Synopsis
A bookworm, a brothel madam, a gangster, an aristocrat, a widow and a war hero walk into an inn – though it turns out there’s nothing funny about what happens next.
For humanity’s ancient enemy the Serafin are rumoured to have returned, and the old man who assembled such an unlikely band believes these misfits might hold the key to defeating them. United only by guilt, trauma, and the machinations of their mysterious patron, together they must journey to the centre of the continent to do battle with gods.
But only by using the Serafin’s own powers do they hold any chance of victory: a magic that has a cost. Corrupted long ago, it condemns those who wield it to become the shunned, self-mutilating sorcerers known as the Scarred.
Each must decide – is that cost worth paying to save the world?
Perfect for fans of authors like Joe Abercrombie, Brian McClellan and George R.R. Martin, The Worth of Scars is an epic flintlock adventure with a twist, fusing thought-provoking, dark and intriguing themes with the classic fantasy quest.
***CONTENT WARNING***
This is a dark book featuring themes, topics and scenes that will not be suitable for everyone. It is very much ‘grimdark’ fantasy, and features many of the staples of that sub-genre.
In particular, the magic at the heart of the novel requires self-mutilation for a user to wield it. This is not a spoiler – it’s a core part of the book from the beginning.
As such, depictions of graphic self-harm in the novel are frequent and unflinching.
If you suffer from or have ever suffered from self-harm or suicidal ideation, then it is the author’s wish that you consider extremely carefully whether or not to read the novel.
Review
I’ve got a thing for blood magic. The cost, the toil, the torment. I love the premise, so the hook behind The Worth of Scars immediately grabbed my attention with its sorcerers that derive their powers from mutilating themselves. And the worse that mutilation is, the more meaningful it is, the more powerful their magic. Like, if a surgeon cut off his hand, he’d become uber-powerful because that’s one hell of a sacrifice for them to make, see?
So it goes in indie author Gabriel Farrell’s epic fantasy debut. While the hook is most certainly compelling, it doesn’t ultimately do enough to separate The Worth of Scars from a multitude of other epic fantasy books. An ancient enemy, known as the Serafin, have returned to plague mankind. An equally ancient man, the wizard Kornelius – our Gandalf stand-in – who helped end the Serafin’s first bid for dominion over the world thousands of years ago is putting together a team to stop the all-consuming throes of evil once again.
Having recruited a smart-mouthed aristocrat, a brothel madam, a disgraced soldier turned recruiter cum actor/liar, an overweight and nebbish bookworm, a cut-throat mercenary with a penchant for threatening the genitals of anyone who gets too close, and a few others, they’re not quite The Avengers but at least they’re something. Or so Kornelius hopes, presuming they don’t betray him first, or each other, or run as far from trouble as they can find. He believes each of them has the potential to become powerful Scarred sorcerers. All they have to do is accept his gift of fantastical powers and willingly destroy their bodies. All for a good cause!
A really good and compelling story is buried in The Worth of Scars somewhere. Farrell, though, takes the remit of writing an epic fantasy and runs wild with it. Scars is unnecessarily long, flush with trivial information that one might mistake for world-building, one-note side characters that are little more than names on a page (some would be referenced hundreds of pages after their brief introduction that I’d completely forgotten they’d existed or what their contributions, if any, to the story might have been), and unnecessary flashbacks that drag on for multiple chapters for no good reason.
Worse is that, while I understood the implications of one’s choice to become Scarred, I never really felt the gravity of that decision. Our cast of would-be sorcerers discreetly mutilate themselves, cutting off fingers or toes, rending flesh from their arms, slicing open their faces or, in one case, stabbing themselves in the butt. But there’s never any real weight or consequence to their actions, save that one has an uncomfortable time sitting afterwards. For as much detail as Farrell suffuses everywhere else, the act of becoming Scarred is oddly glossed over. We don’t even really get any imaginative power sets as a result of all the slicing and dicing, and certainly nothing that feels compelling enough to make us sympathetic for the cost and measures of such an act. One can fight a bit better, another can see farther than usual, and… that’s it? While we’re told that some Scarred can heal, and others can destroy, and a rare few can do both, we never really see our main cast do much of anything. There’s certainly no grand, OH COOL!!! moments of massively grand action set-pieces centered around mutilation and magic. The whole hook behind The Worth of Scars ultimately feels like little more than a footnote. By the time the book exhausts itself, and its readers, as it putters to an anticlimactic ending, there’s no real sense that Kornelius’s Scarred were integral to saving the world, or that they had done anything particularly special.
That’s not to say it’s all bad. While we do get some grand set-pieces in the latter half — and Farrell does write some good battle sequences! — being Scarred never really feels like a vital ingredient to whatever victories can be counted. Farrell’s strengths lie in his ability to craft engaging characters, and I dug the way he slowly but surely developed particular bonds between his cast of misfits. I quite enjoyed the segments when the group found themselves at sea, aboard a ship captained by a man of questionable savoriness and how trust secrets and distrust were used to create fractures between Kornelius and his band of irregulars. Farrell does a wonderful job drawing together the various threads underlying and interlinking this otherwise disparate group, particularly the hidden connections between Ziggy and Petar, which threatens to destroy the friendship they’ve built up over the course of their arduous journey from one side of the world to the other. I found myself quite enamored with their friendship, even if much of it was founded on Ziggy’s self-serving attempts to alleviate his own guilt. I also found Vera’s background as a sex worker turned brothel madam, and the political alliances she was forced into to maintain her independence and control over her own life, nicely developed and intriguing.
While there’s some enjoyment to be had in The Worth of Scars, it’s too bloated and imbalanced to recommend. Farrell has a bad tendency to grind any forward momentum to a screeching halt just as things start to get interesting, and is to repetitious in his delivery of information. With some judicious trimming and a “kill your darlings” style of editing, more compelling and impactful magic systems on par with the weight of the sacrifices being made, more grisly bloodthirstiness on the author’s part, and a bit more trust in his readers to figure things out without a bevy of infodumps and multiple chapters when a sentence or two would suffice, Farrell’s Scars might be worth a fair bit more.
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