Grim “Pitch Black” – The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan (Review)

Author’s Note: Wow, I can’t believe it’s almost been a whole week since I last posted here . . . Here’s a YouTube link if you’d rather listen:

Introduction:

“When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse, and check his pupils to see if he’s ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him. Ringil had already tried the first course of action with Bashka the Schoolmaster and to no avail, so he put down his pint with an elaborate sigh and went to get his broadsword.”

The opening paragraph of The Steel Remains expertly foreshadows what the book offers.  Macabre humor that underlies the prose. A world with dark, fantastical elements. We also get a vignette of our main character, Ringil. Ringil sighs elaborately putting down a pint of beer, disappointed in being separated from his drink. Despite the serious circumstances, he’s not flustered or rushing to action. He fetches his broadsword, a familiar blade. He’s not grabbing a sword or a nearby weapon to use for the situation. Without reading the back cover blurb, we, the readers, know Ringil is accustomed to battle and he’s either a drunk, jaded, or a combination of both.

All of this accomplished in the three opening sentences.

Published in 2008, The Steel Remains is Richard K. Morgan’s first book in his A Land Fit for Heroes Series, his first foray into the fantasy genre. Morgan is best known for Altered Carbon, a science fiction novel that received a 2-season Netflix adaptation in 2018.  

I stumbled across this novel after Google searching for books similar to Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy. Hell, Joe Abercrombie even wrote a blurb for the book. “Bold, brutal, and making no compromises,” says Abercrombie. “Morgan doesn’t so must twist the clichés of fantasy as take an axe to them.” For those unfamiliar, The First Law is a grimdark medieval fantasy. “Grimdark” is defined as a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, and violent. In my readings, it seems like the grimdark classification is mostly attributed to fantasy and science fiction genre books.

Laying my biases bare upfront, I’ll say that I’m not usually drawn to grimdark novels. It’s not the subject matter that makes me squeamish or common characterizations in these novels, but the endings. Blame my American sensibilities, but I’m a sucker for a happy ending. I don’t mind watching the protagonist lament in a mire of violence and self-loathing, but I want to see them eventually pull themselves from the filth and arise a better person, be in a better place, or have a glimmer of hope sparkling in the horizon of their future.

That’s what makes my enjoyment of Joe Abercrombie such an enigma to my reading tastes. Like the promise of Morgan’s opening, Abercrombie’s novels deliver a dire world and amazing characters that suffer in that world, while simultaneously infusing the prose with dark humor that keeps things “light.” Each time I finish one of Joe’s novels, I close the book, place it on my nightstand, and let out a weary, disheartened sigh, looking at the blank ceiling of my room for the answers to my existential despondency. I bemoan the disastrous, sometimes fatal, outcomes that befell my favorite characters, going so far as to complain to my wife.

She studiously nods her head as I ramble, occasionally inserting a well-timed, “And how does that make you feel?”

“Terrible. That’s how it makes me feel,” I sputter with watery eyes as I lay flat on our couch, fingers intertwined over my rib cage.

It makes me feel so terrible that I immediately grab the next book in the series and begin reading it.

Why the tangent about The First Law and why does it matter for this review? Because it informs my point of reference to The Steel Remains and hopefully knowing that perspective can inform your decision on whether or not you should read it or give you a different perspective on why you did or didn’t enjoy it. Despite not enjoying grimdark stories, I still enthusiastically enjoyed The First Law. My emotions are more conflicted for The Steel Remains.

Story Content:

“A dark lord will rise,” proclaims the back cover blurb of The Steel Remains. “Such is the prophecy that dogs Ringil, a washed-up mercenary and onetime war hero whose cynicism is surpassed only be the speed of his sword . . . Now [Rin]gil and two old comrades are all that stand in the way of a prophecy whose fulfillment will drown an entire world in blood.”

Regarding content, the story offers a lot—a little bit of everything for every fantasy fan. Battles, sex, political intrigue, betrayals, aliens, zombies, magic, gods and dragons. The story does go to interesting places, and I won’t spoil it here, but I will comment on the tone. Now, reviews laud The Steel Remains as grimdark. And let me tell you, this novel goes to dark places. I’m not going into detail, but please, if you’re squeamish, skip to the next paragraph after all the asterisks. You’ve been warned. I’ll give you a moment . . .

Alright, troopers, this book covers lovely things such as the gangrape of a child, a torture device that slowly anally impales it’s captee to death, murder of a child, sex slave trade, genital mutilation, a field of still living decapitated heads, graphic sex scenes, etc.

***

***

***

***

I’m not a prune that would suggest these things shouldn’t be used in stories. I think they should if they serve a narrative purpose, and for the most part, I think Morgan uses them for characterization of the characters and world with some exceptions (I’m looking at the side characters we’ll discuss shortly.) Also, he doesn’t mince with details. He will graphically describe the items I listed, and he does so without the signature sprinkle of humor seen in other parts of the novel or the artistic brevity another author might give the scene, so that makes them all the harder to palette. So, if you’re thinking about going into this novel, be warned. If you’re someone who’s looking for a darker novel that doesn’t hold any punches, this is right up your alleyway.

