Mordew

By Alex Pheby

GOD LIES DEFEATED, his corpse hidden in the catacombs beneath Mordew.

On the surface, the streets of this the sea-battered city are slick with the Living Mud and the half-formed, short-lived creatures it spawns - creatures that die and are swept down from the Merchant Quarter by the brooms of the workers and relentless rains, where they rot in the slums.

There, a young boy called Nathan Treeves lives with his parents, eking out a meagre existence by picking treasures from the Living Mud - until one day his mother, desperate and starving, sells him to the mysterious Master of Mordew.

The Master derives his power from feeding on the corpse of God. But Nathan, despite his fear and lowly station, has his own strength – and it is greater than the Master has ever known. Great enough to destroy everything the Master has built. If only Nathan can discover how to use it.

So it is that the Master begins to scheme against him - and Nathan has to fight his way through the betrayals, secrets, and vendettas of the city where God was murdered, and darkness reigns…

WELCOME TO MORDEW – THE FIRST IN A FANTASTIC NEW TRILOGY FROM THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE-SHORTLISTED WRITER, ALEX PHEBY.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galley Beggar Press
• Release date: Aug 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913111083

Alex Pheby

ALEX PHEBY lives with his wife and two children in Scotland, and teaches at the University of Newcastle. Alex’s second novel, Playthings, was shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Book Prize. His third novel, Lucia, was joint winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize. Mordew, the first book in the Cities of the Weft trilogy, was selected as a Book of the Year by The Guardian, The I, Tor.com and Locus.

Reviews for Mordew

[sleahey_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this first of a trilogy, a grim world is described from the point of view of 13 year old Nathan whose father is dying and whose mother must prostitute herself to keep the family going. His father warns him against using his magic, but Nathan doesn't really understand his power and just struggles to survive in the midst of the overwhelming mud, filth, flukes, worms, gill men, and kidnappers. An extensive cast of characters and glossary are required reading to make any sense of the plot, but the map is too small to shed much light. After the 512 pages of story, I was ready to be finished, but alas, the story carries over to the second installment of the trilogy.

[Darcy Campbell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The worldbuilding is very interesting to uncover as you read. I didn't read the notes at the beginning.

[tedwitham · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Alex Pheby’s Mordew is a satisfying fantasy. Mordew (the name is said to be derived from the French mort and Dieu, death and God) seethes with all sorts of life and unlife. There is the Living Mud. There are flukes, non-viable life-forms in the shape of human body parts. Other babies and conceived and born in the normal way by human beings. There are chilling gill men who guard the city’s ports and the houses of the very rich. A magic glass road leads up from the Slums, through the mercantile section to the Manse where the Master, the creator of this dystopia, lives and weaves his magic. Nathan Treeves, a boy from the slums, is recruited into a gang consisting of the leader Gam, the Joeys (are they conjoined twins?) and Prissy, whose sister works as a prostitute. Nathan believes they may help him fund medicine for this dying father. Nathan catches the Master’s eye. We don’t learn the reason for this adoption until much later in the novel. The Master sets Nathan up, under the eye of the faithful Bellows, in luxury in the Manse, where he is educated. The end point of the education is for Nathan to learn the Magic which sustains Mordew and the other worlds. Where Nathan himself ends up is a surprise, and I am not sure that I liked Nathan’s destination, although the fact that his destructive spree is his destiny is clearly drawn.The story is fast paced. The many weird and intriguing characters, the vicious Fagan-like Mr Padge among them, help or hinder Nathan on his discoveries. The last quarter of the book, after the conclusion of the narrative, is a glossary setting out the world of Mordew in detail, how the Magic works, the connection between the material and immaterial realms, the place of time and some of the history of the worlds. I savoured this ‘theological’ section as well, even though it was not necessary to the telling of the story. If you enjoy dystopian fantasy with a steampunk-like aesthetic, you will find much to like in Mordew.

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a giant sprawling book that has no clear purpose or story. It is trying to be an epic and ends up as a damp squib. Nathan has some magical power that allows him to create life to things that want to be alive. Only at various points in the book this same magical power also allows him to kill great swathes of people just because he feels like it. Which breaks all my rules - you can introduce magic, but you can't then have it magically able to do something else again just because that makes it convenient. The world that has been invented is basically a city state, that has layers of society, the slum dwellers are the lowest of the low and live covered in mud and filth below the merchant city and the thing is dominated by The Manse, where The Master lives. Nathan comes from the slums, and gets in with a gang that steal from the merchants and well to do in order to please the gang master. But when in the book Nathan is taken into the Master's house, because of aforesaid ability, he simply leaves his friends behind without a second glance. Nathan also seems curiously incurious to the fate of the boys that are regularly taken into the Manse to work for the Master - and never seem to return. He is very shallow and has no depth of personality beyond his odd ability. Some of the supporting characters were more interesting, the talking dog being by far the most intelligent being in here, but the author falls into the trap of making every woman into a whore. It is all very two dimensional and fails to hang together coherrently. Nathan has nothing about him to make him an interesting person beyond his power and that seems to flex to fit the needs of the rambling story, so feels like a writing convenience rather than a genuinely interesting fact to hang our interest on. I also found the list of events that will be found in the book (which runs to 3 pages) to be ridiculous and arch. There is also a glossary of over 100 pages at the end. At the beginning it tells you not to read it, but by the time I got the end of the book I simply didn't care enough to read any of it. I finished it because this came as a book subscription book and I feel I owe it to them to finish it. But if this is the first in the series, the others will remain firmly unread.