REVIEW: A Drink Before We Die by Daniel Polansky
If you’ve read the Low Town Trilogy (The Straight Razor Cure, Tomorrow, the Killing, She Who Waits) and you’re looking for a little more of that The Warden awesomeness (or this is your first Low Town and you’re wondering if you need to start reading the trilogy), then look no further—I have just the short story for you. A Drink Before We Die is a brilliant little 20-odd minute read that gives you a nice little taste of Daniel Polansky’s incredible ability to deliver amazing grimdark fantasy stories set in a post-war world where hard, brutal people, do hard brutal things, and The Warden manipulates the hell out of all of them.
The Warden runs Low Town, a rough-as-guts slum part of Rigus. He deals the drugs, runs the streets, knows the people, and controls the crime through knowing everything about everyone, and killing the rest. From across the river, Cosgrave is looking to expand his business into Low Town—looking to eat from The Warden’s table, and then likely own it. He’s all balls and bustle, confronting The Warden in The Warden’s house of business he owns with his old war buddy Adolphus with all pretend niceness and snideness of a mafia don.
As you already know, or will come to know, The Warden isn’t having a dash of that. The Warden picks up what Cosgrave is putting down and immediately moves to action in the way that only The Warden does, eschewing ranks of hired muscle for smarts and manipulation.
A Drink Before We Die is a nice little slice of The Warden’s life—a vignette of manipulation and violence, if you must. As a tie in short story, it does everything you want. It doesn’t rely on you knowing the world or having read the trilogy to understand what’s going on. It gives you a taste of the key characters and the kind of story you’ll read in the novels. Is a complete, stand-alone short story, with a finished arc that hints at the greater story without relying on it. Whenever I’m asked about what we look for when procuring tie-in short stories, A Drink Before we Die will join Mark Lawrence’s Bad Seed as my answer as the best examples I can remember reading.
Polansky has long proven himself an excellent proponent of long form storytelling (Those Above, Those Below, Tomorrow’s Children), then delivered in spades in novella length (The Builders), and now I can confirm Polansky can dominate in short story form as well.
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