WARNING! INEVITABLE SPOILERS BELOW! 

Bracing themselves against the shadow,
Warrior, Archer, Mage, and Beast,
Drew sword, sabre, staff, bow and arrow,
So we could live, and one day, live in peace.
—From The Song Of The Four Guardians

The above excerpt of an excerpt of an in-universe heroic folk song exemplifies Matt Waterhouse’s fantasy epic, Out Of The Ashes, the first volume of The Four Guardians series. In this first book, we follow the fate of four medieval-fantasy war heroes risen “from the ashes” as it were, out of their own time, up from their graves, and into the smoldering remains of the country they died trying to protect. Service, it seems, does not end in death; though their resurrection is less than perfect. They might have been raised up, but their memories have been buried, and one of them even has a very new and very different body with which to become accustomed. All this, and still the country of Haama wages war against the invading Caelish forces—though the resistance has dwindled. Can four famous soldiers make the difference in the face of superior numbers and literal fire power?

The answer is, of course they can. They are the heroes, after all. And if you didn’t catch it by their character classes—I mean specializations, this is a Dungeons and Dragons—I mean classic fantasy epic. Alright, enough of the gimmick. Out Of The Ashes reads unvaryingly like D&D fan fiction; this is true right down to the in-word setting elements (the protagonist, Ironclad, is a warforged; and Bassai the wyvernborn is a dragonborn), to the combat (party of four is probably not a coincidence; it’s the average party size for a TTRPG, and they even fulfill the Tank, Ranged DPS, Melee DPS, & Controller roles), to the way that the character backstories relate to the plot. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? That depends on the reader—but what is not reader dependent is the handling of the plot pacing, the relatability of the characters, the verisimilitude of the setting, and the readability of the prose itself. It is by these metrics I shall be reviewing Waterhouse’s debut fantasy novel.

We will begin with the pacing. The plot of Out Of The Ashes, is rather straight forward. Four resurrected heroes awaken with amnesia, and the last thing they can recall was being in a battle against the Caelish forces, who had just brought a dragon down on the city. The heroes are trying to discover who rescued them (they don’t know they died) and while, all the while they want to regain their memories and resume fighting against the Caelish. Interspersed with this narrative are action-packed flashbacks to the battle with the dragon in Melida city. The flash backs constitute approximately 1/5th of the novel, perhaps a bit more.

This two pronged structure is good in theory, especially for what Waterhouse intended to do. The flashbacks allowed for the reader to learn about the party as they remembered about themselves and one another—showing rather than telling. Additionally, they allow for a change of pacing. Waterhouse could inject action at a moment’s notice by breaking from a slow or expository scene into a breakneck battle.

In execution, however, this didn’t turn out to be the case. The pacing should have worked, but issues with the presentation of the characters as well as the passivity of the prose, combined with an excessively broad perspective lens, made the pages turn like frozen molasses. Without getting into the details prematurely, I had a hard time caring about the characters, which in turn left me ambivalent about the stakes. No stakes means no tension, and no tension means no anticipation, no forward drive to progress the narrative or answer unanswered questions. This is actually a novel-killer on its own, but the prose used voice and was discursive at least as often as it was active and figurative, which added a dryness to each paragraph. Also, there were too many paragraphs—what? I mean to say that, for the most part, the narrator described details irrelevant to the characters’ development (they don’t, at least not during the story) or the plot. The opening sentence to a paragraph would give relevant details (most of the time), and the rest would often be minutiae that, if skipped, would not inhibit the reader’s ability to follow the plot—I tested this both on myself and with my wife. Reading only the first sentence of each paragraph for pages on end left us no less understanding the story than when we went back and actually read in detail.

But like I said, the plot itself is not the problem here. Waterhouse’s plans were well laid and showed a sophisticated understanding of plot structure and storytelling. This is actually true of the characters as well.

(Coming back to comment on Kalgan. He is the big bad, to which there is a bigger bad. The bandit clan leader and the 2/3rds of the book his subplot occupies could be cut to the book’s benefit).

The main party is composed of Tobias Calver, to become Ironclad, the leader and shield-and-axe fighter; Ember, the fiery-tempered, red-headed, green-eyed, archer; Thomas, the scholarly mage; and Bassai, the beastly barbarian with a dark past due to blood lust but a good and honorable heart despite his monstrous appearance.

On the face of them, they are your run-of-the-mill fantasy party with the cleric switched out for more melee damage. Below the surface, however, Waterhouse made sure to give each character personal struggles, tragedies, relationships, and motivations for fighting the Caelish. For instance, Thomas was once a Caelish slave; there was once a romance between Calver and Ember; Bassai is an exile who bears the scarring of amputated wings. And it is not just the protagonists who get this treatment. The villains are made round as well. Notably, Mora, a well-adventured witch, has a whole life which gets explored leading up to the position in which she pursues the heroes—Ember in particular—in revenge for the death of her son. These characters might not feel original, but most of them are certainly very round... And that’s good, isn’t it?

