The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan

A group of three young thieves are pulled into a centuries old magical war between ancient beings, mages, and humanity in this wildly original debut epic fantasy.

The city has always been. The city must finally end.

When three thieves – an orphan, a ghoul, and a cursed man – are betrayed by the master of the thieves guild, their quest for revenge uncovers dark truths about their city and exposes a dangerous conspiracy, the seeds of which were sown long before they were born. Cari is a drifter whose past and future are darker than she can know.

Rat is a Ghoul, whose people haunt the city’s underworld.

Spar is a Stone Man, subject to a terrible disease that is slowly petrifying his flesh.

Chance has brought them together, but their friendship could be all that stands in the way of total armageddon.

Happy New Year! I hope the cosy lull after the festive season finds you well rested and ready to kick 2019 off with some more top-notch genre fiction. We’ll begin the year with some fantasy action.

Isn’t it always the way, you and your friends are hired to do a simple bit of breaking and entering, and before you know it everything has gone south. Buildings are exploding, the authorities are on your tail, the local crime boss wants a quiet word and mystical creatures are stalking the city streets ripping people into small chunks. The latest from Gareth Hanrahan, The Gutter Prayer, promises this and delivers on every page.

When we first meet Cari she has lost any sense of direction in her life. An orphan from a young age, she has been running for years. Fate finds her coming home to the city she was born in. Cari just wants to keep under everyone’s radar and have a bit of peace. Unfortunately, after the failed robbery everything goes a bit pear shaped. From that moment on Cari is a marked woman. There is a steely determination in this woman however. Rather than just roll over and submit to her various enemies (there are many), she decides to take them on at their own game.

Cari’s friend Spar has problems of his own. He is feverishly seeking escape from the inevitable. He lives in the shadow of his father’s legacy, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, he also has to contend with an incurable disease that is slowly turning him to stone. Though the disease makes him stronger than your average person, it is destroying him. If he can afford it there are drugs that will slow the transformation but not cure him. I think his condition makes him the most introspective of the characters in the novel. There is a sense of finality that hangs over his head that means every action he takes has to be that much more measured, more thoughtful than everyone else. Spar is living on borrowed time and he knows it.

The final member of this oddly mismatched little surrogate family is a ghoul known as Rat. He finds himself caught between the strict hierarchy that exists in ghoul society, and a life above ground in the light. Through the course of the novel his evolution is handled really well. By novel’s end I think it is fair to say that he has changed beyond all recognition.

Hanrahan’s world building is well observed. Geurdon feels like a city on the very brink of a fundamental change. Over many years, as cities are want to do, it has grown in a haphazard fashion with little or no guidance. A whole host of people, and other sentient type beings, have begun to notice there is a power vacuum, no one is really in charge. Political and theological factions vie for power, trying to out manoeuvre one another. This fantastical cold war has reached the point where something has got to give. All the Machiavellian sneakiness is spilling out onto the streets and people are going to get hurt. Elsewhere in the world there are mentions of an event known as the Godwar. Though Geurdon hasn’t been directly affected yet, you know it is only a matter of time until that particular horror is going to land squarely on everyone’s doorstep. The big question is when you are surrounded by power hungry megalomaniacs, divine beings with a snarky attitude and all manner of other evils, who do you trust?  Cari, Spar and Rat find themselves caught right at ground zero of some world changing events.

I was pleasantly surprised by how dark the narrative of The Gutter Prayer becomes in places. The powers battling against one another are not averse to doing some genuinely nasty things. There are wonderfully icky moments involving a race called The Crawling Ones. You’ll probably not be surprised when I tell you that each Crawling One is made up of many sentient worms. I cannot stress this enough, LOTS OF WORMS! Elsewhere there are also the gruesome, morally blank Tallowmen. These violent warriors, made of wax, are used as weapons by the city’s Alchemist guild whenever blunt force is required. There are also a whole host of seedy underworld types, world weary thief takers, faintly bemused academics and a saint whose language would make a longshoreman blush. It’s all great fun.

You can probably tell I enjoyed The Gutter Prayer. The trio of main characters are engaging, and their adventures are the very definition of exciting. The novel is an inventive mixture of genres. Part political thriller, part heist movie with some dark religious undertones and keen fantasy edge. What more could you ask for?

My musical recommendation to accompany The Gutter Prayer is a soundtrack to The Last Days by Fernando Velázquez. It captures the tone of the novel perfectly.

The Gutter Prayer is published by Orbit Books and is available from 17th January. This is the first book in The Black Iron Legacy so the good news is we’ll be hearing from Gareth Hanrahan again. I can’t wait.