Shower of Stones

A Novel of Jeroun

De: Zachary Jernigan

Narrado por: John FitzGibbon

The follow-up to Zachary Jernigan's critically acclaimed literary debut No Return.

At the moment of his greatest victory, before a crowd of thousands, the warrior Vedas Tezul renounced his faith, calling for a revolt against the god Adrash and imploring mankind to unite in this struggle.

Good intentions count for nothing. In the three months since his sacrilegious pronouncement, the world has not changed for the better. In fact it is now on the verge of dying. The Needle hangs broken in orbit above Jeroun, each of its massive iron spheres poised to fall and blanket the planet's surface in dust. Long-held truces between Adrashi and Anadrashi break apart as panic spreads.

With no allegiance to either side, the disgraced soldier Churls walks into the divided city of Danoor with a simple plan: murder the monster named Fesuy Amendja and retrieve from captivity the only two individuals who still matter to her - Vedas Tezul and the constructed man Berun. The simple plan goes awry, as simple plans do, and in the process Churls and her companions are introduced to one of the world's deepest secrets: a madman, insisting he is the link to an ancient world, offering the most tempting lie of all - hope.

Concluding the visceral, inventive narrative begun in No Return, Shower of Stones pits men against gods and swords against civilization-destroying magic in the fascinatingly harsh world of Jeroun.

©2015 Zachary Jernigan (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

"Boredom drives gods to extraordinary measures"

In Shower of Stones (2015), Zachary Jernigan's potent sequel to No Return (2013), Shavrim Coradin, the divine son of the god Adrash, recruits the warrior monk Vedas Tezul, his lover Churli "Churls" Casta Jons (a tough female mercenary), her daughter Fyra (a unique ghost girl), and their friend Berun (a magical construct made from a thousand brass spheres) to attempt to save the world of Jeroun from impending destruction and to deal with Adrash once and for all. Along for the ride are some of Shavrim's divine siblings. Opposing them are a dormant species of immortal super beings (the elders) predating the rise of interloping humanity, some mages loyal to Adrash or inimical to humanity, and Adrash himself.

The strengths of this book (as with the first one) are the compelling characters (doubting Berun trying to learn to be autonomous, uptight Vedas trying to learn to be a man, guilty Churls trying to learn to be a mother, cute Fyra learning just what she can do, thousand-personalitied Shavrim learning how far he's willing to go against Adrash), the vivid imagining of epic fantasy genre tropes (gods, dragons, magic, named weapons, the end of the world, etc.), the humor (dry and drier), the style (concise, sensual, poetic, muscular), and the intense themes (about families, love, life and death, and human nature).

There are wonderful moments in the novel: Churls trying to rescue Vedas and Berun; Shav showing up with his dragon; Vedas trying to control the god inside him; the elderman mage Pol finding a sacred valley where immortal idiots mine magical elder corpses; Berun meeting his creator/master/father under the sea; Berun communicating with the androgynous god Sradir inside himself; Fyra introducing Vedas and Churls to the land of the dead; Adrash and opponents meeting for the climactic showdown in a colossal colosseum. . .

There are many lines to savor and re-read and remember:

--On detecting a god inside you:
“Vedas allowed himself several heart beats of reflection, shining a torch around the interior of his skull, searching for the interloper he knew to be hiding there.”

--On Berun’s eyes:
"His eyes flared on and off in the darkness, pulsing from brief star to cold stone, over and over again."

--On joy:
"Men deluded themselves when they believed in better days, some bygone era when the sun shone brighter. Better days had never existed. Joy had always been stolen, and sweeter because of that fact."

--On death:
"Once acknowledged, it could not be unseen."

--On power:
“. . . appallingly easy to create division, to build walls instead of bridges. . . as if all history had been as meaningless as children arguing over the rules of a game, as if failure were an inescapable taint written into the souls of mankind.”

--On child-rearing:
"How maddening it was to raise a child. It had always seemed to consist of such awkward moments. Where an errant word could tear everything apart."

--On siblings:
"His brother waited for him with folded arms under a broken sky."

In most fantasy novels the prologues and epilogues are really just the first and last chapters, but here they are something else, and re-reading the prologue after finishing the novel is a moving and horripilating experience.

I did think that the sublime dragon introduced early in the novel and then forgotten is underused and perhaps unnecessary for the story and themes, the only flaw in the novel I could find.

Audiobook reader John FitzGibbon does a fine job reading Jernigan’s exotic names, beautiful and brutal descriptions, and savory conversations. I especially love his Fyra, Berun, and Shav. He enhances the novel.

Although Shower of Stones may be read by itself, reading it as the conclusion to a diptych of novels with No Return is best, because the first novel is also great and makes it easier to understand and appreciate the second. Luckily, Jernigan is not one of the many contemporary fantasy writers given to long series comprised of 800+ page tomes. He follows the more is less fantasy aesthetic, focusing on the highlights of the core part of the lives (and deaths) of a small set of main characters while efficiently evoking a sublime history of millennia and many cultures. He uses fantasy in the best way: entertaining us via the epic doings of warriors, mages, ghosts, and gods while searchingly exploring themes about the human condition. His fantasy feels real because of his complex and convincing characters, his vivid and sensual metaphors, and his careful attention to how people would think and feel and use their bodies in the extreme situations he imagines, as when Vedas realizes the value of positive thinking: “Was it necessary to view events through such an uncharitable lens? What did it profit him . . . to greet each day with a wary eye? He had always been dying. The world had always been dying. It would all end one day, and what would be left of Vedas Tezul?"

An Epic Meditation on Gods and Power

I thought Zachary would struggle to top the first book, but he did. A truly epic and surprising narrative, deepening the characterisation of those we met in the first book and introducing memorable new characters, too. The action is brutal, the magic system is amazing, and the world building masterly.

Excellent performance from John, will definitely listen to more books narrated by him.