Bloody Books -Norylska Groans
There are torture scenes in Norylska Groans that would make even the most dedicated professional torturer pause for a moment and suggest that perhaps everyone involved should take a short break. Not because the victim needs one, obviously. This is grimdark fantasy, after all. No, it is more the sort of pause where the torturer looks at the equipment, looks at the victim, looks back at the equipment and wonders whether things have perhaps become a little excessive. Then they carry on, because apparently this is what we are doing now.
Norylska Groans, written by Michael R. Fletcher and Clayton W. Snyder, is a grimdark fantasy mystery set in a Russian-influenced industrial city where the cold is murderous, the streets are filthy, criminal families compete for power and the most valuable commodities in town may be the memories, skills and personalities of the dead. It is a wonderfully nasty book, but it is also one of the most inventive takes on the ever-growing grimdark genre in a long time, taking the familiar ingredients of brutal violence, corrupt institutions and people trying to survive a world that does not care about them and adding a magical concept that is genuinely fascinating.
The novel opens with Genndy Antonov watching a man being brutally torn apart by machinery in the factory where he works, before Gen is promptly fired from the same job. It is, by any reasonable measure, a terrible day, and things only become worse from there. Gen is a former soldier attempting to adjust to civilian life while trying to support his pregnant wife and young family, living on a heavily taxed pension while working in a city so cold that simply remaining alive requires careful planning. When he is approached by Arkady, a member of the Shkut crime family, and offered work, the decision is not exactly a difficult one. The work is criminal, the pay is good and Gen needs to keep his family fed and warm, which is the sort of situation where morality is forced to compete directly with the price of coal. Gen is also a man who knows that violence is part of him. The system that employed him as a soldier has discarded him, but the skills that made him useful have not gone away, and Norylska Groans is interested in what happens when a person has spent their life being told that certain parts of themselves are useful, only to discover that those same parts make civilian life considerably more complicated.
The other protagonist is Katyushka Leonova, a young woman from a once-wealthy family whose fortunes have fallen following her father’s disgrace. Kat takes secretarial work with the militsiya, Norylska’s police force, in an attempt to support herself and her future husband, only to find herself “volunteered” for a new programme designed to bring women into active military service. The quotation marks are doing a great deal of work there. Kat is partnered with Maks, an experienced veteran of the militsiya, and sent into the Filth, one of Norylska’s roughest districts and an area controlled by the Shkut family. It is here that she becomes involved with the most interesting concept in the entire book: memory and personality stones.
The basic idea is simple enough, although the implications become increasingly horrifying. Memories, skills and personality traits can be extracted from a person and stored in stone, allowing someone else to touch that stone and take on those memories or traits. Need to be braver? There is a stone for that. Need confidence? There is a stone for that. Need the experience and skills of somebody who has spent years investigating crimes? There is a stone for that too. The possibilities become increasingly strange, with personalities capable of being transplanted into animals and memories, skills and aspects of identity treated almost like pieces of equipment that can be stored, transferred and used by someone else. It is one of the coolest magical concepts I have encountered in fantasy for some time, precisely because Fletcher and Snyder are not interested in treating it as a simple collection of useful magical abilities.
The dark implications are everywhere. Both Gen and Kat are forced to use these stones in order to perform their new roles, and both have to grapple with the unsettling possibility that their decisions are no longer entirely their own. If you are wearing a stone containing another person’s courage, are you actually brave? If a memory is not yours, can you trust it? If you have been given somebody else’s instincts, skills or personality traits, where does the borrowed person end and you begin? Some stones even allow the user to perform a role and then remove the memory of the experience entirely, meaning that a detective might put on a stone at the start of a shift and remove it at the end with no memory of what happened during the day. If you have ever worked a job you hated, this is perhaps the most relatable form of magic ever invented, but it is also a brilliant mechanism for a mystery story because the detective may not remember what they did, the memories they are investigating may not belong to them and the person making a decision may not be entirely the person who will later have to live with the consequences.
