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Dogsland #3
We Leave Together
In a city where the rich stage decadent parties as the poor suffer in squalor, where assassins prowl and king's men keep order with truncheons and force, where gangs of children run like dogs and addicts die in the streets, a demonic strain has taken hold. The shapeshifting priestess and priest of Erin have come to Dogsland stalking a fugitive, half-breed Senta Rachel Nolander, and plot to burn her to cleanse the world of her demon-tainted blood. Led ever onward by Rachel's corrupted lover's crying skull, Erin's agents seek their hapless quarry, a frightened girl guided by one promise, one hope, one prayer... We Leave Together.
- GenresFantasyUrban Fantasy
256 pages, Paperback
First published June 15, 2014
206 people want to read
About the author
J.M. McDermott
37 books78 followersHis first novel was plucked from a slush pile and went on to be #6 on Amazon.com's Year's Best SF/F of 2008, shortlisted for a Crawford Prize, and on Locus Magazine's Recommended Reading List for Debuts. His short fiction has appeared in Weird Tales Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Apex Magazine, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, among other places. He has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and an MFA in Popular Fiction from the Stonecoast program of the University of Southern Maine.
By night, he wanders a maze of bookshelves and empty coffee cups, and by day he wanders the streets of San Antonio, where he lives and works.
He tries to write in between.
By night, he wanders a maze of bookshelves and empty coffee cups, and by day he wanders the streets of San Antonio, where he lives and works.
He tries to write in between.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 23, 2017
What Was a Broken-Hearted Demon Child to Do?
The husband and wife Walkers of the Goddess Erin spent the first two books in J M McDermott's Dogsland trilogy, Never Knew Another (2011) and When We Were Executioners (2012), sifting the memories adhering to the skull of the dead demon child, Corporal Jona Lord Joni, in order to find and purify the places he contaminated and to locate and exterminate two other demon spawn, his lover Rachel Nolander (a mystic elemental sorceress) and his foil Salvatore Fidelio (an immortal, amoral, amnesiac thief). But by the start of the third book, We Leave Together (2014), the Walkers have changed their mission in Dogsland. Though they still seek Salvatore to kill him, they have put Rachel (who's benign and has fled the city) on the back burner and have decided to start a fiery revolution to cleanse the city of the Sabacthanis, a noble father and daughter team who have been using economic, political, and magical power to corrupt and dominate Dogsland and its king.
Two main things shift the Walkers from apolitical holy executioners to engaged arsonist revolutionaries: Jona and Rachel's memories of loving each other (demon spawn together in a hostile world) and Jona's memories of the awful source of the demon weed eating the city from the inside out. Early in the novel the wife asks her husband, "Would you die for me, like Jona did for his beloved?" He replies, "No. You shouldn't die for me, either. Let me sleep." But she says, "Liar." Later, she notes, "Even now, his skull cries out her name into the dark." In the course of Jona's king's man (policeman) day job and assassin night work, he discovered who's been producing demon weed and inserting it into the city and how it's made but didn't believe he could do anything with the awful knowledge. The Walkers will put it to good effect.
While trying to clean up Dogsland in the present, the Walker wife also narrates Jona and Rachel's poignant memories of their fraught childhoods and sad parting. Rachel recalls, for instance, how her big half-brother Djoss became her protector when they were kids by killing her demon "doppelganger" father, while Jona recollects learning to fear his demon child father's sleepwalking and to avoid sharing an orange with another human being. Other memories painfully detail the growing separation of Rachel from Jona, due to Djoss falling under the sway of demon weed, requiring her to become his protector: "He's my whole life. I won't let him go, Jona."
When finishing a fantasy trilogy one may wonder, was it worth all the time and energy to read? Does the third volume satisfyingly end the first two? The first time I finished this concluding book of the Dogsland trilogy, I thought not. This was partly due to my having listened to Eileen Stevens give great readings of the first two novels as audiobooks, whereas the third novel was only available as a paperback or a kindle. I read the kindle version and missed Stevens and found too many typos (e.g., "He grabbed the reigns"). And I thought that McDermott should have finally explained things like Elishta's motives in making the demon spawn and how many there are and why they take different forms. And at first I felt that the climax, in which after nearly three novels the Walker wife finally "remembers" how Jona and Rachel parted and how he was killed by his sergeant, was disappointing. (**Those aren't spoilers! We've known that such things would happen from the start of the first book.**)
But I re-read the third book and kept thinking about it and the trilogy, and started liking it all a lot more. About the lack of explanation for demon children, McDermott may be saying there are no answers for such things: "Jona looked up at the stars, and wondered what they were. Religions had answers, but there was never an answer that satisfied Jona when his own existence was an abomination to the religions. He didn't feel like an abomination. He just felt lonely." About the climax, although Jona is disappointing in his last absurd, passive, and reckless collaboration with Ela Sabacthani, we may somewhat excuse him because he's broken hearted, having lost Rachel, who’d made him a better man, a better demon spawn. And Jona's last memories reveal that Rachel became strong enough in her will and her magic to leave the city and to take care of Djoss. And that Jona could finally briefly dream (he was always unable to sleep) and even fly (his mother had cut off his wings when he was born).
