I'll talk more about it under the spoiler cut, but they're definite fandom catnip.)

b) It's all extremely good!

I was expecting the usual small-fandom experience where there's 1 fic in Portuguese, 2 Harry Potter crossovers, and 1 drabble that's part of someone's 200-fandom drabble collection ... but no! There are only four fics, but they're all excellent, they hit my buttons delightfully, and while they did spoil me for some later developments in the series, they also took me from lukewarm about whether to read onward, to slamming the hold button on the books at the library and then, um, rereading about 12 times every scene in this book in which these characters appear and thinking about nothing else for the last couple of days.

It's actually kind of an interesting phenomenon because the characters didn't mash down my id buttons on this level until after reading the fic. The book has a very emotionally restrained, kind of bleak style, and I think it took the extra emotionality of the fic to push me over the edge. But once I went, I went hard.

Under the cut gets pretty spoilery, especially for the first half of the book, but LOOK, I have to talk about them or I will EXPLODE.

( California Bones spoilers concerning one particular set of characters not actually the main ones, including quotes )