Synopsis
Renowned throughout the land of Ankhana as the Blade of Tyshalle, Caine has killed his share of monarchs and commoners, villains and heroes. He is relentless, unstoppable, simply the best there is at what he does.
At home on Earth, Caine is Hari Michaelson, a superstar whose adventures in Ankhana command an audience of billions. Yet he is shackled by a rigid caste society, bound to ignore the grim fact that he kills men on a far-off world for the entertainment of his own planet–and bound to keep his rage in check.
But now Michaelson has crossed the line. His estranged wife, Pallas Rill, has mysteriously disappeared in the slums of Ankhana. To save her, he must confront the greatest challenge of his life: a lethal game of cat and mouse with the most treacherous rulers of two worlds…
Review
This will be a review of superlatives. It’s hard not to resort to grandiose language when you encounter a book like Heroes Die, or a series like The Acts of Caine.
Heroes Die is a book out of time, a high-concept work of art that straddles both the grimdark fantasy and dystopian sci-fi subgenres, but released at the height of the epic doorstopper fantasy craze: the mid-1990s. With The Wheel of Time taking over the world, with The Sword of Truth and A Song of Ice and Fire and Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and The Runelords fighting for shelf space, Matthew Woodring Stover quietly released one of the most ambitious, bloodiest, and just plain best gritty fantasy books yet put to pen.
I say “gritty” here. Perhaps I should say “grimdark”, but I’m not so certain. While Heroes Die does wear many of the trappings of grimdark, it is still a book with a fundamentally positive outlook. It contends that one can make a positive difference in the world, that society can improve, however incrementally. But at the same time…well, if you haven’t yet read Stover, you haven’t read fight scenes quite like this.
The story opens on Earth, a couple hundred years in the future. Hari Michaelson is an Actor in Earth’s dystopian caste system, a man who worked his way up from the ghettos of San Francisco to become one of the most popular people in the world—but still subject to the whims of the upper class Administrators and Businessmen and Leisurefolk. He is separated from his wife, Shanna Leighton, an Actress of some renown herself. He is ready for a quiet, bitter retirement.
Because being an Actor here means something very different. It means being transferred with recording equipment implanted in your brain to an alternate dimension of Earth called Overworld, where elves and dwarves and dragons and magic are real. It means engineering violent and otherwise titillating situations for the audiences back on Earth to enjoy in virtual reality experiences, where your life is very much on the line—and where the lives you take are real beings. Overworld is no simulation.
But Hari’s desires mean nothing. He is still under contract with the Adventures Unlimited Studio, and they see money signs when Shanna (known as Pallas Ril on Overworld) loses her connection to Earth mid-Adventure. They strongarm Hari to once again assume his identity as Caine, the most notorious assassin on Overworld, and contract him to remove the God Emperor Ma’elKoth from power—and only after he succeeds will they allow him to attempt to rescue his ex-wife (who may or may not be willing to be saved, or even need his help at all).
Thus, with a seven-day deadline looming over him, Caine must undertake the most difficult Adventure of his career, caught between the authoritarian governments of two worlds and hoping to save those he most loves.
The result is a nearly perfect book. Matthew Woodring Stover is an absolute master of his craft, and he wields each of the critical elements of writing with authority. His prose sparkles. His fight scenes are truly unrivaled, his decades of martial arts experience shining through in visceral blow-by-blow spectacle. The dialogue is witty and sharp and oftentimes profound. You’ll laugh as often as you grip the book with white knuckles. And his characters…ahh, his characters.
Caine is of course at the heart of the story, and the external conflicts he face are really just the surface. His interiority is vividly explored, not only through his broken relationship with Shanna but with his invalid and abusive father, with his propensity and talent for violence. He is one of the most deeply realized characters in all of fantasy, and this is also in part because the characters around him are so rich as well.
Shanna/Pallas Ril is the secondary protagonist in the book, and her chapters positively ripple with tension, both internal and external. Her relationships with both Caine and with his friends on Overworld are fraught, constantly raising the stakes and keeping the book on a gripping pace. The antagonists are similarly powerful: Administrator Kollberg is the face of the Studio in the Earth chapters, and he exemplifies the greasy middle manager in infuriatingly perfect fashion; Count Berne is the chief rival of Caine on Overworld, a sadistic but thrillingly effective warrior who works for Ma’elKoth and nurtures a deep grudge against Caine.
And speaking of Ma’el’Koth:
“If you’re so hot to have him killed, why don’t you just transfer six guys with assault rifles into the Colhari Palace?”
“We, er…” Kollberg coughed wetly into his fist. “We tried that; except it was eight, not six. We, ah, still don’t know precisely what happened.”
Ma’elKoth is so incredibly intimidating. It is rare that I’ve read an antagonist that reaches this same level of pure fear for not just the protagonist(s), but the reader. He is truly a God Emperor, fantastically powerful in physical, magical, and political strength. He stands seven-plus feet tall, ripples with muscle, and moves with the grace of a dancer. His powers infantilize even the other gods of Overworld. He rules the city and empire of Ankhana with an iron fist, administered by Berne and the magic-assassin Grey Cats.
But perhaps the scariest thing about Ma’elKoth is his mind.
“Did you become a god because you wanted to save the race, or do you want to save the race because it gives you an excuse to become a god?”
“This, Caine, is why I so value your company. I have pondered that question Myself, from time to time. I have decided that the answer is irrelevant.”
Matthew Woodring Stover is a smart man, that much is clear. Reading his books—not just The Acts of Caine, but his famously acclaimed Star Wars novels and his Heart of Bronze duology—reveals that he is a deep thinker, that he is incredibly well-read, that he enjoys philosophy and morality and ethics as integral parts of daily thought.
His characters reflect that, and Ma’elKoth is at the heart of it. His conversations with Caine are absolutely riveting, shining with repartee and profound musings cast out almost casually. It’s hard to write a super-smart character (just ask Brandon Sanderson, who struggled mightily with this during a certain infamous sequence in Wind and Truth), but Stover nails it with Ma’elKoth.
Every time Ma’elKoth and Caine are on the same page, their dialogue reveals incredible new depths to both characters. They are beautifully opposed and tragically attracted to each other., magnetically drawn to an inflection point that will dramatically change two worlds. They are, simply put, my favorite protagonist and antagonist in all the many hundreds of SFF books I’ve read.
Heroes Die is the full package. Stover takes every element of storycraft and pieces them together to form a spectacular puzzle, an epic tapestry that thrills and jars, that makes your heart leap and your stomach churn. His fights are drenched in blood and surge with adrenaline.
It is not a book for the faint of heart, not a book for kids. The themes are thoroughly mature, not to mention the brutal subject matter. This book is, to quite Stover himself, “a piece of violent entertainment that’s a meditation on violent entertainment—as a concept in itself, as a cultural obsession. It’s a love story: romantic love, paternal love, repressed homoerotic love, love of money, of power, of country, love betrayed and employed as both carrot and stick. It’s about all different kinds of heroes and all the different ways they die.”
And that last sentence is key. It is often said that grimdark fantasy does not have heroes. If Heroes Die is full of heroes—and it is—can it be grimdark? What if all those heroes die? What does it mean for a hero to die? Can a hero die at all?
Matthew Woodring Stover is not interested in giving the reader easy answers. He asks tough questions, those above and more besides. Answering those questions is up to you. He just hopes you’re along for the ride.
But don’t get too comfortable, because this is Caine’s ride.
“You want to know what Caine would really be saying to you, here tonight? You want to? He’d say: She’s my woman and this is my fight. He’d say: You flock of shit-eating vultures should get lives of your fucking own.”
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