The cast of Benjamin Liar’s The Failures are just that: failures. The map nestled in the opening pages, depicting a towering mountain with tunnels running far beneath its surface and intricate silver constructs along its top and sides, is labeled “A Diagram Of The End Of The World.” No matter how much they try, the book’s interjecting narrator, scholar Bind e Reynald, reminds us that “we know how the story ends. We know what happened… we know the villains, we know the failed heroes. We know how the world died.”
By the end of the book, we don’t know the full story; The Failures is just the first in a trilogy. But we’ve met many of our heroes, the people who will—some misguided, all flawed in their own way—attempt to save the world as it slowly goes dark.
At the top of this enormous mountain, high enough that it scrapes the pitch-black sky, is a dead city made of silver. It represents the heyday of a magic that’s slowly failing, their inbuilt lights and warmth slowly giving way to the Dark above. Into that city have stumbled monsters of incredible strength, who can break buildings with their bare hands and shrug off injuries that would kill any normal person and who hail from a strange, faraway world with no magic and strange clothes and pocketknives attached to keychains. Their names are Gunnar Anderson and Jackie Aimes.
One night, back in that world, Gunnar had received an entrancing dream of adventure, of a quest for a powerful sword in a land of magic. On the way, he’d picked up listless bartender Jackie, willing to skip out on her job for the hope of something different, as well as a sword stolen from Jackie’s cousin. The dream’s guidance led them to an octagonal, ink-black pillar in the woods, where they’d been stripped down to their constituent atoms and reassembled atop the mountain, gaining inhuman strength in the process. The classic start to a thrilling adventure—except that neither of them are sure what to do next.
Buy the Book
The Failures
Farther down the mountain, in the city of Cannoux nestled up against its slopes, are two teenage boys, James and Chris D’Essan. They also dreamt of adventure, except that instead of an ancient, magical castle as Gunnar dreamt, they saw a sun-dappled forest—a captivating sight in a dark and stunted world—and instead of a sword, their dream tasked them with retrieving an intricate silver key. They see it as a way to escape the tedium of lessons and a way to impress the red-haired girl Katherine who joins them, a lark that will make them famous and respected. But the problem with retrieving powerful artifacts is that they attract dangerous people, like the cruel master of the city or the far crueler Lady Winter from far abroad, whose plans are measured in centuries.
Deep inside the mountain, in the Keep at its very heart, a girl named Sophie Vesachai had the same dream, except that she was tasked with finding a book. And like the others, her hopes of wild, rollicking adventures were quickly darkened. Finding the book left her scarred and implanted with forbidden magic, got her exiled from her family, and sparked a devastating, bloody war throughout the tunnels and passages of the Keep that left many of her friends dead.
That story, however, is far in the past: Her narrative is set twenty years in the future from her dream (and from the other narratives), as the Key, the Book, and the Sword begin to converge. Now, Sophie is a cynical alcoholic who, with her band of old and new friends gathered since the war, wants nothing more than to drink herself into a stupor and fall into whatever cheap pleasure is closest.
The Failures is a rich, interlocking tapestry of stories, jumping back and forth between its timelines. We follow more than just Gunnar and Jackie, James and Chris, and Sophie and her Killers: interspersed in their narratives are the machinations of the scheming Lady Winter and her cabal, the implacable pursuit of a fugitive by one of Winter’s trained and crafted soldiers, and scattered treatises by the scholar Reynald explaining some facet of this dark and dying world. But beyond the vast scope of the storytelling on display, what I found most fascinating was the way it played with the typical structures of children’s fantasy.
All three groups of heroes are initially motivated by the promise of adventure, the chance to find an object of immense power that could restore the world to its former glory. The first step in their quests is to step outside the bounds of the world they know: Gunnar and Jackie are torn from Earth onto the mountain; James and Chris travel through a freestanding, magical door; and Sophie must leave the light of the Keep into the dim, uncharted tunnels around it. Jackie almost name-checks the trope, saying that their transport is “like a magic portal or some shit, like that one book.” And for James, Chris, and Sophie, this is a kid’s adventure, the dream only granted to those under a certain age—but from there, it falls apart. The adventures turn bloody, grim, and lonely. What makes The Failures so gripping as a novel is that it manages to balance the heaviness and the hope at the same time, the desperate, painful battles and choices with that first glimmer of adventure. Even in a world which has already ended, we’re given the chance to believe that maybe it can still be saved.
The Failures is published by DAW.
Read an excerpt.
