[Book Review] Grave Empire (The Great Silence 1) — Richard Swan
In The Great Silence, Everyone Can Hear Them Scream!
Richard Swan’s Grave Empire kicks off a brand-new trilogy, The Great Silence set in the same universe as his critically acclaimed dark fantasy trilogy The Empire of the Wolf. While cities and species wage their petty wars over differences in religious interpretation, a malicious horror creeps into the world, threatening to invade the mortal plane and consume everything that holds life.
The Great Silence trilogy, with its first entry, Grave Empire is set in the same universe as The Empire of the Wolf, about two hundred years after the conclusion of The Trials of Empire. The Sovan empire has spread far and wide, fueled by the fires of invention, innovation, industry, and innate lust for expansion. Magic has been outlawed in the empire, the old warnings of the horrors that slithered beneath the mortal plane of reality have dwindled into whispers of history, disappearing into hushed legend. Gunpowder has replaced the blade.
You can read my review for The Trials of Empire here.
But darker magic persists. When a secret deathcult suddenly loses all ties with the souls in the afterlife, the prophecy of the Great Silence surges into motion and kickstarts a battle for the very lifeblood of mortal existence in the world.
Grave Empire is told through POV chapters following three major arcs. Renata Ranier, the ambassador to the elusive Stygio (the race of mer-folk), tasked with approaching her diplomatic species, as they hold the key to explaining the Great Silence before it is too late. She is joined by the usual troupe of dark-fantasy characters, a gruff duty-above-all-else General Glaser, the happy-but-loopy academic Ambassador Maruska, the elitist corps-engineer Ozolinsh, and the hunky Lyzander.
The second POV, by which Grave Empire kicks off, follows Captain Peter Kleist, the unassuming, cowardly, and wholly unready soldier, thrust into the horrors of the New East, where screams of agony from the world beneath have ravaged the mortal plane, sending soldiers into a state of pitiful jadedness as they navigate the gritty frontier war with the enemy state of the Casimir and their pagan allies. Peter is yanked from his comfortable life and thrown into set-pieces of abject violence, wanton savagery, and unimaginable horror. Through Peter’s perspective, the terror facing the world is truly realized.
The last, and frankly most enjoyable arc followed Count Lamprecht von Oldenberg, as he delves into arcane death magicks with his pagan witch partner Yelena. His character has nefarious leanings traditional in grimdark spaces. His need to derive profit, even from suffering and death forms the perfect counterbalance to Renata’s altruistic aims. In truth, I am most interested in von Oldenberg’s plot in the sequel novel.
What Swan does masterfully in Grave Empire, is create a sense of escalating foreboding as the events of the book unfold. Through the eyes of the horrors that Peter and Renata face in their misbegotten adventures, we get to feel the building tension as the horrors seem just out of view at all times, yet are ever-present, and readers are pulled into the same plight as the characters on the page. Continuing his themes from Empire of the Wolf, Swan uses his storytelling craft to weave a sense of mystery with classic dark fantasy tropes. While not as openly detective-noir as The Justice of Kings, Peter being tasked to investigate the horrors plaguing the empire’s holdings in the New East, had a similar aftertaste to the opening sections of the first book in Swan’s first trilogy.
Unfortunately, Swan’s character work fares more poorly than his worldbuilding efforts. Especially when compared to the stalwart characters that were Konrad Vonvalt and Helena and their interpersonal dynamics and character arcs through the trilogy, the newer cast of characters are sadly underdeveloped and monotonic. Renata is clearly meant to be the primary protagonist and the Helena stand-in for this trilogy, but struggles to find her own voice of character, and her character arc feels under baked. Peter’s character showed much more promise, but also largely followed tropes well-trodden by those deeply enmeshed in the world of grimdark. The side characters, numerous as they were, also felt more one-sided and wooden. Even with the deeper exploration of newer species with their traits and lore, with twists and turns of betrayal, now standard in Swan’s writing, the character work is a step back from his previous trilogy.
Furthermore, when compared to the tight pacing and expert plotting of The Justice of Kings as a masterclass of telling a completely self-contained story, a hectic horror fueled detective-noir set in a dark fantasy world, Grave Silence goes the way of traditional dark fantasy trilogies, quickly expanding away from its core, failing to tell a tight story in its first offering, more interested in setting the stage for the trilogy. One only hopes that the characters are given more time to breathe and develop individual voices and rewarding personality arcs as they are pulled through a tightly paced second entry in the series.
Grave Empire blends the otherworldly horror of Lovecraftian fantasy with the gritty stylings of grim and dark fantasy, set in a world heavy with lore. If Grave Empire is any indication, the stakes will only get higher, the characters will only sink lower into the depths of horror, and the empire’s screams will only get louder in The Great Silence.
