Wiz Duos 1 - The God Road by David Gullen & To Sail The Interstice by Ben Wright

I would like to thank Wizard’s Tower Press for an advance copy of this collection in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher - Wizard’s Tower Press

Published - Out Now

Price - £13.00 paperback £4.99 ebook via https://www.wizardstowerbooks.com/shop/wiz-duos-book-1/

Two novellas in one volume.

The God Road by David Gullen

The City of Flesh is falling apart. Food and resources are running out. With LucasAna’s enemies gaining the upper hand, there seems little choice for him and his people but to leave the city and take their chances in the outside world.

But the God Road is a dangerous place, even for mighty six-legged warriors. Faced with deadly horrors at every turn, their survival skills and the bonds of love and friendship will be tested to the limit.

To Sail the Interstice by Ben Wright

Come, sail the interstice with us, from the coastal jungles where the ghosts of ancient factories walk and kill, through a portal in the ocean to an impossible cathedral built on song. To a desert, where a band of survivors from a crashed airship march for their lives, and a bereaved traveller must come face to face with himself…

The novella is having a strong resurgence and many publishers are finding out that there is a market for smaller condensed stories that can offer something unique. It isn’t of course something new and in the past there was a well known publisher who created Ace Doubles - two novellas published in the same book. Now Wizard’s Tower Press have created a new range based on this ideas and the first Wiz Duo, edited by Roz Clarke and Joanne Hall has two very different tales but very much here two tales focusing on showing how far science fiction and fantasy can stretch our definition of reality.

The God Road by David Gullen takes us to the City of Flesh and this very much for takes us back to the New Weird side of the genre. It’s a tale of non-humans living in a world very much not ours and this creates a really interesting challenge for Gullen creating a wholly alien world and the reader to learn to understand it.

Our insectoid characters live when we meet them in the body of a dead God that fell to the earth. Initially we have images of towers built out of muscle and bone while all seek the sacred and delicious taste of Godflesh. It created powerful image but reminding us that even an alien race may still have issue we recognise we find it on the dawn of civil war. The Myxini and Aganathan creeds have lived together but the tensions finally erupt into riots and violence and a group of Aganathan survivors now leave the city onto the mysterious and very dangerous God Road to seek a new home.

This story was very enjoyable because it very much makes the reader work to understand a world that doesn’t work very much as our own. It’s a dangerous road trip as we watch this small group find out how dangerous things are outside the city. There is very little exposition so readers need to work out culture, biology and history through the clues and events we witness. There are two set pieces one more spiritual and one more action focused with some fascinating monsters both of which also help us understand the world a bit more.

It’s a tale focused on the world and my one reservation on this is the main characters we meet didn’t really jump out at me. This felt more a story focused on the snapshot of the world and its weirdness which to be fair isn’t always a bad thing.

To Sail The Interstice by Ben Wright stata off looking familiar and then taking some big jumps to show us we definitely are not in our world. Our entry point character is Garnas who fishes and hunts but hears of two people who have gone missing in the island’s jungle and he meets after a big set piece of an adventure and encounters adventurers Shirin and Eillert. One a warrior with a checkered history and the other able to use Song for great power. A bond is formed and Garnas takes the opportunity to travel with them.

Very quickly though and delivered with a lovely sense of wonder we find these people travel between worlds and so what we have here is a loosely connected set of adventures taking us from underworld double dealings, an immense Cathedral looming out of toxic clouds and a desperate race for survival in a dangerous and possibly haunted desert. This really impressed me as it feels a modern take on the old pulp fiction of the past where we would follow the same characters into many different types of adventure. Each gives us a few insights into one of the trio and the solutions to the problems they face are not that predictable. Again this is a world that shows it doesn’t work like ours and the reader has to swing into accepting that Song can destroy buildings or whips can travel in space. They’re fast paced, innovative and a lot of fun. I’d quite like to revisit these three again. My only issue is that it felt possibly like it needed one tale to loop all the story strands together at the end but I would not be upset if there are more tales to come.

Wiz Duo 1 is innovative, not afraid to challenge a reader and most of all a lot of fun. For those seeking escape from this world at the moment then let’s jump to an incredibly alien world or travel the wider and weirder universe. I highly recommend them and ooh look I’ve the second volume to talk about soon…