The Gutter Prayer – Get Your Mind In This Gutter

This is pretty much the coolest post ever on the site, and I’ll tell you why. I’m writing from the future! Not only did we here at The Quill to Live receive an advanced reader’s copy of The Gutter Prayer (in exchange for an honest review), but I’m writing this from the back of a taxi in London. Not only is this being written before the book is even out, but I’m writing it from tomorrow (depending on where you live and what time it is, I suppose it could even be from the past all things considered but since that’s how these usually go that sounds less cool).

Let’s get the actual review started, shall we? To whet your appetite, I’d like to give you my one-line description: take RJB’s Divine Cities series, throw in a little churchy intrigue a la Gladstone’s Craft Sequence series, then top it off with a healthy smattering of unique and fun ideas and you get The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan. Any longtime readers of the blog will know just how lofty the heights of our esteem is for The Divine Cities and the Craft Sequence, and they will surely be wondering whether this novel soars like an eagle or a little more like Icarus.

I’m gonna go ahead and spoil the rest of the review a little here and answer that lead-in question: the book was great. I had a really fun time with a varied cast of characters, a unique and vibrant city I enjoyed exploring, and a surprisingly deep and interesting world. While there was a bit of hand-waving when it came to filling in the parts of the world we didn’t see, there was enough fleshed out that I’m excited for a chance to go back and hear more about them. The city that we spend the duration of our tale in, Guerdon, is an old and storied merchant city with a long enough past that some of it is bound to be dark (and oh my does it turn out to be). With an incurable plague that slowly turns its victims to statues, alchemical monsters patrolling the streets, and ghouls living alongside humans Guerdon has a lot going on. It would be easy to just sketch the city out in broad strokes with so much else to describe, but Hanrahan does a great job of making Guerdon feel lived in and real. As the story unfolds and we become privy to more of the city’s past I became more impressed with the amount of thought that was put into it and how interesting it all was.

As cool as the city was, however, you need solid characters to do things in a story. Spar, Rat, and Carillon are the three main characters in The Gutter Prayer and they’re all thieves. Spar is a stone man, afflicted by the plague mentioned earlier and the descriptions of his illness and what he goes through to survive it just a little longer can be heartwrenching at times. Carillon is a vagrant and thief recently returned to the city after running away in her childhood. Rat is a ghoul. I want to point out that the fact that a main character was a ghoul was my main reason for choosing to read and review this book. I was hoping that would add a bit of something disturbing to the story and oh boy does it. I don’t think the sections from Rat’s POV would necessarily turn anyone off of the book by itself, but there are certainly things that made me squeamish.

That’s a perfect segue into explaining why I was reminded of The Divine Cities, one of my absolute favorite series, when I was reading this book. Hanrahan’s creativity in coming up with and describing the various non-human “monsters” in his story is spectacular. Roaming the streets of Guerdon instead of a police force is the “Tallowmen”, waxwork figures made from criminals (and possibly others) with a burning wick on the top of their head. Super strong, super fast, and with a wicked knife instead of handcuffs, the Tallowmen added a lot of great tension to the story considering our main characters are thieves. The Tallowmen aren’t even the only thing: Crawling Ones, the aforementioned population of Ghouls, Ravellers, various alchemical horror-weapons, and in the near distance is the Godswar where maddened gods twist nature to do battle with one another. It all adds up to nearly a thrill a page and it felt like nearly every chapter was a cliffhanger in terms of exciting new things to see.

It can’t all be good, of course, and while the characters and world were amazing, the plot felt little rushed and unfocused. It felt very much like a couple of stories mushed together to make a single longer introduction to the world, and while it didn’t put me off the book I think that a lot could have been done to make the pacing better. It’s a plot we’ve seen before, and in a book that is so bursting full of unique and fresh things, it sticks out a little bit.

All in all I think that The Gutter Prayer is an interesting and extremely fun entry into The Black Iron Legacy, the name of this new series. I love discovering new monsters and I’m a sucker for detailed, old, and dangerous cities. If you’re anything like me in those regards you’ll absolutely love The Gutter Prayer. I’m interested in where the sequel goes, because much like City Of Stairs, The Gutter Prayer ends with a variety of paths open to it. I’ll be keeping my eye out for the sequel, as I think this series is going to be one of the major talking points of 2019.

Rating: The Gutter Prayer – 8.0/10
-Will