Product Description

In the kingdom of Crotheny, two young girls play in the tangled gardens of the sacred city of the dead where, fleeing an imaginary attacker, they discover the unknown crypt of a legendary, ancestral queen. In the wilds of the forest, while investigating the mass slaughter of an innocent family, the king's forester comes face-to-face with a monstrous beast found only in folk tales and nightmares.

Meanwhile, travelling the same road, a scholarly young priest begins his education in the nature of the evil that festers just beneath the surface of a seemingly peaceful realm. For the royal family is facing a betrayal that only sorcery can accomplish. And now, for three beautiful sisters, for a young man elevated to knighthood, and for for countless others, a darkness is emerging to shatter all that once seemed certain, familiar, and good.

Numerous separate destinies will become entangled as malevolent forces stalk the land -- and the Briar King, that primeval harbinger of death, has awakened from his slumber.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156766 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Customer Reviews

An exciting new fantasy
As fantasies go, I have to say I enjoyed this novel - it is certainly in the upper rungs of the genre. Perhaps it didn't rank among the greats, but it certainly entertained me consistently. One of the signs of a talented author is their ability to control several overlapping storylines and characters in a way that keeps you on your toes no matter which person's story you are reading at the time. I hated the end of every chapter when it meant that thread of the story was left hanging, while we delved into another, but again, I was reluctant to finish the next chapter, too. If I had to pick a fault in this book, it would be the character of the king. I assume Keyes intended him to be a good man who suffered from the faults of humanity, but I found myself unable to get over his disrespectful treatment of his wife, a good person, the reasons for which are never explained. I also found it slightly odd that he never actually speaks to his children, though they feature often in his thoughts. Though the impending-evil-doom story is slightly contrived, The Briar King himself is a wonderfully twisted creation of folktale and your typical fantasy-baddy, one of the best villainous concepts to come out recently, and I only wish he had a larger role in the novel. In saying this, I have yet to read the second in the series, a task I am thoroughly looking forward to. Put simply, not one to be missed by any serious fantasy addict like myself.

What a spiny fellow!
I bought The Briar King, by Greg Keyes, a while back because everybody told me that it was so good. However, I found myself reluctant to start yet another epic fantasy series, so it languished in my "To be read" stack. Then, I received a review copy of the second book in the series, The Charnal Prince, so I decided I should probably read both of them soon. I tell you this not because you should necessarily care what I do (what a man reads is really his private business unless he writes reviews about them), but so that you can avoid doing the same thing I did. If you like fantasy at all, you should go out, get this book, and maybe even the second book, and read them. Right now. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Oh, you want me to tell you why you should read it? Ok. Keyes has created a masterpiece with vivid characters, an interesting overarching plot, and a doom from the dawn of time. This is not your ordinary doom from the dawn of time, though. The Briar King is a force of nature that is never truly understood, something that's called forth to wreak havoc on the land, changing this world into its own gruesome image. With this book, Keyes is well on his way to reshaping that world. We follow a disparate group of characters, including a king, his queen, a young knight who becomes her protector, a couple of princesses, and a fencer who becomes infatuated with one of those princesses. On the other hand, we have the guardian of the King's Forest, his lover, and a monk who finds himself translating some very ancient, and very evil, documents, much to the detriment of the world, not to mention his own skin. A conspiracy is afoot throughout the land, one which may bring down an entire royal family, and one which may result in the death of everybody. Everywhere. Treachery abounds, and nobody is safe. Will the coming of the Briar King make this all moot?

Keyes does almost everything right in The Briar King. He switches settings with a deftness I haven't seen in quite a while, leaving each scene just when it's starting to get good. This causes the reader to read the traditional "just one more chapter" to find out what's going on. I average about one hundred pages a day usually, and I know I at least doubled that with this book. Every character is completely three dimensional, with the exception of Fend, one of the villains of the piece. I found him a bit flat, but otherwise, all of the characters are interesting. Keyes also takes the story in some unexpected directions. A love affair that seems very predictable doesn't, in fact, happen. There are some daring escapes, but each one is plausible, not stretching that oh-so-important suspension of disbelief that some fantasy novels break constantly. Each character has a completely understandable motivation that keeps the book moving at a lightning pace.

Keyes also does a wonderful job of world-building. The map is beautiful (he credits Kirk Caldwell for it) and the land is populated with a dazzling array of cultures, all of them suitably human but different enough that you can tell the difference. One area, Vitellio, is clearly patterned after medieval Italy, even down to the names which sound pseudo-Italian. This has the double benefit of giving you an idea what the culture is like but it's just different enough. He also has a talent for languages. The language in Vitellio is one example, but others have been made up as well. He even goes so far as to invent dialects and slang for some of the people.

Finally, I have to compliment Keyes on the prose in the book. The imagery is amazing and the action scenes are extremely well choreographed. They are realistic, and blood does flow vividly, but he's not so graphic that heads are bouncing all over the place (though one or two of them do). Whether it's a quiet scene or a loud scene with swords bouncing off of plate armour, Keyes does a great job with it. Here's an example:

"Asper White opened his eyes to a vaulted stone ceiling and a distant, singsong litany. Fever crawled like centipedes beneath his skin, and when he tried to move, his limbs felt like rotting fern fronds." Pg 382

Best of all, Keyes is not afraid to kill any of his characters. Some people think that George R.R. Martin is sadistic to his characters! The body count is quite high, but none of the deaths are gratuitous. Each one fits the story perfectly, though some are quite perfunctory. Even these, however, don't feel out of place. Instead, they are realistic. While there are heroic escapes (and, admittedly, a couple of rather unrealistic ones), it's never a certainty that the viewpoint character will make it out of the scene alive. Sometimes, a death is just a death.

The Briar King is one of the best fantasy books I've read since Jennifer Fallon's series, and I think it even surpasses them. Everything just comes together in a rich whole, making a juicy treat that will taste good with every bite. And the best thing is, when you finish it, you can pick up the second book and wolf that one down too. Sadly, it will be close to a year before the final book is out.

David Roy

one of the best debut novels for a series in some time
I had never heard of "TheBriar King" or Greg Keyes until I saw Terry Brooks plugging the book on his web site. I decided to check it out. It has always been difficult for me to get excited about a new fantasy series, it feels like a major investment of time and I don't want it to be a waste. But, with the Terry Brooks recommendation and blurbs on the back cover from Melanie Rawn and Katherine Kurtz, I was willing to give the book a chance. I'm glad that I did.

"The Briar King" will suffer from inevitable comparisons to Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" and to George Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire". While such comparisons are only natural, they are unfair. A fantasy series needs time to develop over several books to be fairly compared to another major series. Also, while there are a couple of stylistic similarities, "The Briar King" is wholly distinct. It also stands up quite well on its own.

The novel begins thousands of years before the main story, as we see the origins of the land and the prophecy that will begin to shape the events of the book. The novel follows several characters: the headstrong daughter of a king, a woodsman, and a bookish scholar. While some of these paths to intertwine at points, there is quite a bit going on to build the world as a real place as well as creating a detailed story that will be a joy to follow over 4 books. The series will be called "The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone" and will be four books.

This is an exciting new fantasy series, and any fan of Robert Jordan or George Martin owes it to him or herself to check this one out.

-Joe Sherry