It took the arrival of the third volume of Alan Campbell’s Deepgate Codex, God of Clocks, on my doormat to prompt me to pick up the first volume, Scar Night – and now I have read it, I only wish I had not waited so long. It’s an evocative blend of grimy fantasy, with shades of Jeff VanderMeer, China Mieville and Neal Stephenson in the grotesque city of Deepgate, and with distinct steampunk undertones in the form of the mouldering technologies whose use has been forgotten over the course of milennia, to be replaced by superstitition and ignorance.

The city of Deepgate is almost a character in the story – built on a giant web of chains, it perches above an apparently bottomless abyss. There is a whole theology surrounding the abyss – the dead are ceremonially cast down there, to reside in the City of the Dead. The Church of Ulcis is the spiritual and temporal authority in Deepgate – with assassins, an airship navy responsible for defence of Deepgate against the desert tribes, and a propensity to use chemical weapons against them, it nevertheless appears to be a fading institution.

Dill is the last Archon – in the past these winged beings were the defenders and champions of Deepgate, responsible for the technology that founded the city. They were great warriors, but Dill is no more than a diffident teenager, not even permitted to flex his wings, reduced to ceremional functions. His assigned protector, the assassin Rachel Hael, is a deadly individual who has clashed with Deepgate’s perpetual curse, the vampiric angel Carnival, who must kill regularly to live.

Dill, Rachel and Carnival discover the hard way that what is at the bottom of the abyss is far more dangerous to Deepgate than anyone could possibly have imagined; meanwhile the head of Deepgate’s poisoners, Devon, responsible for the deadly chemical munitions deployed against the desert tribes, rebels against the Church and sets out to send Deepgate to the bottom of the abyss, by seeking an alliance with the tribes. The two storylines gather pace impressively – and it becomes clear that the threat to Deepgate from what is in the Abyss far outweighs that posed by its desert adversaries.

Scar Night is a bleak vision of a decaying society suffocating under the weight of accreted layers of superstition, ritual and fear – and shows what happens when those layers are dug away and the assumptions underlying them are fundamentally challenged. It’s a well-paced adventure with some great twists and turns, and it’s clear that the action here represents the firing of the first shots in a wider war that will grip us in further volumes. With some memorable characters, I look forward to finding out what happens next, in volume two, Iron Angel.

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