Day of the Dragonking starts with a bang. Steve Rowan sees and feels an airplane crash right outside his apartment. He sees and hears the passengers and the crew, sees three people turn over tarot cards to cause the crash, sees the crash site furrow in his parking lot. Yet he doesn’t see it. There are no fireball, no emergency response vehicles, no television trucks.
This crash happened and it didn’t happen. A mysterious cabal used the sacrifice of 400+ people to power the Change, bringing magic into the world. Main character Steve assumes the avatar of tarot character The Fool with the Fool’s powers and weaknesses and is pulled into a runaway mess with female Seal Ace Morningstar, sentient NSA computer Barnaby and haunted cell phone Send Money.
Day of the Dragonking is non-stop action, sometimes running so fast that it wobbles. It isn’t clear who the villians are, we hear of The Illuminati, but we hear they are only the side show, that Someone Else wants to wake up the World Serpent with a truly horrific sacrifice of 100,000 lives.
Meanwhile Steve and Ace plus cell phone and other characters picked up along the way are rushing around Washington DC trying to understand and help corral the Change.
I enjoyed the first part of the book when we meet the characters and the pace is slow enough that we can be bewildered right along with Steve and can share the terror and worry. About a third into the novel the pace increases and gets a little harder to follow. Also I found I really didn’t care. The story switched from people-centric to event-centric and got a little silly around the edges.
A Bit Too Fast and A Bit Too Much
For example, somewhere author Edward B. Irving tells us that Steve’s cell phone is special because it contains the soul? memories? personality? of a dead Chinese Apple employee called Send Money. I managed to miss this and it seemed as if the phone went from the anonymous “my phone” to “Send Money” without a blink.
Barnaby tells Steve and Ace that the Change centered in Washington DC, where the plane crashed, and that the effect is radiating outwards. Yet all the computers in California and China, Russia and around the world are Changed immediately.
Irving doesn’t explain or show us what is happening to the rest of humanity. Some folks apparently were tagged immediately by The Villians to stop Steve and Ace, but we don’t know how this happened or why the people went along with it. The military detachment merely presents itself, declares they will stop Steve and Ace, Ace fights them and wins and we go on. Huh? Who got to these guys so fast and how?
There are some ha-ha/funny comments about Congress and lobbyists and such becoming elves or dwarves or trolls, but we never see this, we only hear about it. Some reviewers commented on the political satire, but I expect to see something, not merely hear about it 3rd hand for satire.
Characters
At first I liked Steve Rowan and he was the best of a middling lot. Steve is a 3rd rate journalist, twice-divorced, lonely and doesn’t believe in much. Shoved into a corner he quickly picks up the basic Fool powers and manages to work magic by focusing on the tarot card. Ace warns him against using blood magic, whether it’s his blood or from others’ but Steve doesn’t really believe her. He uses blood magic three times before he realizes he just made a mistake, that the blood magic is addictive.
Ace Morningstar is a female Seal (at a time when only men could qualify). She used her pre-Change magic to masquerade as a man and her own determination and ability to hone her skills to a frightening level. No one realized she was a woman until another magic user saw through her glamour. Ace is tough, smart, ferocious and single minded. Her charge, as she reminds Steve, is his safety yes, but Send Money – the cell phone – even before Steve the living human.
Ace has magic and plenty of experience with it before the Change, but lost the magic in the Change. She still has the knowledge and experience and understand the Tarot analogies and avatars. Irving does a good job with Ace acting as both character and explainer-to-the-audience and to Steve.
Setting
The action takes place in Washington DC, mostly on or near the Mall. I’m not familiar with the locale but the vivid descriptions made it easy to follow. I loved the description of the Potemkin building the CIA quickly threw together to confuse any lurking enemies.
Summary
The Day of the Dragonking was middling good to good with some rough patches in the plot that made it hard to follow and harder to care about the characters. The Kindle version I got could use serious copyediting as there are many copy/paste errors and formatting problems.
While I enjoyed the book overall I may or may not read the sequels. If Irving is done with the set up then the subsequent books may flow better and make more sense. He may be able to show the Washington Beltway satire too and help us care about the people.
Irving writes well with interesting phases and has a vivid imagination to create an intricate world similar to but far different from our own. Dialogue is a little weak, especially between Ace and Steve.
3 1/2 Stars
I received a free copy of Day of the Dragonking from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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