Finally, given the bleak parameters the trilogy sets up in the first two books, the third one ends, if not with a happy ending, at least with a sense of renewal, redemption, acceptance, and love. By experiencing Jona and Rachel's love, the Walkers may pursue their duty to seek and destroy all demon spawn a wee less rigidly and righteously. They prefer helping Nicola Calipari (Jona's sergeant who's still conflicted over having killed Jona) get his fledgling farm going and his "wife" Franka bearing their baby to hunting Rachel. They're happy to be outside the city: "I think the wilderness is where things happen and no one writes about them. It is the place where there are no maps, no memorials to heroes, no gravestones, no paper, and no ink."
I enjoyed the vivid, laconic, poetic writing in the book: "Flying insects flew into the lamps and died with screams that only my husband and I could hear." And it's doomed romance: "When it is a good dream, I dream of your breath moving in and out of your chest and my ear pressed against your chest, and the breath flowing in and out of both of us, and it is the same breath."
If you like literate, bleak, romantic urban fantasy where the main character is an "of-demon" dead before the story begins and there are few obvious answers to existential questions, you should give the trilogy a try.
The husband and wife Walkers of the Goddess Erin spent the first two books in J M McDermott's Dogsland trilogy, Never Knew Another (2011) and When We Were Executioners (2012), sifting the memories adhering to the skull of the dead demon child, Corporal Jona Lord Joni, in order to find and purify the places he contaminated and to locate and exterminate two other demon spawn, his lover Rachel Nolander (a mystic elemental sorceress) and his foil Salvatore Fidelio (an immortal, amoral, amnesiac thief). But by the start of the third book, We Leave Together (2014), the Walkers have changed their mission in Dogsland. Though they still seek Salvatore to kill him, they have put Rachel (who's benign and has fled the city) on the back burner and have decided to start a fiery revolution to cleanse the city of the Sabacthanis, a noble father and daughter team who have been using economic, political, and magical power to corrupt and dominate Dogsland and its king.
Two main things shift the Walkers from apolitical holy executioners to engaged arsonist revolutionaries: Jona and Rachel's memories of loving each other (demon spawn together in a hostile world) and Jona's memories of the awful source of the demon weed eating the city from the inside out. Early in the novel the wife asks her husband, "Would you die for me, like Jona did for his beloved?" He replies, "No. You shouldn't die for me, either. Let me sleep." But she says, "Liar." Later, she notes, "Even now, his skull cries out her name into the dark." In the course of Jona's king's man (policeman) day job and assassin night work, he discovered who's been producing demon weed and inserting it into the city and how it's made but didn't believe he could do anything with the awful knowledge. The Walkers will put it to good effect.
While trying to clean up Dogsland in the present, the Walker wife also narrates Jona and Rachel's poignant memories of their fraught childhoods and sad parting. Rachel recalls, for instance, how her big half-brother Djoss became her protector when they were kids by killing her demon "doppelganger" father, while Jona recollects learning to fear his demon child father's sleepwalking and to avoid sharing an orange with another human being. Other memories painfully detail the growing separation of Rachel from Jona, due to Djoss falling under the sway of demon weed, requiring her to become his protector: "He's my whole life. I won't let him go, Jona."
When finishing a fantasy trilogy one may wonder, was it worth all the time and energy to read? Does the third volume satisfyingly end the first two? The first time I finished this concluding book of the Dogsland trilogy, I thought not. This was partly due to my having listened to Eileen Stevens give great readings of the first two novels as audiobooks, whereas the third novel was only available as a paperback or a kindle. I read the kindle version and missed Stevens and found too many typos (e.g., "He grabbed the reigns"). And I thought that McDermott should have finally explained things like Elishta's motives in making the demon spawn and how many there are and why they take different forms. And at first I felt that the climax, in which after nearly three novels the Walker wife finally "remembers" how Jona and Rachel parted and how he was killed by his sergeant, was disappointing. (**Those aren't spoilers! We've known that such things would happen from the start of the first book.**)
But I re-read the third book and kept thinking about it and the trilogy, and started liking it all a lot more. About the lack of explanation for demon children, McDermott may be saying there are no answers for such things: "Jona looked up at the stars, and wondered what they were. Religions had answers, but there was never an answer that satisfied Jona when his own existence was an abomination to the religions. He didn't feel like an abomination. He just felt lonely." About the climax, although Jona is disappointing in his last absurd, passive, and reckless collaboration with Ela Sabacthani, we may somewhat excuse him because he's broken hearted, having lost Rachel, who’d made him a better man, a better demon spawn. And Jona's last memories reveal that Rachel became strong enough in her will and her magic to leave the city and to take care of Djoss. And that Jona could finally briefly dream (he was always unable to sleep) and even fly (his mother had cut off his wings when he was born).