It could be, but it isn’t. There is a reason stories have lots of flat characters and that roundness is saved for a select few. The same thing is true in regard to dynamism. Why? Because fleshing out character details takes time and page space. It often stops the narrative, slowing down the pacing. Rounding a character and making him or her dynamic is a trade-off, and making the trade too many times leaves a story with too much character and not enough plot progression. This isn’t good for the pacing, obviously, but it is equally detrimental to the plot. This is because, in an attempt to make the reader care by giving plot-irrelevant and current-character-development details, the reader instead feels forced.

While we are reading about Mora’s origins and the father of her son, we’re asking ourselves, “Why are you telling me this now?” and “Why should I care about this?” The same goes for when Mora is torturing Thomas. “”Why do we care that Thomas was a slave?” The text assumes we should, as if someone else’s tragedies should automatically make us feel sympathetic. They don’t. Human emotions are more complex, unfortunately. These backstory elements have to do more than explain how we got here, they must also affect where the plot and characters are going—and they don’t, because all the character development happens before the story begins.

As a consequence of the characters already being fully adult, fully established, fully skilled heroes with “rich” histories, they don’t really have anywhere to go development-wise. The attempt at making them round and dynamic actually made them static, the exception being Ironclad, but unfortunately his character lacks sufficient depth to carry the whole party, even if he could do so physically. He’s a construct now, and that has some serious implications for his life and relationships. It’s too bad Ember is a generic red-head with a bad temper and a drinking problem. Sure, she is supposed to have had terrible things befall her in the past, but because I can’t bring myself to care about yet another feisty action-girl, those tragic events feel, well, like the backstory on a D&D character sheet. Those details are irrelevant to the story now. They exist after-the-fact to justify the immature young man’s ideal of what a woman ought to be (massive post-publish edit ahead):

This warrants its own essay, but I should make the reader understand the Affinity for the Amazonian. This is not an original idea from me, but I can’t exactly place all the origins in which I learned it (Jung, among others).

The Affinity for the Amazonian is the immature male desire for a woman who is like a man in all the particular ways in which he has to change, take responsibility, or learn to begrudgingly accept (My Fair Lady has a whole song about this).

Does this describe Ember? Yes it does. She is young, fit, and attractive—all the superficial needs of the young man met! But she is in all other ways not like a woman. She externalizes her anger, drinks to ignore her emotions, is a proud and hyper-effective user of a weapon requiring great strength and spatial intelligence, and can kill with a level of detachment rare even for disagreeable men. All this, and despite a longstanding romantic relationship with her superior officer and commander, doesn’t get pregnant—because that would make her a real woman and not the imaginary Amazonian fantasy.

A real woman would probably not be a warrior. Her interests are unlikely to involve fighting, and if she somehow found herself in that position, there would probably be some form of trauma which would interfere with her ability to form a functional relationship with Calver. She would probably use a spear or some other hafted weapon, wielding a short singlehanded sword as a sidearm. If she did get pregnant, that would spell the end of her combat career, because the hormonal changes that comes from pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding are transformative (let alone the practical concerns of being on campaign while pregnant or carrying a baby).

What follows are citations from the paperback version of the novel giving examples of Ember’s action-girl characteristics:

Ember grinned at him as she notched another arrow and drew her bow. He could have dropped his weapon and kissed her right then and there. With her back arched and muscles tensed, calm focus in her eyes, she looked majestic. Her blood red hair fluttered as she loosed the arrow.

. . .

"Are you going to turn around," she called with a raised eyebrow, "or am I going to have to shoot everyone while you're staring at me?" (15-6)

She was a little taller than the man, with pale skin and hair that was a colour somewhere between copper and blood. She brushed a long strand of it out of her emerald eyes, which flicked up towards where he lay. She looked to be a little older than the man, two or three years perhaps. (23)

Ember took a long drink of wine, and sighed in satisfaction. Aside from briefly quenching her thirst however, she felt no better, no calmer. She drained the goblet, but still felt nothing. her head should have felt lighter, but it had never felt heavier. She poured herself another, drank deeply. Still nothing. (55)

At first he thought that the guards had strewn their armour on the floor, but as his eyes adjusted he realised that they were bodies, almost two dozen of them. The smell of the fire had covered up the smell of death.

Ember was sat calmly on a trunk, polishing a serrated dagger. She looked up at the trio and smiled weakly.

“What took you so long?” (215-6)

Ember was advancing quickly on Mora, dagger drawn. She twisted away from a fireball that singed the leather armour on her back, quickly regaining her balance on the narrow siding. Almost as soon as she did, black tendrils snakes around her neck, and Mora cried out as Ember slashed through them. Ember fell back and rolled to her feet, jumping back away from a steam of conjured fire.

“Is that all you’ve got, Mora?” shouted Ember. “I’ve fought a dragon.” (302)

*end of post-publish edits.

By trying to make us care, Waterhouse’s own attempts worked against him.

