Disclosure: I met Alan Baxter once, briefly, at Genrecon. He seemed like a great guy, and since then I’ve been following him on Twitter and FB and reading some of his short fiction. He’s a writer I admire, a local writer too. He’s always been generous with advice and with sharing his experiences of being a writer, and I’ve learnt a lot from him. He’s given me a very valuable perspective of what being a writer entails. I was really happy to hear that he got the book deal, and I was looking forward to reading about Alex Caine.

Review:

‘Bound’ drops us straight into the action. We’re in Caine’s head and he’s in a fight, an illegal MMA match somewhere in Sydney’s underworld. We are quickly introduced to Caine’s ability – to see the ‘shades’ of his opponent’s intent. It makes him a formidable fighter, so much so that he attracts the unwanted attention of an organised crime boss. When a mysterious Englishman arrives who recognises Caine’s powers, and offers to teach him more about himself, the fighter reluctantly follows his new mentor’s call. Thus begins a globe-trotting adventure of rapidly escalating magic and quests to find ancient objects of great power.

This is Urban Fantasy with a magical bent and lashings of sex and violence. If you like ancient prophecies and street fights and magic and shadowy organisations in the wainscoting of normal life, try this book.

There are possible spoilers from here on, but if you want to know more, and are prepared to risk spoilers, read on.

Photo courtesy of author’s website

There are some very cool concepts here. I haven’t read Baxter’s original – self-published – novels, but their titles echo here. Some characters sit meaningfully at the edges of Caine’s story and I suspect they’d be even more meaningful to readers familiar with Baxter’s earlier work. The magesign to which Caine is so perceptive is a great idea. Other elements are from more familiar tropes: elemental control, warlocks, grimoires, gargoyles, faeries, ancient demi-gods, shape-shifters. Baxter has thrown them all into a blender of his own design though, and they each come out with some new twist. It’s in combining these elements that Baxter is at his best.

I also really enjoyed the globe-trotting. Australia, England, Iceland, Canada, Italy, Scotland… it was like Bond, if Bond was a magically empowered brawler. Baxter evokes each location in his writing and the shifting geography, the litany of airports, adds a layer of the familiar and mundane over which the supernatural elements can rise.

As we become more familiar with Caine’s growing confidence in his own powers, we are shown the even greater forces opposing him. It’s a steep incline and Baxter drives us forward relentlessly, ever-changing, ever-escalating. The consequence of this is that the stakes quickly become very high indeed, perhaps too quickly. Caine’s transition from neophyte to dominance is even quicker. I found that he lost me a little somewhere on the climb. The Caine of the early chapters was a guy I could relate to. By the latter half of the book this was no longer the case. The previously engaging fight scenes lost their fizz when the outcome was no longer in doubt. A fighter out of his depth fighting for his life against two gargoyles is tense. An invincible superpower tearing through powerful opponents with ease, less so. I also struggled to maintain my sympathy for the character after his decision to take a life, even if that was a decision influenced by a force at that point uncontrolled. Another review I read suggested that Caine was an author-surrogate, and though I wouldn’t entirely agree with that assessment, I can see where it comes from.

The antagonists are varied. The sub-contractor was probably the most interesting, and I would have liked to have seen more of him. The Weird Sisters were also strong. Their introduction was one of the best scenes in the book, clearly the darkest and most horrific. I’m not easily put-off by horror, but that scene in a Scottish hotel required a pause for recovery. Again they were perhaps under-utilised. Other antagonists came and went.

Mr Hood and Miss Sparks are the most enduring, and ultimately the truest antagonists of the novel (other than the force behind the grimoire). I felt Miss Sparks was one of the more interesting POV characters. There seemed to be more to her than was revealed. Perhaps this waits for me in the second and third volumes of the series. Mr Hood was menacing and confident and a good counter-point to Caine. The Sparks/Hood relationship was repulsive and fascinating, even though the sexual elements of it sometimes dropped in with a thud. I have no qualms about the sexual content, and even as it is Baxter is never overly explicit with it, but there were some instances that felt gratuitous.

Which brings me to Silhouette. I didn’t like Silhouette. I understand how she was necessary to the narrative and how Caine couldn’t have achieved what he did without her. I understood why he went from Welby to Silhouette, why he came to depend on her, and then she on him. I didn’t feel that the emotional connection really evolved naturally, but that wasn’t really a problem – emotional connections can be unexpected and inexplicable. I just didn’t like her, as a character. She promised to become quite interesting, briefly, or to reveal a side of herself to which Caine was unaware, but it never really happened. As Caine’s power grew her independence and agency seemed to contract accordingly. A shame, because she entered with a certain sense of self that seemed by the end to have been diminished. Her (many) sex scenes with Caine were unsexy, probably deliberately so, and some of them deeply discomforting – for much the same reasons as with Hood/Sparks.

‘Bound’ kept me hooked throughout. I finished the whole thing in a week, and there’s plenty in it to keep you wanting to turn the next page (or swipe the screen in my case). It’s the novel of a writer who knows his craft and can deliver on a promise. I’ll read the others in the series too, at least because I’m interested in where Baxter goes from here. With such a powerful protagonist, and such powerful enemies already defeated, I’m sure there’ll be something even bigger to come.

***Alan Baxter will be in Melbourne this Friday (26^th Sept) and will be signing books. Check out his website – http://www.alanbaxteronline.com – or follow him on twitter – @AlanBaxter – for details.***