Spellbound

Book II of the Grimnoir Chronicles

By: Larry Correia

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 16 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Audie Award, Paranormal, 2013

Dark fantasy goes hardboiled in Book II of the hard-hitting Grimnoir Chronicles by the New York Times best-selling creator of Monster Hunter International. The Grimnoir Society’s mission is to protect people with magic, and they’ve done so - successfully and in secret - since the mysterious arrival of the Power in the 1850s, but when a magical assassin makes an attempt on the life of President Franklin Roosevelt, the crime is pinned on the Grimnoir. The knights must become fugitives while they attempt to discover who framed them.Thing go from bad to worse when Jake Sullivan, former P.I. and knight of the Grimnoir, receives a telephone call from a dead man - a man he helped kill. Turns out the Power jumped universes because it was fleeing from a predator that eats magic and leaves destroyed worlds in its wake. That predator has just landed on Earth.

©2012 Larry Correia (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Good story, but I was hoping for a cast of readers

Correia does a commendable job but knowing that a cast of voice actors separately did at least the first book in the series leaves this reading comparably flat and more difficult to distinguish characters.

excellent

loved this book from start to cliffhanger. I highly recommend this series to any noir/magic fan out there

Good stuff

Solid build up, this feels less like a "second book" and more like a direct continuation of the previous book

Maybe the BEST fantasy novel I've ever read!

Would you listen to Spellbound again? Why?

Yes. It's enthralling. Carry Correia is a fantasticly talented writer.

What did you like best about this story?

Larry Correia is a flood of smart fresh ideas. Some so strange they made the hair stand up on my head. Utterly brilliant!

What about Bronson Pinchot’s performance did you like?

He has a great talnt to do many voices. Seemed like a whole cast. Male and female.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

YES! It's amazing! I never wanted it to end.

Any additional comments?

This is the second book. Hard Magic is #1. This series is so darned good I can only hope Larry Correia keeps writing ... for a very long time. His alternate reality starts in the 1900's and continues through WW1 with the Kaiser raising a army of the undead. That is a mere background detail...and then the book really gets exciting! I have not read a story this fresh and this thrilling in so long it made me marvel at the magic that a good book can be this entertaining. The first book is great. The second book is tremendous!! There are ideas so wild and original that it made my hair stand on end. Larry Correia is one of the very VERY best, smartest, and well researched fantasy writers of our time. I bow to his towering imagination. He is a flood of new ideas, and creates a great retro/pulp story. It all unfolds in a beautifully detailed world so real that it lives and breaths with life and heart pounding action. Each book adding rich detail to a ever changing and growing reality with stranger and adding more clever sub plots and characters. Characters? There are NO flat characters - everyone has depth, a history, and growing story arches in a world so much like ours, yet so utter fantastic - it's hypnotic and enthralling. You cheat yourself out of the read of a life time if you do not read these books. I hope Larry keeps going. Keeps writing. Talent this good is very rare... far too rare. I cannot say of any fantasy writer as good as he is right now. And I think he's getting better.

One of the Good Ones!

I started with book one and I didn’t think I would like it in the beginning. I had to start it over three times to get past the first chapter, but once I started listening I couldn’t put it down. I was glad to have part two they’re ready and waiting. These books are filled with plotting, scheming and all kinds of twist and turns that you don’t see coming. And Faye! I love me some Faye. I love her quirky and weird sayings which really helps to bring the story to life. I can’t wait to get started on book 3!

Another addictive book

This is another greatly written book that will have you listening non-stop from beginning to end.

great fun

I hope we get more in this world. the trilogy and short stories are fantastic.

truly excellent continuation of the story

What does Bronson Pinchot bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

he is truly outstanding! the best overall narrator i've heard to date! he brings the characters to life!

Any additional comments?

first things first...after the conclusion of hard magic, i wasn't sure if larry correia could create a villan as powerful or as dreaded as the chairman, but i'm here to tell you that larry successfully crafts another lethal villain with the temerity to directly confront and challenge the grimnoir knights head on!

the events that transpired in hard magic have made the public even more wary of actives. magical opposition groups are organizing, and the gov't is proposing laws that require actives to register themselves. a secretive, new gov't agency is given a blank check to "deal with" the active problem.

enter agent crowe. crowe's mandate is to retrieve a particular grimnoir knight at any cost. crowe is merciless and relentless. he will go to any length to capture his prize, and the grimnoir knights quickly discover he won't stop. his strange and mysterious powers manage to frighten the grimnoir knights. i found crowe to be a worthy villain. he reminded me of agent smith from the 1st matrix movie- crafty, creepy, frightening powerful, relentless.

new characters are introduced, and their backstories are just as intriguing as our original cast. correia easily weaves the new characters into the overarching plot. there is a surprising addition to the grimnoir knights, and his/her inclusion (i won't tell) further fills out the story.

i hesitate to say more b/c i don't want to rob you of discovering a truly rewarding story. spellbound is an excellent continuation of the story and definitely worthy of your time.

Harry Potter with Guns and Attitude

Larry Correia delivers more fast paced adventures of the Grimnoir as they are forced to work with old enemies against an even greater threat.
Bronson Pinchot's narration never disappoints.

