A cold-blooded assassin, as well as the Queen of Bionar—a title she has claimed by blood and won by the sword yet which is slipping from her grasp as the usurped king rallies his followers—Rowen requires Rol's assistance to keep her throne ... and her head. And though moral scruples seem to prevent her from returning Rol's incestuous love, she is not above using it to manipulate him in her life-and-death struggle for power.

Rowen's emissary, the former Thief-King, Canker, finds Rol in the hidden pirate city of Ganesh Ka. There Rol occupies a precarious position. As captain of the man-of-war Revenant, Rol protects the city and brings in riches with audacious acts of piracy. Yet his success has led the city's leader, Artimion, to view him with jealousy and suspicion. Hence Artimion is agreeable when Canker proposes trading Rol's assistance in Bionar's civil war for future royal protection. And Rol, though he trusts neither Canker nor Artimion (nor Rowen, for that matter), is compelled by various inducements, physical and emotional, to accept the deal.

Accompanied by Canker and three trusted crewmembers from the Revenant—Gallico, a hulking halftroll; Creed, an escaped convict; and Giffon, a young healer who was once a slave—Rol sets out for Bionar, first by ship, then overland, heading straight for the besieged capital of Myconn, where Rowen awaits him.

Rol's blood may not be royal (he and Rowen share a mother, and Rowen's royal blood comes through her father), but it is magical, the inheritance of a vanished race known as the Weren, thought by some to have been angels, by others demons. Others share this blood, which can heal wounds and extend life: Gallico, for one, and Rowen, for another. Yet there is something special about Rol's blood, about Rol himself.

While the others are at least partly human, even Gallico, Rol, despite his appearance, is not human at all. And much to his own horror, his mysterious true self is rising up in him at moments of rage and violence like some vengeful god of fire, threatening to burn his human form away. As if that weren't unsettling enough, he carries a bloodthirsty sentient sword, Fleam, that could be a long-lost sister to Elric's cursed blade. The use of this sword seems to accelerate Rol's transformation, as does the shedding of blood generally. There will be plenty of both in Myconn.

At the very apogee of contemporary fantasy

Paul Kearney is a terrific writer, one of the best currently working in epic fantasy, though most readers probably haven't heard of him. His peers are Martin, Erikson and Bakker. But whereas those writers are known as much for the length as the depth of their creative endeavors, Kearney has mastered a prose style of such supple suggestiveness that, in a book that is only half or even a third the length of theirs, he matches or outdoes them in characterization, world-building and atmosphere. Parts of This Forsaken World have a bleak beauty that reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's recent post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, while other passages are as lively and well observed as anything in the oeuvre of Patrick O'Brian. Throw in the brooding philosophical temperament of the seafaring tales of Conrad and you've got the kind of book, series, author, that is just what a lot of readers are looking for without quite knowing it exists.

Kearney's title refers to a myth wherein his world of Umer was abandoned by its creator, who left its inhabitants, human and otherwise, without hope of an afterlife, whether of salvation or damnation. (It is this aspect of the novel, which engages interestingly with Christian belief, as well as the grim focus of the rigorously austere prose, that brought McCarthy to mind.) The mythology is complex, and more hinted at than stated outright, but it seems that lesser gods may have remained behind (such as the wind god, Ran, who lends his name to the first volume, The Mark of Ran, that title itself referring to strange scars on the palm of Rol Cortishane).

More concrete is the existence of the Weren, though they are long since vanished, with only scattered descendants remaining, their blood intermixed with that of human beings. Rol is such a scatterling: Except he might not be. He might be the thing itself, pure Weren. Or even something greater and more terrible. Kearney is very good at slowly peeling back the layers of myth that both hint at and obscure the reality of Rol's identity and the history of Umer. Yet even as Rol is revealed to be something other than human, even as his own humanity is being slowly and painfully stripped from him, Kearney grounds him all the more firmly in the human through his friendships, his loves and his hates. Perhaps it is this, more than anything, that lifts the novel into the realm of the extraordinary.

The sentient sword is a common enough trope, and alert readers will find other familiar and even archetypal turns of plot and relationship here, from the scars on Rol's palm to his mysterious father to the brother-sister dyad around which much of the plot turns. But Kearney takes these familiar tropes and makes them seem not so much new as simply less important than they might be in a typical fantasy novel. He relegates them to what in literary terms must be their proper place. What matter here are not the gimmicks, the cool artifacts, the plot coupons. What matter are character and the destiny, as yet only partially revealed, that shapes character ... and is perhaps shaped by it in turn.