Kell's Legend Review

Review Kell’s Legend, book 1 of the Clockwork Vampire Chronicles

Author Andy Remic

Publisher Angry Robot Books (Harpercollins UK)

If this book was a movie, it would an action-packed horror movie. Elements of the prologue lowered my expectation of the book. However, Remic surprised me with an imaginative and riveting tale. You could say that Remic took Kell’s axe and did a bit of genre smashing because he mixes warrior fantasy with steampunkish/scifi elements and minces out a jaw-dropping tale of gore, horror and close-your-eyes-and-block-your-ears scenes.

For me to be unable to put the book down was a bit of a surprise too, because I do not usually read brutal, dark, battle-focussed fantasy. I read Gemmel once and there are flavours of that here. 'The Steel Remains’ by Richard Morgan is also on a par with Kell’s Legend. Morgan did some new gritty things with the tropes and his word smithing is glorious. Remic on the other hand keeps rolling out the surprises, takes ick to a new level and still manages to paint a broad canvass with extremely nice touches. The book was more than I thought it would be and I like to be surprised and awed and entertained.

Kell’s Legend is principally about Kell, a retired soldier who lives in the city of Jalder, feeding on the scraps of his life through his granddaughter, Nienna. Kell cooks soup and plays a father figure, albeit surreptitiously, in Neinna’s life. This is because his daughter, the girl’s mother, hates him. Kell is the stuff of legend. He has a past and that past smacks him in the face when a strange army invades, using ice smoke to freeze the inhabitants of the city so they can be killed. There are strange beings called Harvesters, who suck the life and blood out of the living and the dead. Albino soldiers in black armour and the vachines are driving south to invade.

Kell’s axe has a personality, something derived from the old blood magic, a trickster personality and you can tell that they have a kind of truce, Kell and the axe. This also makes for an interesting character interaction because it is in this dialogue that Kell’s deeper flaws and strengths are intermingled. It is where he both loves and hates himself. All he wants to do is save his granddaughter, the only good thing in his life. Nienna represents continuation, innocence and chance to live again, a chance to make different choices. And the world is set against him.

The secondary characters are well rounded—Saark, the womanising, thief, whose story gradually unravels and Anukis, the vachine outcast, who is tortured until she explodes in violence. Nasty characters breed within the chapters, multiplying as the story unfolds. With a George RR Martin regard for characters, you never know who is going to die next. There are the additional elements, things I have not seen before. Vachines, vampire machines, more like renegade ‘Borg’ who don’t waste time saying they will assimilate you before they kill you. The whole clockwork element is entirely fascinating. There appears to be no purpose to it (too early in the first volume to tell) but it works in a terrifying way, particularly when the clockwork goes wrong. To go into too much more detail would indeed spoil it for the reader. However, the book is well worth delving into.

Without appearing too sexist, I’d say it is a blokey kind of read (okay I must be wearing trousers today), full of forays with swords, punch ups, beheadings, axe grinding skulls, to rip ‘em in your teeth, howling slaughter. And then the battle scenes, where there is more despair than stench of dead bodies floating in the mist. Weird unstoppable monsters and buckets full of dog shit, gore and intrigue.