Characters:

Ringil, the story’s protagonist, is a war hero from a previous conflict with the Scaled Folk, a lizard-like people fought years past, that the reader is given occasional glimpses of through flashback scenes. Ringil is also a gay noble, scorned by his family and homeland society for his sexual preferences. He spends his days idling away at a bar in a remote, faraway town, spinning tales about the war for coin. He’s inclined to do good, but his actions are colored by the prejudice he’s experienced and the traumas of war. He’s a man that’s quick to reach for his sword because that’s the currency he deals best in and it’s his prowess with a blade that allows him to survive in this medieval society. He’s wonderfully written and it’s his story sections that are the most exciting.

Morgan discussed his use of dark anti-heroes in his novels in an interview with Fantasy Magazine. “Our heroic figures have become bland, tame, teen-friendly, moral, and middle-American to a fault. Above all, they are safe. Great prowess in violence is seen as a handy little sub-set of skills that you can switch on and off as required, and the rest of the time you just revert to being this likeable average guy getting on with his white-picket-fence average existence . . . Violence scars, it disfigures lives and souls, whole societies and generations sometimes, and there is no going back from it. And the individuals who excel at it are anything but safe to have around afterwards. That’s a truth I try to come back to constantly in my fiction, and guys like Ringil are the result.”

This philosophy shines through Ringil’s story. He’s called when bad things are afoot, a break glass in case of emergency tool. Once the problem is solved, however, everyone would prefer that he returns to his small corner of the world.

The dark-anti hero motif also accompanies the other two main characters of the novel—Egar the Dragonbane, a debaucherous chieftain of a nomadic tribespeople, and Archeth, a bitter woman of otherworldly origins that has been left behind in the human realm by her people. While interesting in their own right, Egar and Archeth had the unenviable task of being in the same novel as Ringil, which ensured their chapters were regulated to the “how long until I get back to Ringil?” sections. This feeling wasn’t helped by their underwhelming contributions to the narrative’s progression. Egar, in particular, felt like the biggest offender. He has a side story involving tribe politics, his conflicted longings for the glory days of his youth and life outside the tribe, and divine intervention, which appears as a MacGuffin to transport him to a convenient location for the final battle. And outside of swinging his blade at said battle, Egar doesn’t touch the narrative throughline—it’s Ringil that pushes everything forward to its conclusion. Maybe Egar is meant as a distraction, a change of pace so the reader wouldn’t get bored following Ringil chapter after chapter. If it was, it comes as a jarring shift, a tire-screeching brake on the highway.

The prose:

I’m going to highlight a few sentences from the novel that stood out to me while reading, because regardless of my complaints, Morgan’s writing is fantastic. Even as I blanched at certain sections, I couldn’t help but appreciate his prose throughout the novel. Here’s one in Ringil’s head:

“[Ringil’s sword] wasn’t a heavy weapon for its size . . . but this morning it hung like the stump of some ship’s mast he’d been lashed to in a storm, and was now forced to drag on his back one sodden step at a time up onto a beach of doubtful respite . . . The things he’d once clung to were gone, his shipmates were taken by the storm, and he already knew the natives around here weren’t friendly.”

Here's one that I thought highlighted how Morgan was able to sprinkle in humor with a soft, artist’s touch:

“The moment hovered for heartbeats, like a crow on beating wings the instant before it lands . . . The balance tipped, the moment sideslipped, skidded, and landed on its black-feathered arse.”

Here’s another reflective piece from Ringil. Again, a lot of the book’s best work is done through Ringil.

“Ringil went home, bad-tempered and grit-eyed with the krin. The Glades presented an accustomed predawn palette for his mood—low lying river mist snagged through the tortured black silhouettes of the mangroves, high mansion windows like the lights of ships moored or run aground . . . He followed the path home with a sleepwalker’s assurance, decade-old memories overlaid with the last few days of his return. Nothing much had changed on this side of the river . . . and this might easily have been any given morning of his misspent youth.”

Conclusion:  

The Steel Remains occupies a difficult place when formulating a final recommendation. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re hankering for a darker fantasy novel that doesn’t hold any punches, this is for you. If you’re at all squeamish, run and hide.

I’ll provide this—if any of the above has piqued your interest, I would recommend you give it a try. The book has been out for a while and you can find it for around six bucks on Thriftbooks. The book has good prose, a well-written protagonist, and it doesn’t finish on a sequel-bait cliffhanger. If you don’t like it, not much is lost. If you do like it, you’ll be happy to know there’s more.

Based on my scant searches about the sequel in the series, The Cold Commands follows the same three protagonists a year after the conclusion of the first book. Some reviews of the sequel suggest that the second book manages to be even darker and more brutal than the first installment. How does it manage to accomplish that? I’m not brave enough to find out, but you might be.

If you’ve read the sequels, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know what you think about the first one too.

Thanks for stopping by and I’ll see you next time.