Finally, given the bleak parameters the trilogy sets up in the first two books, the third one ends, if not with a happy ending, at least with a sense of renewal, redemption, acceptance, and love. By experiencing Jona and Rachel's love, the Walkers may pursue their duty to seek and destroy all demon spawn a wee less rigidly and righteously. They prefer helping Nicola Calipari (Jona's sergeant who's still conflicted over having killed Jona) get his fledgling farm going and his "wife" Franka bearing their baby to hunting Rachel. They're happy to be outside the city: "I think the wilderness is where things happen and no one writes about them. It is the place where there are no maps, no memorials to heroes, no gravestones, no paper, and no ink."
I enjoyed the vivid, laconic, poetic writing in the book: "Flying insects flew into the lamps and died with screams that only my husband and I could hear." And it's doomed romance: "When it is a good dream, I dream of your breath moving in and out of your chest and my ear pressed against your chest, and the breath flowing in and out of both of us, and it is the same breath."
If you like literate, bleak, romantic urban fantasy where the main character is an "of-demon" dead before the story begins and there are few obvious answers to existential questions, you should give the trilogy a try.
February 17, 2017
I have only recently (meaning within the last 10 years) started reading urban fantasy and I have very little experience with high fantasy, outside of Tolkien.
And very recently, I came across a term I'd not heard at all: grimdark. (I'm always late to everything, but I do get there eventually.)
This trilogy would have to qualify as grimdark.
It is very dark, very bleak, and well. . .grim. And yet, in the sparseness of the writing, the language, the poverty and despair in the storyline, there is so much beauty. The lines of good and evil are so convoluted in the mud and shit and humanity that they blur and bend round each other until good is evil for the sake of being better and evil shows mercy in being kind and just.
If any of that makes sense. I spent the first book mostly confused, the second mostly grossed out and the third wanting to weep. There's really no way to describe this trilogy, other than it's a full-body mindsuck. I can't even tell you a time period: it seems medieval but there are modern aspects, too, sort of. I guess it's kind of dystopian, if you want a label, but not exactly.
All I can say for sure is, I will miss Jona Lord Joni, Rachel Nolander and her brother Djoss, and the Walkers of Erin. I also would be interested in re-reading this trilogy, and that's not something I do much of.
True Rating: solid 5 stars
Date purchased/borrowed: 09/15
Cost: $5.99 (full purchase price, no discount)
And very recently, I came across a term I'd not heard at all: grimdark. (I'm always late to everything, but I do get there eventually.)
This trilogy would have to qualify as grimdark.
It is very dark, very bleak, and well. . .grim. And yet, in the sparseness of the writing, the language, the poverty and despair in the storyline, there is so much beauty. The lines of good and evil are so convoluted in the mud and shit and humanity that they blur and bend round each other until good is evil for the sake of being better and evil shows mercy in being kind and just.
If any of that makes sense. I spent the first book mostly confused, the second mostly grossed out and the third wanting to weep. There's really no way to describe this trilogy, other than it's a full-body mindsuck. I can't even tell you a time period: it seems medieval but there are modern aspects, too, sort of. I guess it's kind of dystopian, if you want a label, but not exactly.
All I can say for sure is, I will miss Jona Lord Joni, Rachel Nolander and her brother Djoss, and the Walkers of Erin. I also would be interested in re-reading this trilogy, and that's not something I do much of.
True Rating: solid 5 stars
Date purchased/borrowed: 09/15
Cost: $5.99 (full purchase price, no discount)
July 13, 2014
This is the final book in a trilogy, yet it travels back in time to the events preceding the first book. McDermott created a city that feels totally lived in and realistic but has an alien undercurrent to it all the time. One of the most fascinating things about this series is the POV structure -- while it is really told by one character, she has the ability to draw memories from the skull of a dead person. We see most of the story filtered through the memories of dead characters and what they remember of other character's stories.
July 19, 2020
How did Lord Joni finally meet his end, how did Rachel Nolander influence his fate and that of Dogsland.
October 6, 2015
Kind of slack and slow outta the gate, meandering it felt like though maybe I'd forgotten too much about book 2. A lot gets lost in his obliqueness and misdirection, most of it productive and intentional cuz of POV structure etc, but sometimes it felt as if things were lost unintentionally. Prose is still too sloppy/imperfectly edited, though this book was best of the three there. All that said, prose was still real good. Dude can bring killer lines on the reg. What read as POV lapses in book 2 IIRC were perfectly framed and legit here; my guess is bad editing at Nightshade fucked that up before. Great presentation to the whole thing, just steeped in atmosphere, you can smell it and see it and you ain't smelled or seen this before. Characters complex, both sympathetic and repellant. Plot strangely, almost coldly deployed a la a lotta Wolfe but effective too, as w/Wolfe. Real good stuff, real good trilogy.
January 12, 2015
Και όλο πλησιάζει το τέλος και όλο ζυγώνει η ώρα που θα μάθεις πώς πέθανε ο Jona. Κι όλο εύχεσαι απλά να μην τελειώσει. Εκπληκτικό τέλος μια μια εκπληκτική σειρά βιβλίων.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews