Black Orchids from Aum
Black Orchids from Aum Aum. City of Gates. The Lost City. The Cursed City.
Come to Aum, where anything can be bought. Come ready to bargain for love, for power, for dreams. Just remember, the price must always be paid.
Customer Review: Different, compelling, and strangely beautiful
A bleak city in a bleaker setting, Aum is known as the 'City of Gates'. Surrounded by perpetual mist and deprived a view of the sun and stars by a jealous, forgotten god, Aum is a threshold for travel between worlds, and perhaps eras. At any time of day metaphysical gates in the city are opening and closing, bringing strange travelers with desperate quests into a city where one can buy anything. The point to remember here is that nothing in Aum is freely given; even the smallest favors come with a price, usually paid in pain and suffering.
Throughout the excellent tales in this book, Aum is the constant and most compelling character. A city rendered in beautiful sepia writing, Aum is a place of shadow and desperation. The stories are best described as dark fantasy or horror, but the book conjours up movements of bleak beauty all the more delightful for their fragility.
Houarner writes with simplicity. His characters are very rarely nice people, but the reader understands the motives of each. It is the bleak settings and tangible sense of emptiness and loss throughout that makes this book soar. A decaying boatman riding a river of death and decay or a beautiful princess determined to usurp her father's throne at any cost might not strike the reader as original characters, but trust me, you don't know where these stories are headed.
Read this book. It certainly made a lasting impression on me. If you enjoy this sort of dark horror/fantasy sort of setting, where the city itself seems to be the most important character, also check out "The Trial of Flowers" by Jay Lake.
Customer Review: There's No Such Thing As A Free Orchid
This was recommended to me as an introduction to Gerard Houarner's noir fantasy. I found it an extremely interesting example of of what I think of as 'city of adventure' fiction. This has been around for some time - the first use of the form that I encountered was Moorcock's Tanelorn, which weaves in and out of his stories. Other efforts in this sub-genre include Lynn Abbey and Mary Gentle. And, more recently, Mieville's New Crobuzon and Simon Green's Nightside have appeared. The themes are wide ranging, the only requirement being that the city and its culture be just as important as the story itself.
Aum is one of the bleaker metropolis's in in what is usually a dark landscape. Condemned for some unknown since to exist separate from everywhere else under permanently dark skies, Aum is a dangerous waystation for interdimensional trade and barter. Countless gates to elsewhere open in the city, watched over by the gate mothers and their attendants. Even to enter Aum requires bartering - the traveler must acquire a parasite that serves as a language translator. To be without language or livelihood in Aum is an invitation to disaster lost in a city where you can buy anything - if you have the price.
And the price in Aum is never something as simple as wealth. In this collection every story presents a grim sort of justice - those that abuse love have it torn from them, those that bargain for kingdoms skirt empty thrones, Gods die and leave two edged artifacts. Rarely is there even a glimmer of hope, and every tiny victory contains the seeds of its defeat. This is Aum's curse and the bane of those who chose to come to it.
Houarner's style is straightforward narrative with little embellishment. With the exception of the final tale, each story stands by itself with no shared cast. Whch is only to be expected from a collections drawn from a a number of trade publications and written over nearly a decade. I would have liked to see more details of Aum and its workings. Houarner, a minimalist, introduces only what he needs to further his story. This works well for each story, but leaves the reader feeling there is something lacking when trying to read the tales as a body of work. There is enough here to whet one's interest, but not enough to completely satisfy.