P.C. Hodgell, To Ride a Rathorn [Library of Babel]

To Ride a Rathorn is the fourth book in P.C. Hodgell’s Kencyrath series (the previous three are God Stalk, Dark of the Moon and Seeker’s Mask), and as such probably wouldn’t get to the top of the booklog queue– there’s just too much backstory, and the book wouldn’t make any sense to a new reader.

However, the plot and structure of this one allow such a great one-sentence description that I can’t resist posting it: This book reads like a cross between Harry Potter and the Malazan Book of the Fallen.

To do the backstory a grave injustice, our heroine Jame is one of the Kencyrath, a race charged by their god to fight the evil Perimal Darkling through a chain of different worlds. The fight wasn’t going well, even before they were betrayed by one of their own leaders, and lately, the Kencyr have fallen into squabbling among themselves, oblivious to the threat to their latest world, Rathilien.

Jame is a daughter of the highest House of the aristocracy, but her father was just slightly insane, and threw her out to be raised in mysterious circumstances on the fringes of the worlds controlled by Perimal Darkling. In God Stalk, she returns to Rathillien, remembering next to nothing about her past, and is thrown into several books worth of bloody strife and politics. She has a variety of pooly understood magical powers, and a real talent for destruction, and blood and chaos follow her wherever she goes.

In this book, she is sent to the Kencyr military academy, for political reasons, and needs to survive another set of schemes against her, as well as dealing with a host of lurking monsters, and some vengeful ghosts. It’s a cheery scenario.

The military academy is organized around the various aristocratic Houses of the Kencyr (seven of them), and cadets of different Houses are pitted against one another individually and in teams in various competitions. These Houses are also the main political entities of this world, so all the plots and schemes revolve around membership in one House or another. I don’t know if this is an intentional Harry Potter riff, but there’s no way to avoid the parallel. It’s Hogwarts, with more blood and kinky sex. Highly destructive hijinks ensue.

The original books were well liked, by those who read them, but not commercially successful, so the last couple of volumes have been published by Meisha Merlin. While they can be found in big-box stores (I got my copy at Borders), this has some unfortunate consequences, in terms of the production of the book: the maps and charts in this book are very poorly reproduced, and badly pixellated, and the entire book is indifferently copyedited.

I mention this not just as a caveat emptor note about the physical volume, but because the numerous typos and other glitches make me wonder about how much editing the main text has received. It doesn’t help that it’s been several years since I read Seeker’s Mask, but I found the plot here to be very confusing and unfocussed. It may be that this is an unavoidable consequence of the sheer mass of backstory, but I can’t help wondering if it might’ve been cleaned up a bit by a good editor.

Anyway, it’s the fourth book in the series. If you’ve read and liked the others, this provides similar qualities. It does move the plot along somewhat, and explains a bit about just why some of the older generation of characters are so crazy and hateful. I’m not sure how many more volumes are planned, but this is a good continuation of what has gone before.