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This review first appeared in All About Romance: http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/boo...Home
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Clashing Tempest
Brandon Witt
August 2015, Paranormal Fantasy
DSP Publications, 360 pages, Amazon ASIN 1632166860
Part of a series
Grade: B+
Sensuality: Hot
Note: This book is available digitally from Amazon.
Clashing Tempest, the last book of the Men of Myth trilogy continues with the parallel adventures of Finn and Brett, but now Brett has Lelas as his best friend and confidante, while Finn has Schwint as his sidekick and lover. Both young men are seeking the truth, unaware that their lives are on converging paths that will lead them to unimaginable horror—and to Sonia, waitress turned vampire queen. At the same time, we learn a great deal of back-story and begin to see the pieces come together even as our two protagonists struggle to make sense of things.
Brandon Witt creates an intense, complex and mostly dazzling world in which magic and mortality intertwine. What his narrative lacks in Tolkeinesque grandeur, it makes up for in a kind of romantic-horror road-trip feeling that is both very contemporary and very American. Throughout the series, both Brett and Finn continue to sound like what they are—young Californians in over their heads trying to embrace destines handed to them against their wills. They are reluctant heroes, and they are not exceptionally noble. By keeping them flawed, Witt gives us characters we grow to love and care for, and he plumbs emotional depths that satisfy our need to feel along with them. These are not cerebral books; they’re all heart.
Sonia continues to be my stumbling block in the third book. I think we are supposed to sympathize with her, or at least with her hellish predicament — she is fully aware of the horror she has become, and hates it; yet she feels no remorse or love or connection to the gentle, loving human she was. Gwala, the vampire king, poses no such problem; in him there is no moral ambiguity. He revels in his own power and absence of any human moral compass. My inability to sympathise with her may be my fault, I think, not the author’s. My own novels created a model of a vampire who assimilates into the human world as a survival technique; the vampire as good guy. Brandon Witt choses the more traditional vampire trope, the relentless predator for whom humans are nothing more than food. I’ve always felt that there is a lack of internal logic in these killer vampires, because my mind has trouble accepting the notion that the larger world wouldn’t notice all those mysterious deaths, and that constantly killing humans works against effective camouflage that will last for millennia--especially since blood is a renewable resource. And from this arises my consistent discomfort with the ambiguous Sonia, who is what she is, but is nonetheless expected to command our sympathy. We aren’t allowed to forget the Sonia that was - loving, charming, a good friend. Clearly, Witt loves Sonia’s character, and I confess that I almost did. Almost. Nonetheless, her presence in the final third of the trilogy matters, and as readers we simply have to embrace Sonia’s truth or lose our way. In the end, liking Sonia isn’t important: understanding her is what counts.
The action really picks up in this book, and I found it to be a compulsive read. The final cataclysm is both satisfying and puzzling—there is a deux-ex-machina plot device that both intrigued and annoyed me. And, while the ending in this book is not a cliffhanger, exactly, it left me with mixed feelings. I wanted more closure, particularly in regard to Brett’s future. But there are promises of more books dealing with other characters whom we’ve met along the way. Even though I’m not really done with Brett or Finn, I confess that I look forward to the next saga from Witt’s Men of Myth.
Brandon Witt creates a world in his Men of Myth series that appeals to readers like me greatly. Like the Beings series by F. Cooper and the End Street Detective Agency books by Amber Kell and RJ Scott, Witt’s world posits the unseen presence of paranormal beings, interacting with humans at varying degrees of awareness.Witt promises that the Men of Myth series will continue; but the immediate saga of Brett Wright, mer-demon, and Finn de Morisco, warlock, wends its way through the second substantial volume of the trio. The third book is equally hefty. This is a series of epic scale.
Witt is not a poetic writer, but he is a good story-teller, and the gripping narrative swept me along from the beginning of Rising Frenzy, where we reacquaint ourselves with Brett, now fully engaged with the newly discovered oceanic family he discovered in the previous book Submerging Inferno (review here). As Brett copes with his new life, he continues to grieve his loss of Finn, but embraces the undersea world in which he finally feels at home. He discovers his father, Therin, and finds a new friend in Lelas, who becomes the stand-in for Sonia, his best human friend, who met a horrific fate in Submerging Inferno.
Finn, on the other hand, is wallowing in loss. Even his boisterous, loving family can’t pull him out of his grief over Brett’s abandonment. As he retreats from his family and sinks into the sordid goings-on of The Square—a sort of perverted Diagon Alley lying hidden in San Diego—Finn happens upon Schwint, a happy-go-lucky fairy. Schwint is a favorite character of mine in this book, as he becomes Finn’s ally and lover.
While most of the book is written from Brett and Finn’s perspectives, Sonia Liu reappears in an important secondary role, a third point of view that is slightly forced but ultimately essential. Sonia is a difficult character for me; the loving, flirtatious Chinese American heiress is transformed into a dazzling killer, a guiltless vampire seething with anger at her violent creation. The somewhat arbitrary cliffhanger at the end of volume two has her meeting Gwala, the ancient, waiflike monster who rules the Vampire Cathedral and who holds the strings of all our friends’ destinies.
Thus Rising Frenzy feels somewhat like a very long preamble to Clashing Tempest and the two books should really be read together for continuity. It’s a big commitment, but worth it for the fun of Brandon Witt’s vivid imagination.
The other books in the Men of Myth series are Submerging Inferno (book one) and Clashing Tempest (book three).
This was originally reviewed in All About Romance: http://www.likesbooks.com/cgi-bin/boo...
Witt's a good story teller. The simple story is that Brett Wright, a San Diego lifeguard, has been living with his friend Sonia for years, since being kicked out of his grandparents’ home for being gay. Unusually tall, blond and beautiful, Brett is oblivious to the possible implications of his remarkable metabolism and his affinity with the ocean and its creatures. In fairly short order, he survives a horrible date, only to be confronted with a previously hidden world of paranormal creatures worthy of his darkest dreams.
Enter Finn de Morisco, beautiful Chicano pastry chef and beloved member of a large, noisy Encinitas family who are more than meets the eye. Finn rescues Brett from a close brush with a violent death, inadvertently plunging his entire family into a supernatural mystery that threatens everything he loves – including Brett.
Witt offers us vivid characters in Brett and Finn, and indeed with all of Finn’s family, who take on distinctive shape in our minds and hearts. The two young men’s relationship seems to be evolving in tried-and-true romance fashion; but given the fact that this is the first of a series, we all know from the start that there will be no simple happy ending or easy solutions to the problems Brett and Finn face.
I'll be submitting a review of books 2 and 3 to All About Romance. Once they're up, I'll post them here. It's an amazing series (in spite of some grammatical frustrations).