REVIEW: A Graveyard for Heroes
Gorgeous imagery, great character work, and a world rife with religious and political tension, Michael Michel’s A Graveyard for Heroes is a dark, successful follow up to book one’s The Price of Power. The amount of POV’s are growing, the stakes rising, and the skies darkening in this indie gem.
“Tyrants oft arrive in velvet slippers but they always leave in iron-shod boots.”
A Graveyard for Heroes centers on the repercussions of the battles won and lost in The Price of Power. Ishoa must pick herself up from the ashes and snow; Barodane seeks to right his wrongs, but he finds living harder than waiting to die; Thephos has become an Awakened, but now he must find out what that means and what his powers are, not easy for a suicidal pig farmer. With these three POV’s, and two new ones of Valka, a Scothean general and spy & Zadani, a cook with revenge on her mind and targets for her knife, Michel’s A Graveyard for Heroes is a violent, dark, character-driven story.
Michel’s bread and butter is his character work, and he’s at the top of his game here. Barodane may have been the MVP of book one, but A Graveyard for Heroes two stand-outs are Ishoa & Valka. Ishoa is granted the most screentime in this book and goes on a nice training arc for both martial prowess and what it means to be a leader, where Valka’s tale is an intricately woven one of spies, betrayals, threats, blackmail, politics, and religious mechanations. Grimdark fans will feel particularly at home with Valka.
From a side character perspective, A Graveyard for Heroes heralds one of the most interesting antagonists I’ve ever read. Siddai is a child who is known as the Arrow of Light, a messiah who none can deny his power or wisdom. Even as assassins bear their knives and spies whisper their secrets, he carries on with intelligence, grace, and an undercurrent of malice seen only in figures like Monster’s Johan Liebert.
The imagery in A Graveyard for Heroes is both gorgeous and disgusting. Michel paints beautiful landscapes and bloody viscera with the same level of distinct, visceral touches. You can see men dying, smell roasting pork, hear sounds of suffering, and taste both glory and bitter defeat.
Another aspect of the book that deserves praise is the prose. Despite the length of A Graveyard for Heroes, Michel’s pen never wavers from a prose perspective. Often times with books this large, you notice portions where the author threw something on the page to keep things moving or didn’t fully go over each paragraph to make sure the flow, eloquence, and word choice were there, but we do not see that laziness in A Graveyard for Heroes. The length of the book is ambitious, but Michel delivers on that ambition.
“ A single experience, no matter how horrible, does not condemn all experiences. Just like one failure on your part, Isha, does not condemn you to a life of failure. You must face forward to see your path. You must let the past go.”
My main complaint with A Graveyard for Heroes is that one of the POV’s simply didn’t work for me. That’s a fairly common complaint in any multi-POV book—and it may be a case of personal preference—but Zadani the cook I just couldn’t invest in fully. Characters who can always tell when others are lying & revenge plot lines rarely work for me, and when you compare her parts to characters like Valka, Ishoa & Barodane, she just doesn’t reach those heights.
A few secondary complaints is that while we do have some excellent new voices, one of the main POV’s/plotlines from The Price of Power does not appear in A Graveyard for Heroes. I’m not overly sure why this character was cut from the sequel, but their presence was missed. Finally, I found some of the dialogue exchanges from secondary antagonists a bit cliche and over-the-top villainous. It’s noticeable only due to how strong the rest of the dialogue is, but there are brief moments in this thick tome that could have used a touch more polish.
All in all, however, this is one of the best sequels I’ve read and a leap in every discernable aspect of writing. Plot, prose, character work, dialogue, world-building, action, all of it is an improvement from the already excellent The Price of Power. Michael Michel is promising grand, ambitious things, and with the skill shown in A Graveyard for Heroes, I suspect the series shall go down as my favorite indie series of all time. Character-driven readers, fans of Abercrombie/GRRM/X-Men, and grimdark fans alike should invest now in this indie series.
Read A Graveyard for HeroesThe post REVIEW: A Graveyard for Heroes appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.