I reiterate: a lot of care went into drafting these characters. Waterhouse did try to do all the right things with them. He tried to make them round, fully fleshed-out humans. He tried to show changes across their lives. He did give them complex relationships with their world and society. It is only in the execution of these laudable attempt that Out Of The Ashes falls down.

I must unfortunately say the same for the setting. Without harping on too long, it is clear that Waterhouse thought out the world and detailed it thoroughly. Nothing ever struck my as inconsistent. In-world, things are coherent (physics aside). Wherein the fault lies is verisimilitude.

Some readers, those familiar with fantasy games, film, and books, may not detect anything amiss in Out Of The Ashes. However, anyone who knows even a bit about historical terminology, combat, weapons, and armor—or modern medical knowledge or physics (I’m looking at you 90lb fully steel warhammer) will bulk repeatedly and consistently throughout the novel.

Bows and crossbows don’t “fire”; they “shoot”, or arrows can be “loosed”. A blow from Ironclad would literally be like getting hit with a truck; he should be able to take crowds of people, breaking the bones to powder through their shields and armor. Armor is not easily penetrated; Ironclad would be invulnerable to most of the attacks which hurt him, and his giant shield would be superfluous. Ember must be juicing to shoot her war bow; draw weights of 70lbs+ would exhaust a woman very, very quickly, if she could even draw the bow at all. Rubber boots probably haven’t been invented yet. Thrust with your rapier, Ydra; it’s not slicing through a ghoul; I don’t care if it is on fire.

There was more which stuck out to me like a sore thumb, too much to remember, and this review is long enough as it is. So on to final comments on the prose.

Waterhouse is a skilled author. At the time of writing, I’ve seen some of his contemporary composition, and it is well crafted. What I am about to critique cannot be assumed to apply to his other novels, and it doesn’t even apply across the totality of Out Of The Ashes. Indeed, there are some vivid and creative descriptions throughout the novel, particularly during the battle with the dragon. However, for every one of those, there are three or for block of discursive text using passive voice and speaking in abstraction (as opposed to concretes). This is particularly true of action scenes. A reader of Ashes might misunderstand me and deny this, so I will clarify.

Saying something like (not a quote from the novel) “The Caelish soldier was twice stabbed in the belly before he fell.” is not concrete. It is abstract. “Stab” is a categorical which functions in this mid-level summary of combat. A concrete description would be something like, “Bassai’s razor-sharp sabre points plunged in unison through the Caelish soldiers’ abdomen, exploding out his back like a pair of wings, reminding the wyvernborn of what he would never get back.” In the second example, the narrator slows down and zooms in and layers interiority. We are talking about Bassai’s specific sharp sword points not just generically stabbing but plunging deeply, so deeply that the effect is something reminiscent of the punishment the perpetrator once faced and is in a sense reliving through inflicting this mode of murder on someone else. Again, my prior example is not a quote from the novel, though it is representative of many, many actual lines of exposition.

A real example would be the following:

Ember drew back and fired up at the latest fool to step into her eyeline, the arrow taking him through the forehead. She ducked back down behind Ironclad, nimbly spinning away from a jab aimed at her belly. As she rose up, she kicked out with her left leg, catching the Caelish swordsman in the ribs, and knocking him right into Ironclad’s path.

This example is in active voice, which is good, but it is entirely discursive. “Drew back and fired” has none of the texture of drawing a bow, holding the tension in one’s back, loosing the arrow, or feeling the snap of the strip leaving the fingers or maybe swiping the bow-arm. “The latest fool to step into her eyeline,” could be describing anyone, and it makes the fight sound tired and boring to Ember. An arrow “through the forehead” does not communicate the weight and violence of a steel or iron arrowhead punching through thick skull. “jab aimed at her belly” doesn’t tell the reader anything of the weapon or the man wielding it, so the potential wound is just as vague in the imagination. “She kicked out with her left leg,” is specific in a way that is not important, taking up page space and reader effort without any emotional pay-off. The same can be said for “catching the Caelish swordsman in the ribs.” It mattered that she pushed him, but the kick itself could have been anything for all the impact that was not imparted onto the reader’s mind eye.

And I’ll leave my critique of the prose there, reminding us all that this is a debut novel and not representative of Waterhouse’s work today. If he so chose, Waterhouse could fairly and rightfully review and say the same thing I said here about my first novel Salt, Sand and Blood. The prose gets clunky in that tome in a number of places.

In sum, I can’t recommend Out of the Ashes on its own. It is the first instalment in the series, which is a shame, as the rest of the books are likely much better, as the Matt Waterhouse I am familiar with is actually quite brilliant. It may be the case that this series should skip the first book, or else an abridged version may be a good idea. But as it is, the plot is a slog, the characters are not investable, and the setting lacks verisimilitude to anyone remotely familiar with history and real combat. The things the novels tries to accomplish—complex plot, deep characters, and an epic setting—could have been great but for the execution. Hopefully, the next novel shows some of the amazing progress we know Waterhouse for today.

But don’t take my word for it. Click on the book cover above, get your own copy of Out Of The Ashes, and let both me and Matt know what you think.