[Book Review] House of Open Wounds (The Tyrant Philosophers 2) — Adrian Tchaikovsky
If you ever wanted to know what would happen if you mashed together the bleak “All War Is Hell” motif of All Quiet on the Western Front, with the buddy camaraderie of MASH, held together by the black absurdist humor of Catch-22, set in a grimdark fantasy universe, then House of Open Wounds by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the book for you.
The second book in the Tyrant Philosophers series, House of Open Wounds carries over only one of the main POV characters from the first book (City of Last Chances), the foul-mouthed pacifist priest, Yasnic and his partner-in-misery, the eponymously named God (unnamed and referred to with the uppercase G, rather than the other named gods). In this tale, they are thrown smack dab in the middle of the Pallaseen invasion of yet another foreign land, in their effort to spread their so-called “perfection” to the uncivilized and savage lands outside their massive empire. Except this time, the Pals have met their match in the wily mercenary Loruthi people. Let the messy novel-spanning battle commence.
Much like one of the best grimdark standalone novels written so far, The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, House of Open Wounds focuses on a single battle, spending more time detailing the horrors that wartime brings upon everyone from the high general of the armies, to the lowly washerwomen and camp-followers. Tchaikovsky perfectly cements his grimdark insertion by painting a bleak wordscape filled with abject misery tied together with gallows humor borne by the soldiers whose entire world is war, entire life is on the brink of death, where kill or be killed takes on an almost mundane, amusing nature.
Our “hero” (insofar as heroes can exist in a grimdark wartorn world), Yasnic (now going by Maric Jack) finds himself in a Catch-22 esque quandary of being wedged in a brutal war while being a near-immortal human as long as he does not cause direct or indirect harm to anyone. And therein lies the central premise of this expertly crafted narrative: the struggle to maintain a pacifist stance in a world outlined by violence and evil.
In his quest for miserable pacifism, he is thrust into the war hospital, where he meets his ragtag group of MASH-y band of brothers, a golem of a chief “physician”, a wily skiver, a magical being who can absorb wounds unto herself and cast it into the void, a meek boy who knows nothing but Pal-perfection in a time of war who holds a dark secret, a literal necromancer, a priest of all that is unclean and a priestess of a fire god. Tchaikovsky takes his time to flesh out the complex individual motivations and how their circumstances intertwine with their personas and ambitions.
Where House of Open Wounds truly shines is in the solid push-forward narrative tying together individual backstories of most of the primary and secondary characters giving just enough information to whet the readers’ appetite for larger worldbuilding. While some have complained about the chunky wordcount and seemingly plodding pacing, I assure you, there is reward in the slow burn. You can just imagine spin-off stories for most of the major characters, and it is a masterclass in fantasy storytelling.
The sheer hypocrisy of the “Perfected” Pallasseen Higher Orders of casting all non-rational holy (or unholy, there are literal contracts with the Lords of the Underworld to lease out demons, this book has everything!) as enemies to be wiped out by the scourge of rationality, they are not above harnessing these same oddities to further their ends, and line their own pockets and further their ambitions within the all too familiar dog-eat-dog world of climbing the hierarchy. The allegories to the aggressive Nazi expansion coupled with the misery-driven conquest of the Soviet empire are plain to see in the way the Pal empire is characterized with villains both exemplars of “we do what we are told”, “we do what we must”, along with an unhealthy dose of pure sociopathic evil that comes along with wartime mania among the powers that be. With such a horrific backdrop, the small embers of hope and heroism, though few and far between, from our protagonists torn between the selfish need to survive and the budding sense of something greater than themselves, that much more impactful.
House of Open Wounds is a celebration of the stubborn will to survive even in the darkest of times surrounded by horrors seen and implied. Tchaikovsky does not spare his readers from gore and hyperviolence but with the matter-of-fact tone that is a trope in grimdark fantasy. His prose is eloquently dense yet crisp. While many complained of the jerky shifts in POVs and uneven pacing in City of Last Chances, House of Open Wounds is a more coherent product with balanced POV perspectives leading to a rewarding crescendo of a conclusion.
Do not be fooled. There is no happy ending.
This is war.
This is grimdark.
