Some Writing, Some Typing

At almost 800 pages, Hell's Foundations Quiver is the longest of David Weber's eight "Safehold" books. You could make a good argument, too, that it does the least to move the story of Safehold forward of any of those eight.

We begin with the forces of the Charisian Empire solidifying their control over the nation of Siddarmark and preparing to face the immense armies of the Church of God Awaiting marshaled by the nation of Harchong. We end with most of that mopping up finished and the forces of the Charisian Empire preparing to face the immense armies of the Church of God Awaiting marshaled by the nation of Harchong.

In between, Weber tests our patience harder than a doughnut tempts a desert hermit by doing almost nothing to advance the main storyline of attempts to wrest control of Safehold from the Church so technology can be rebuilt enough to fight and defeat the genocidal Gbaba race that has almost wiped out humanity. He tests it with multiple-paragraph diversions like one that explains why a ship attacked by two of our heroes has a poop deck for grappling hooks to catch on.

Or long conversations that inform characters about events we readers have just witnessed happen. Or third and fourth and fifth run-throughs of chief villain "Zhaspar Clyntahn" causing more concern and worry to those around him when he is menacingly quiet instead of exploding with volcanic rage as he usually does. Or used to, anyway.

Or repeated reminders that Safeholdian years are not Old Earth years. Or the ridiculous variant spellings of proper names that are used according to no logic whatsoever to try to demonstrate language drift. "Cayleb Ahrmahk" and the like are bad enough, but since the Harchongese have mostly Mandarin-derived names they achieve a whole new level of narrative killing. Every other word Safeholdians use, which we would presume would also show the language drift, is plain ol' English, as are almost every proper noun that's not a person's name -- "Green Valley" doesn't become "Grayn Vahlay," for example.

The frustration level hits such a high mark because Weber is a top storyteller with a great tale to offer who still has some great scenes and character development gems buried in the landfill of undisciplined prose that clogs the rest of the book. The Safehold books can be better. They have been better. So it's tough to figure out why it's going to be very hard for one of them to be worse than this one is.

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Back in 2005, Julie Kenner started a fun little series that imagined what it might be like if a woman who was definitely not an infringement on the copyrighted character Buffy the Vampire Slayer but who did the same sort of thing retired to life as a suburban mom but found her thirtysomething self called back into the hunting lifestyle. Carpe Demon established Kate Connor as a woman fully committed to home and hearth -- until an old man from the pet food aisle at Wal-Mart stalks her to her home and tries to kill her.

He was, of course, a demon and his attack signals that Kate's years of peaceful domesticity have come to an end. The wry and witty series ran at a book a year until stopping at 2009's Demon Ex Machina. There were any number of possibilities. Buffy ended in 2003 and as she faded from public consciousness pastiches based upon her lost their sales power as well. Kenner had also written up a very tangled web of major and minor plotlines involving Kate, her daughter from her first marriage Allie (and Allie's late father), her second husband Stuart, her old mentor, the Vatican-based corps of Demon Hunters to which she had belonged, and so on. It didn't really mesh well with the comic tone that had elevated both Buffy and Kenner's own series. And Kenner was writing several other series as well, some of which hit sweeter spots in the zeitgeist and probably seemed like better investments of time to both her and her publisher.

So Kate's story went on hold until 2014's Pax Demonica, in which Kate and her family travel to Rome to meet with the leaders of the forces fighting evil and learn what they could about all of the recent problems that seem to have coalesced around them. Kenner still has her gift for wry observations and gives Buffy creator Joss Whedon a run for his money in the quippy dialogue department. She's sketched her characters more than painted them, but they are well-formed and realistic sketches of people placed in very unusual circumstances -- you could see people acting like this (if they learned that demonic beings would sometimes inhabit the recently dead in order to use their bodies to do evil things, that is).

But the story is pretty thin, feeling padded in several places. That it seems to set up a new conflict for Kate to handle while not really resolving some previous threads doesn't make a reader feel particularly forgiving about second and third and fourth visits to some scenarios and situations. If there are indeed chapters yet untold in Kate's story some of them probably should have been in Pax Demonica in place of some of what's there; it does not at all feel like a book that had five years to cook.