Superpowers and Guns: Fun Pulpy Libertarian SF

Less than a year after the California Knights of the Grimnoir's desperate attempt to save the USA from the Tesla superweapon of the evil Japanese Imperium in Larry Correia's Hard Magic (2011), the sequel, Spellbound (2011), begins with their being framed for the attempted assassination of President Roosevelt. Indeed, a new governmental organization called the Office of the Coordinator of Information is out to eliminate the entire covert Grimnoir Society. The mood in America regarding Actives (people like the Grimnoir able to access "the Power" to perform specialized "magical" abilities like telekenisis, telepathy, and healing) has turned dangerously ugly, and although the Grimnoir are dedicated to coexistence between Actives and Normals, they are "loved by few, feared by many, and hated by more." Worse, the Power, an alien entity who came to earth in 1849 and started seeding certain people with "magic" so they can grow it and feed it back to the Power when they die, is about to be followed here by its own super alien predator, the Enemy. To prevent the Enemy from destroying the earth, someone must kill its Pathfinder, and to have a chance at that, the Grimnoir may need to call on their Imperium archenemies.

If all that sounds involved and absurd, it is, but Correia tells his story with pulpy panache and appealing characters. Our favorite Knights from the first book are back, like Francis Cornelius Stuyvesant, a young Mover (able to mentally move objects) who's been playing the Bruce Wayne-esque millionaire playboy corporation head; Jake Sullivan, a hard-bitten, chivalrous Heavy (able to manipulate gravity) who's been researching magic and carving magical spell sigils into his own flesh; and Faye Rivera, a teen Traveler (able to teleport herself and other people and objects) who's possibly turning into the Spellbound, the vessel for the most dangerous and powerful cursed spell of all. Correia introduces some intriguing new Knights, like Whisper, a French Torch (able to manipulate fire) and Ian, a bitter Summoner (able to summon demons); X-factors, like the Japanese Iron Guard Brute Toru (able to access super strength and speed) and the Texas Justice Beverly Hammer (able to find people and detect when they lie); and antagonists, like OCI agent Crow (an amoral, scary guy with a long history of dirty work). And real historical people appear with alternate-world twists, as in epigraphs by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert E. "Heavy" Howard, and Geronimo, references to Babe Ruth and Jack Johnson, and cameos by Navy Lt. Heinlein and Raymond Chandler, who says when Francis gives him a tricky covert job, "I'm an accountant, not a detective." (Funny lines like that are many in the novel.)

As in the first novel, Correia revels in writing exciting and creative (and destructive!) small- and large-scale fight scenes featuring a variety of weapons (tommy guns, shotguns, 45s, knives, nails, katana, war clubs, etc.), machines (automata, dirigibles, magic nullifiers, etc.), powers (electricity, fire, gravity, animal possessing, spell writing, etc.), foes (G-men, demons, black domes of death, etc.), and injuries (broken limbs, burst eyeballs, punctured lungs, gunshot wounds, immolation, etc.). Correia is not above adding humor to the action, as when a nearly deaf and blind old woman sleeps through an apocalypse in her boarding house.

The novel has a libertarian thrust. The Grimnoir's raison d'etre is "to fight for liberty though it cost my life," and Jake is sick of men with "grand visions," "just a bunch of assholes trying to control everyone else." At one point Francis says, "Nothing like that [the government imprisoning all Actives] could happen here [in America]." But of course, it can happen here, and it's up to the Grimnoir to stop it.

Correia does some politically correct things regarding race, as in repugnant racist epigraphs by H.G. Wells and Jack London, Faye's opposition to segregation, and a white Knight's marriage to a "quadroon" woman. And he depicts a more complex side to the Japanese than in the first novel's one-note depiction of them as loyalty-crazed, inhuman eugenic experimenters bent on purifying the world.

Bronson Pinchot has great fun reading the novel, changing his voices for European characters and for Americans from different classes and regions, and for demons and men and women. I really like his deliberate, deep voice for Jake, and his Okie-naïve-girl-on-the-surface-cold-killer-beneath for Faye.

Spellbound is so entertaining that it almost teleported me past some flaws.

--Correia writes some bad lines, as when a man has "unfashionably large old-fashioned sideburns."

--His ends-justify-the-means villain mastermind is prone to typical flaws of such figures, being unable to resist gloatingly telling his plans to captured heroes, and generally seeming less brilliant than he's supposed to be.

--Although Correia generally obeys the limits to magic he sets up, as when Faye can't Travel outside a boarding house because of a dust storm, he also ignores such limits when expedient, as when she Travels into an OCI room that's "full of dust."

--Correia callously uses animals for humor, as when a Knight possesses a cow into the path of a speeding automobile to stop it and then has the cow, with all four legs broken, wink at the enemy and trash-talk him.

--Finally, although the plot of Spellbound has its own closure and prepares the way for the climactic third volume, I suspect that much of the entertaining second book is superfluous, for its necessary developments (re Faye and Toru) could come in the beginning of the third book, making a potent duology instead of a de rigueur trilogy.

Anyway, readers who like pulpy horror sf about super powers and "Cog" inventions (like a Thomas Edison-made spirit phone to call hell) with plenty of exciting action and appealing characters should like the trilogy.