I've been reading Scar Night for 8 whole weeks! I don't get a lot of time to read but the 8 weeks is only partly a reflection of that.

For whatever reason, the first half of Scar Night didn't grip me. On the other hand I've given up on a fair number of best selling fantasy books between page 50 & 100 when they've not worked for me - and I didn't give up on Scar Night. What kept me in the game were the facts that Scar Night has excellent prose, good description, good dialogue, and tremendous imagination. I think it was simply the characters that for the longest time didn't win me over.

Eventually though the story sunk its hooks in me and I started to care a bit about the characters (and considerably more about what was going to happen).

Possibly because I'm not the widest read fantasy fan (I'm wide read, but have a narrow window on fantasy), I found Scar Night to be unlike any other tale I've read. It felt in no way derivative, and that freshness is a big plus. The city of Deepgate, hung on chains above a seemingly bottomless pit, is a fantastic work of imagination, brought to life at each turn. And the characters, whilst the least gripping part of the ensemble for me, were certainly not cliched and certainly were interesting. It was on an emotional level they failed to engage me.

So, with 90% of the required raw ingredients for an excellent fantasy Campbell sets to work and does a great job. By the end I was fully sold on the story and as the tempo picked up and we bounced from cliff-hanging thread to cliff-hanging thread I was thoroughly enjoying it all.

At the end the 'bottom of the bottomless pit' stuff was somewhat anti-climactic, but when something is built up for so long it's near impossible to fulful expectations & the mystery of it was used to great effect for a long time - so that's ok.

I can certainly recommend the read and I'll be trying another Campbell book one of these days.