The Legend of Eli Monpress by Rachel Aaron

As threatened at the end of the last review I'm going to reread series that I've read before. Most of them will be rereads, but there are a few series in the library that I only read part of (Katherine Kerr's Deverry series springs to mind) before abandoning and they've since been completed, so some of those series will be entirely new to me. In most places I'll cover complete series, but in some cases when the series is composed of relatively self contained volumes (Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files for example), I'll do as much of the series as is already out. I also want to where I can highlight lesser known series, which is why I picked The Legend of Eli Monpress by Rachel Aaron for the first entry, rather than something by Joe Abercrombie, or Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series.

I had an interesting history with Eli Monpress. I read the first book; The Spirit Thief, when it first came out and it was part of a experiment publishers played with back at the time. It may have been that readers of epic fantasy were becoming increasingly hacked off by the wait between volumes (we all know the authors I'm talking about, so there's no need to mention them again here) and so the publishers printed the books shot gun fashion, one after the other. The first one I can remember seeing do this with success was Brent Weeks Night Angel trilogy. It doesn't happen now, so as a marketing ploy the whole thing may not have been as successful as the publishers hoped.

The Legend of Eli Monpress started out as one of these experiments. By the time I picked up The Spirit Thief, the 2nd and 3rd volume were out. This gave me, and I am sure many others, the impression that it was in fact a trilogy. It's not. There are actually 5 books in it, although because it went through a few different formats, plenty of readers also have it as 3 volumes. What they did, for reasons known only to the marketing department of Orbit, was put the first 3 books out. Then wait for them to go out of publication, collect them into an omnibus, wait again for a whole bunch of new readers to discover Eli and then eventually put out the final 2 books, although they took their own sweet time about that, too.

There was also a bit of a marketing issue. The Eli Monpress books don't really fit neatly into any category. I can remember when they first came out, due to the cover (it was pretty bad) people asking what they were: paranormal (they're not), urban fantasy, epic, secondary world, etc... They have elements of a number of different sub genres, but they fit neatly as fantasy without confusing it with a bunch of sub genres.

The Spirit Thief introduces readers to the cocky, but strangely charming thief Eli Monpress and his partners in crime, the swordsman Josef Liechten wielder of the greatest awakened sword in the world; The Heart of War, a sword that has the power of a mountain within it and Nico, a insubstantial girl that carries the spirit of a demon within her small frame. Because Eli's aim in life is to get the biggest bounty ever offered for a single person on his head, that brings him direct conflict with the determined, straight down the line spiritualist Miranda Lyonette and her ever present friend the giant ghost hound Gin.

The first book is fairly light, and I can see in this grim dark worshipping world why some readers shied away from it. For me that was a selling point. I do read grim dark (in fact a grim dark will be making my books of 2018 post tomorrow), but it has to be in my opinion superlative to separate it from the unrelentingly bleak, dark for the sake of being dark, stuff that is glutting the market. The kingdom of Mellinor in the first book wouldn't look out of place in a Disney film (having said that the whole thing would make a great animation if anyone were minded to do it. Eli is as much Flynn Rider as he is Locke Lamora).

The first 3 books have the feel of a trilogy with each book giving us a new story about Eli and his two partners. Having reread it I can't see how the author could have wrapped it up earlier, but I think it could have been accomplished by making all 3 of them a bit bigger.

I think that maybe it was a trilogy and for various reasons it was decided to make it into 5 books. The gap between the 3rd and 4th book does show. They have different feel and it felt to me like they were written a fair time after the first 3, when the author's mind set had altered. They're a lot darker and they're also a lot bigger, in some cases unnecessarily (I'm completely over the extra words so many authors now, especially fantasy ones, seem to need to use to tell a story. I blame the ease of using a word processor), but they're still fairly good if they lack the joy of the original books.

There are some excellent ideas present in the series: the Heart of War, the ability to speak to the spirit present within all things like buildings and cutlery or carts, the way the spirits bound to the spiritualists interact with whoever they're bound to (Miranda's spirits were particularly fun to read as was Karon, Eli's lava spirit) and then there was Benehime, the Shepherdess, who over the 5 books went from beautiful, loving goddess to carelessly evil and cruel, especially where Eli was concerned.

It's a fun ride as a series, and it's a shame that it often gets overlooked now.

Next up, in the new year will be The Dresden Files. not including the 2 short story collections (I haven't decided whether I'll do those as well, I may inlcude them in a separate post if I do) that weighs in at 15 books, so I may be some time.