The Waking Fire by Anthony Ryan is a Grimdark/fantasy novel with adventure, war, spies, pirates, and assassins, set in a world shaped by dragons.
The Cover: The cover on the version I have is a good fit with the fantasy genre. It depicts a black dragon, broken chains flailing about its body as it rises up before a cloaked man. The font is simple, with both the white title and the red author’s name, clearly visible against the black background occupying the lower half of the cover.
The Good Stuff: I like this author and he didn’t let me down with this book. It reminded me of ‘Blackwing’ by Ed McDonald, but with dragons. The story line is solid, the characters are interesting, the world is well established, and all is suitably dark/gritty. Just the way I like it. I also liked the writing technique employed for the chapter structure, assigning individual chapters to each of the main characters. The author left some good cliff-hangers at the end of the chapters, which kept me wanting to read on to find out what was going to happen next along each of the character paths.
The Bad Stuff: While I enjoyed this story, I didn’t enjoy it as much as his other work ‘Blood Song’. The magic system in ‘The Waking Fire’ revolves around dragon blood, with a number of different coloured dragons within the world. There were a lot of references to the colour types, which I found quite repetitive and a distraction at times. Overall, the cover is nice and is the sort of cover that would draw my attention when seeking out a fantasy novel. The story is good and there are plenty of interesting characters, in a world that mixes magic and technology successfully. I’m giving this one a wrench-turning, blood-mingling, fire-breathing, 3.5 out of 5 golden bookmarks.
Allan Walsh writes Fantasy and Horror. If you’re looking for something new to read in these genres, why not check out his books here.