The past is not merely something the characters investigate. It is something they can literally put on. Kat discovers that the stones she has been using contain secrets about the militsiya and her partner, including the memories of Maks’s former partner, who was tortured and killed by the Shkut. The dead can continue to influence the living, not through ghosts or prophecies, but through the pieces of themselves that have been extracted, stored and passed on. The novel’s central themes grow out of this idea, because Norylska Groans is, in many ways, a book about insecurity. Gen worries about whether he can provide for his family, Kat is thrust into a role for which she has no experience and both characters are forced to confront the fear that they are not enough: not brave enough, not capable enough, not strong enough or simply not the right sort of person for the world in which they find themselves.
The stones offer a solution to that insecurity. You can borrow what you lack. You can become more courageous, more confident or more capable, but only by taking those things from somebody else, which raises some genuinely fascinating questions about identity. If your personality can be extracted, stored and transferred, what is the essential part of you? If you can be made braver by putting on a stone, were you ever brave at all? If someone else can alter the parts of your personality that you access, how much responsibility do you retain for what you do? Norylska Groans does not shy away from the psychological consequences of these questions, and there are some genuinely haunting sequences throughout the book. The most disturbing thing about the stones is not necessarily what they allow people to do, but what they make people question about themselves.
The world around this central concept is equally well drawn. Norylska is a bleak, industrial city that seems to be permanently cold, dirty and unhappy, with furnaces rumbling in the distance, streets that stink of factories and a wind that cuts through clothing like teeth. “The city moaned, the creak of shrinking wood. Off to the north the furnaces rumbled like sleeping dragons. Never silent. Norylska groans.” The cold is almost a character in its own right, with every part of life having to be planned around it, from travel to work to the simple question of how long you can afford to be outside. The city feels built for survival rather than comfort, and the characters are constantly reminded that nature, industry, crime and the state are all capable of killing them. As the novel puts it, “The wind cut through his coat like teeth of ice as he trod the streets, however, so he forgave the vodka its trespass in exchange for false warmth.”
Norylska also feels much larger than the immediate story. Details are constantly layered into the background, creating the sense of a wider world filled with monstrous megafauna, mysterious magic users, ancient secrets and seemingly endless layers of corruption. Society is heavily stratified, and nobody appears to move through it without being damaged in some way. The result is a setting that feels lived-in to its darkest, grimmest corners, and although Norylska Groans works perfectly well as a standalone novel, there is enough scope here to make me curious about what other stories might exist beyond the city’s frozen streets.
And then there is the violence. Norylska Groans is not shy about brutality, and there are scenes here that are genuinely difficult to read, particularly the torture sequences. The authors clearly understand the grimdark tradition, but they are not simply throwing gore onto the page for the sake of it. Violence is part of the world, part of the systems that control the characters and part of the way those characters understand themselves. There is a constant sense that everyone is being used by someone else. Gen is used by the military, then discarded, then recruited by organised crime. Kat is recruited into a system that gives her the tools to become more capable while quietly raising questions about what she is being turned into. The criminal families fight over memory stones, the state seeks to control their use and the dead continue to influence the living through the pieces of themselves that remain behind. Nobody gets out of Norylska entirely unscathed.
I went into Norylska Groans with high expectations, but I did not expect to be quite so completely blown away by the creativity on display here. The story had its claws in me almost immediately and did not let go, while the alternating perspectives work extremely well and the two authors’ styles fit together seamlessly. I would place Norylska Groans firmly in the A-Tier of Grimdark Fantasy Mysteries, which is an incredibly specific category, admittedly. I would not want to place it on a list alongside The Lord of the Rings and A Song of Ice and Fire and then pretend they are all trying to do the same thing, because that would be like comparing a chainsaw to a particularly ornate dinner knife. Both can be used to cut things, but one of them is going to make the evening considerably more memorable.
For what Norylska Groans is trying to be, however, it is exceptionally well executed. It is cold, filthy, violent, inventive and packed with characters you genuinely care about, which is a dangerous combination when the authors clearly enjoy putting those characters through hell. It is a story about people who feel they are not enough, in a world that has discovered a way to let them borrow the qualities they lack. It is a mystery where the past can be worn like clothing, a fantasy where personality is a commodity and a grimdark novel that manages to be brutal without losing sight of the people beneath the blood. And occasionally, it is a book about torture scenes so unpleasant that even Glokta would probably suggest everyone take a moment and think about what they are doing, before complaining about the stairs.
Highly recommended.