The Infernal City: Back to the Kitchen for the Next Book

The cover is another nice standout point, its texture is different than most books I have (feeling a bit like one of my Penguin Clothbound Classics) with a cover that feels like a throwback to the pulpy science fiction/fantasy of the seventies and eighties.

The Infernal City is not a book I have any strong feelings over. I definitely liked it, and really enjoyed that it took place in one of my favorite fantasy settings of all time, Tamriel. However, the work as a whole did stand out with its varied and pretty interesting cast of main characters and look into the chaos that the Umbra Crisis wrought on Tamriel in the Fourth Era.

The plot of The Infernal City is pretty interesting, even though by the end it hasn't really gone anywhere. In a large nutshell, this floating city by the name of Umbra appears over the coast of the province of Black Marsh, and seems to somehow drain the life-force and reanimate anyone it passes under, creating an army of undead where it goes. Our group of heroes, who spend nearly the entirety of the novel separated (and still are by the novel's end, so that tagline was a honking lie) mostly doing their own thing, but each is connected by their opposition and position to Umbra. To its credit, the main cast of characters is nice, small, and only infrequently wanders into trope territory. You have a Dark Elf mage, someone with major beef against the leader of the floating city, who acts as a mentor, but a bitter and reluctant one at that. There's the prince of the Empire, who in his foolhardy adventure to destroy Umbra finds himself embroiled in court intrigue and cut off from his comfort zone and resources. There's also an Imperial spy, who's on the trail of a massive conspiracy that somehow will connect the prince with...something (I'm not sure, the closest explanation was to make the siege of the Imperial City easier?). However, the most interesting characters are the two that we spend the most time with and find themselves trapped on the floating Umbra are the Breton cook/alchemist, who acts as the heroine, and Mire-Glim, her Argonian friend. Now both are basically normal people without any extraordinary qualities except for her locket which allows her to communicate with the prince via a matching amulet (seriously, I have no goddamn idea how that happened, I'm very much convinced that I missed something) and she does have an aura of protagonist around her, they're pretty fun to follow around. Besides that though, there's not much to be said about The Infernal City. Umbra is a strange and very alien location (it's pretty damn eerie, like a simulation of the real world of Tamriel with an added synthetic element), it's a pretty fun read, and besides Bilbo and Garion (for much of the Belgariad) I haven't seen many fantasy protagonists who don't have any real combat capabilities. It's refreshing, definitely something not for young kids, but pretty much anyone from eighth grade on could read this.

So that's my thoughts on reading The Infernal City, it's a nice cozy fantasy read, and while it's part of a series there's not much of an investment you have to make, it's just two books. I do however have a slight criticism regarding the two-book structure though. I feel like the two books should have been combined, because the climax at the end of the book feels less like a dramatic end to the first part of a saga and more like a mid-novel climax. It felt somewhat cheap, like it was just to sell the other book, but the book was already pretty good, why resort to this cheap tactic? It's sad that my biggest complaint with the book surfaced after I closed it, but really it frustrated me, not that I'm not going to buy the second book mind you.