Review: The Route Of Dor Nassia and Other Stories, Emir Raz Funes
By Luke Frostick
I was intrigued when I found a short story collection called The Route Of Dor Nassia and Other Stories. It promised me fantasy stories set in a dark world and was only more intriguing having been published in Istanbul. It is rare for such a book to fall so neatly into both my wheelhouses.
Unfortunately, however, the book doesn’t work.
The story follows a number of characters on both sides of a war in the aftermath of a decisive battle. Through a sequence of short vignettes, the characters must survive the consequences of defeat and on one hand, whilst dealing with the consequences of victory and the hollowness of it all, on the other. All good stuff.
After finishing the book, I kept thinking about The Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, which starts in much the same way: Two sides of a morally murky war dealing with the fallout of a horrific massacre. The losers trying to not get killed and the winners questioning what they did and what they were ordered to do. However, in Erikson’s grimdark masterpiece, it is the first act that launches the survivors onto a long and complex road of questioning authority. The Route doesn’t. It stops. I was left wondering where the rest of my book was.
The other thing that would separate The Route Of Dor Nassia from Erikson’s works is the depth of the world presented. Of course detailed world building can be performed in a short story. If you read any of the offering of venues like Clarkesworld, you’ll find how writers can construct complex places - along with characters - within a limited space. The world around Dor Nassia is little more than a cold city and a cold forest. There is some interesting stuff surrounding an evil sorcerer and a cool interpretation of dwarves, but neither are given the space to go anywhere in the plot. If the world is flat, it is hard to make the characters three-dimensional.
The prose is a bit janky too - not exactly bad, but it could have done with another editing pass. Also, some sections are not consistent. For example, a character acquires a cool dwarf weapon that gets forgotten about then remembered again when the plot requires. In one section, the dwarves’ armour is described as so loud it echoes across a valley. In the next page, still, it is described as wholy silent.
That all being said, I do think that there is potential here; it just hasn’t been realised. The world clearly has more to it than the writer was able to express in his word count. There is some good dialog, good characters and the ‘war is hell’ theme comes across powerfully. If The Route Of Dor Nassia had been the opening scenes of a grander epic fantasy, I would have kept reading. If you are a fan of writers like Joe Abercrombie and you are looking for something similar, this book might be worth picking up.
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