Fiction: Dead Country by Max Gladstone

Dead Country is a fantasy novel set in a semi-futuristic desert reminiscent of the American Southwest.  The main character is a Craftswoman, Tara, who wields magic through spells as exacting as a legal contract and with similar boundary-defining properties.  Tara is an accomplished necromancer living in the big city who returns home to the small town of Edgemont after her father dies.
       Tara was run out of Edgemont as a child for misusing her magical talents.  The emotional heart of the novel is Tara dealing with small-town prejudice,  her father’s death, and memories of an abusive teacher. 
       Her main ally is a handsome townie, Conner, who spends his free time in glass canyons of the deadlands.  She also reluctantly takes on an apprentice, Dawn, who survived a raider attack. 

       The conflict ramps up when the raiders attack Edgemont and Tara is tainted by the raiders' cursed magic while defending the town.  The raiders themselves are a cross between the bad guys in Mad Max and zombies who must be utterly destroyed or they keep coming.

       One of my favorite parts of the story is when Tara and her apprentice Dawn, with the help of townie Conner, work on strengthening the protective boundaries of the town against a second raider attack.  To be accurate, they must know all they can of the land, which means learning many of the town’s closely guarded secrets. 
       When the raiders do attack, Tara has prepared some surprises.  This sequence reminded me of so many fun martial arts and adventure movies where the underdog heroes outsmart their rivals, like the final fight in Conan the Barbarian.  The struggle against the raiders in this book has a surprising outcome that sets up the final confrontation.

I greatly enjoyed Tara’s descriptions of the Craft for her apprentice: 

• “Beings tend to see minds only in beings like themselves—rocks, naturally, think only rocks can talk, and they’re right, at timescales meaningful to rock.”
• “Gods emerge from the interaction of soulstuff in a community, so long as there’s a kind of space for them, made by individuals’ imaginative surrender to something greater.  That space is what we call faith.”

In the climax, Tara confronts the legacy of her abusive teacher.  Her apprentice Dawn speaks to Tara’s strength of spirit surviving a small town and an abusive teacher:

• “You fought them, all of them.  You made a world for yourself.  You did not let them tell you who you were.  You did not surrender.”

But Tara denies that she has any special “Chosen One” qualities:

• “I’m not special, Dawn.  I was hurt.  I worked hard.  I was lucky.”​

       Overall, the novel is superbly written with plot twists that feel both surprising and inevitable.
       I was privileged to interact with Max Gladstone in my Writing the Other class. He is at the top of his craft in Dead Country.

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