INTO THE REALMS OF DARKNESS
The strange case of the ‘Depleted Men’ will lead white wizard the Professor and his young ward Martin Kingswraith, into the darkest corners of Victorian London.
As the two embark on a chillingly dangerous adventure help will come from Penelope Epimeliad and the mysterious children, once tree sprites in Britain’s magnificent primordial woodlands, who live in a vast Roman reservoir under the Tower of London. The children emerge as a force for good dedicated to fighting evil, bringing help to the needy, comfort to the innocent, and food to the downtrodden masses. It’s a fitting role as it was the children who created the Depleted Men. In their former lives they were murderers who relied on ancient enchantments to suck the minerals from the bodies of their victims, leaving behind a shell of soft, jelly-like protein.
Kingswraith Taste no Pity fuses science-fiction with magic against the backdrop of Dickensian London. In Pearson’s world nothing is as it seems and the thick, damp fog that swirls through the capital’s dirty streets is the ideal cover for danger and supernatural forces. Watching it all from the top of his Piccadilly house like a ringmaster in a circus, is Haven Sligh the villainous man/creature from another dimension on a revenge mission. Fans of Pearson’s science-fiction will feel at home with this book as it draws on his larger than life imagination, his ability to construct an atmosphere that feels genuine, along with a gift for writing dialogue that captures the verbal quirks of a period, in this case late nineteenth century Britain. There is some violence although in fairness it doesn’t even come close to reaching the levels in the Body Holiday and Souls Asylum novels.
Kingswraith Taste no pity is a satisfying read that adults and teenagers will enjoy. The plot rolls along at a solid pace while the characters are either likeable or deeply reprehensible. There’s also the occasional reference to attitudes prevalent at the time, for example when a woman publicly accuses the Professor and Kingswraith of being lovers. While that would hardly raise an eyebrow in today’s world, it was a serious accusation to make against someone in nineteenth century Britain when homosexuality was illegal and punishable with a jail sentence. I wasn’t entirely convinced about the usefulness of that particular scene or even sure of what it added to the overall story, apart from revealing how a bigoted stranger was ready to put an innocent man behind bars!
That aside the book does a more than effective job of shining a light on the lives of ordinary people and how vulnerable some of them were, especially children. In Chapter 4 the reader is introduced to a nameless man with the predatory instincts of a wolf who, after killing two armed thugs, searches for a young girl to sexually abuse knowing he won’t be accountable. He finds his target, only to discover that she’s not the innocent, defenceless child he thought she was. His death is gruesome but is also a form of retributive justice for the young, nameless victims he sexually humiliated and murdered when he lived abroad.
Kingswraith Taste no Pity deserves a sequel and the ending appears to have been set up with that in mind. Haven Sligh may have been defeated but nine of his brothers in darkness, the Viventum Nominis Umbra, are lurking in the depths of the shadows. Can they succeed where he failed?
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
Why not add Kingswraith and the Vadhaka, the sequel to Kingwraith Taste no Pity, to your Derek E Pearson collection? Click on the covers to find out more about other books by this author. Listen to Derek E Pearson reading an extract from his novel Slave Skin or watch the video of him in conversation with Read2Write’s Juliette Foster.
