Review: Aeon’s Gate trilogy by Sam Sykes

I’m impressed with this debut trilogy from a new fantasy author

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I’m always on the look out for good new fantasy – new to me, anyway. Twitter has turned out to be an excellent source for this. I believe I found Sam Sykes having followed Joe Abercrombie. Sykes is very entertaining on Twitter and I felt it was only fair to buy one of his books. So I did.

The first book in the trilogy, Tome of the Undergates, starts with a 200+ page sea battle with pirates. That’s either awful or awesome depending on your point of view, and I thought it was awesome. Being thrown right into the action like that isn’t something I’ve experienced before. Usually battles come after the characters have been introduced, when we know who to cheer for. Managing to make the reader care about characters we’ve only just met is hard, and here you do kinda care. Even more difficult is keeping the reader invested even after those characters have been revealed to be a bunch of scumbags and villains.

This opening is intriguing. We don’t know why the characters are fighting pirates, why they’re at sea, or even who our main cast is. All this information is revealed slowly, keeping interest high. Our intrepid gang comprises Lenk, the leader, Kataria, Dreadalion, Gariath, Asper and Denaos. In many ways they are the ideal AD&D group – leader, warrior, mage, barbarian, cleric and thief.

Tome, as the name implies is about a book. The kind that if it falls into the wrong hands Very Bad Things will happen. It’s our group of adventurers’ job to ensure that doesn’t happen. Not because it’s the right thing to do, but rather because they’re being paid very good money. Our gang is not heroic or noble, with the possible exception of Lenk, who at least tries. And yet you still root for them. This may be because they’re real. They’re flawed, they’re vulnerable, they’re petty, they have secrets, they’ve made mistakes and they want to atone for them, some of them have done terrible things, some of them are going to do terrible things. In short, they’re human. Even the ones that aren’t.

My dad’s comment pretty much summed the books up: “They’re good, really good, but they’re so weird”

The other two books in the trilogy are Black Halo and The Skybound Sea. I’m not going to attempt to a precis of each of them – read them, they’re great. Each book comes to a proper conclusion, but the story continues throughout.

The books are incredibly inventive. Sykes has created whole new races, complete with history, culture, beliefs and so on. The writing is stunning; by turns funny, exciting, gross, beautiful, moving, violent, disgusting and more. The final book ends with a great twist, presumably setting up Sykes’s next book, A City Stained Red, which he is working on right now. When he’s not on Twitter.

I genuinely loved these books. I even insisted my dad read them, and I never do that. His comment pretty much summed them up: “They’re good, really good, but they’re so weird.” I’d take that as a compliment.