The Warded Man is an effective, efficiently-written fantasy thriller, one with an ingenious premise: at nightfall, various sorts of grisly 'corelings' rise from the earth to slaughter all living beings. folks live and travel behind various 'wards'. draw an imprecise ward: you are fucked, and probably dead. the novel documents a society which may or may not be in transition to ways that more proactively and aggressively engage with this continual threat. the set-up is particularly effective in its recreation of that paranoid feeling from Night of the Living Dead & Assault on Precinct 13 & the like, where folks must board themselves up together against a terrifying onslaught. except that this happens every single night. shudders! so much for the lonesome midnight walks that i crave from time to time; i would be dead, dead, dead.so now i'm going to draw this review out interminably by comparing and contrasting the book to various other modern first-novels-in-a-fantasy-series.
Kushiel's Dart vs. The Warded Man. Gardens is actually fairly terrible when considering the craft of writing. truly awful and eye-rolling, in parts. i have no complaints about Warded Man's prose; on the other hand, the writing in Gardens is just so ugh! however, Gardens is also one of the most densely plotted and richly imagined worlds i've visited, while Warded Man's world has an overly streamlined and rather half-baked quality to it that often plagues new authors. Warded Man's world is all about the corelings. Gardens is about the entire world. winner: Gardens of the Moon, although this was a close one.
A Game of Thrones vs. The Warded Man. duh, a no-brainer. that's like comparing a kiss on the cheek to making sweet love all night long. winner by a ridiculously wide margin: A Game of Thrones.
The Drowning City vs. The Warded Man. Hundred Thousand has mythic resonance, ambiguity, and its artful writing is a delight. Warded Man has carefully developed characters and an interestingly predetermined quality to its solid narrative. one is airy, the other is down-to-earth. A Tie.
The Blade Itself, The Lies of Locke Lamora, and The Name of the Wind vs. Warded Man. well, in all three cases, the incredible talents of Abercrombie and Lynch and Rothfuss trump the more workmanlike writing abilities of Brett, in every way: fascinating characterization, compelling stylistic and/or narrative choices, the depth of the world-building, the intrigue of the mysteries, etc, etc. but it is interesting to note the parallels between Warded Man and The Blade: both first-novels-in-a-series spend their time developing the lives of their three primary players, focusing on how they came to be the way they are, with the primary action to take place in the next novel. winners: Blade, Lies, Name.
Black Sun Rising vs. The Warded Man. although Black Sun is not a recent novel, this is an interesting comparison to me because both works (despite their dramatic differences) use the entire world is against the humans as their central concept. both also suffer from a certain lack of robustness in the actual world-building. that said, Black Sun stumbles in ways that Warded Man does not: Warded Man is not only pleasingly straightforward, the action in the narrative and the thoughtfulness behind the rather grey-toned characterizations have an intrinsic logic to them that Black Sun lacks.
winner: The Warded Man.
