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The Collapse of Reality
Searching for the Eminent #3
by Marvin North
Independently Published, 390pp
Published: July 2022

I've had an absolute blast with Marvin North's 'Searching for the Eminent' trilogy because it has a relish in not remotely playing by the rules. I can't remember reading any series of books that hops genres so gleefully and so unconventionally since Brian Lumley's 'Titus Crow' series, which started out as cosmic horror, then ventured into science fiction, dark fantasy and planetary romance, the final volume, 'Elysia', serving to wrap up two further very different series, one fantasy, the other sword and sorcery. I have no idea if North has read Lumley, but he shows just as much disdain for a sense of genre purity here.

This is the final instalment in a trilogy and each book is very different indeed, as can be seen from what its primary characters get up to. The first book, 'March of the Meek', is primarily fantasy, set in a post-apocalyptic landscape. Rekco studies swordsmanship, Kyoku learns magic and Cathy tries to survive an orphanage in the Dickensian slums of Last Theli, which believes itself the last city on the planet. It's highly limited in scope, mirroring the limited experiences of this trio. 'Towards the Apocalypse', the second book, opens all that up like a firework display, showing us that while some parts of the city might still feel fantasy, others are full on science fiction. As doors are opened and walls are toppled between the two, that scope feels far less limited.

Continuing that trend, this third book expands everything once more and even further than I had expected. Physically, the trilogy moved from a couple of houses and the city slums in book one to much of the city and various locations around it in book two and now to... well, it isn't merely the whole city or the whole planet, it's an impressive amount of the universe. And in genre, the three characters follow their own very distinct genre paths. Rekco has to deal with effectively becoming a superhero, a new genre for this trilogy again; Kyoku shifts into science fiction, accompanying an agreeably violent former galactic sentry with blue skin as she visits a weird alien dimension; and Cathy stays fantasy, travelling with a segment of the underground across the Forgotten Woods to the Redlands to start civilisation over.

All of that is because this is a direct sequel to the second book, continuing as it left off with Rekco and Kyoku's assault on the Retallor Tower. However well-intentioned their actions, this has had an immense and unexpected toll on Last Theli. Half the city has now gone completely mad. There are ridiculous numbers of dead in what's being appropriately called the Halvening (after all, the Snap had already been taken). With the Mayor dead, the Runic Guard has made itself known, its leader, Ximon Judd effectively taking over. And Oglis Inima, that blue-skinned alien, is here for reasons of her own. Civilisation in the city has been dealt a serious blow and only a couple of news journalists, now unemployed, seem to care to ask the right questions.

As you can imagine, this is a wild read indeed that's tonally all over the map. North does maintain his core story admirably well, gradually moving us towards a decent understanding of what's going on and why, right down to explaining who's behind it at every level and what their purpose is. That means that we figure out why the city is the way it is, why the problems it's had and why that's all falling apart now that certain people are dead. It also means that we figure out why the universe is the way it is, why the problems it's had and why that's all falling apart now that certain people are dead.

It boggles my mind that only two books earlier, I talked about how North seemed reticent to give answers to any of our questions. Now, he's introducing us to Dalu, creator of the universe, and the answers are there to questions we haven't even thought up yet. For instance, there's a threat by the name of the Fleeting Requiem, an entity powerful enough to destroy the universe, reminding me of the Great Evil in the later 'Pip and Flinx' books by Alan Dean Foster. At no point in 'March of the Meek' did I wonder about what threats might be facing the universe. I was too busy thinking about why characters learning to fight with swords or cast magic spells might want to buy protein bars at the local RM Mart. Talk about a leap in scope.

And that really does underline why this trilogy was independently published. There are only two kinds of authors who can get away with something this outrageously non-conformist: writers like Stephen King, whose reputations are so huge that they sell books in ludicrous quantities without readers every having to read a back cover blurb, and writers like Marvin North, who doesn't have an editor screaming at him in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS about which shelf at Barnes & Noble he might imagine his book might fit on. King doesn't care. North doesn't care. Everyone in between has to.

Now, the absence of that editor, who does have a point, means that it's up to North and only him to keep this insane genre-hopping behemoth on the rails. Does he manage it? Well, I might guess at that when I can figure out where the rails are. When they're firmly laid through the city gates and up the many storeys of a skyscraper, we can tell easily enough. When they're laid with magic through some alien dimension that hops the spaces between planets, that's not quite so trivial a task. I'm going to have to let this trilogy percolate in my brain for a while before I'll start to see a plothole rudely dangling out of the side.

For now, North certainly found his way to appropriate resolutions and I'm far from unhappy about how any of this ended up. Maybe there's a little plot convenience in how so many of the Ten come from one city, but there are explanations for that. The trilogy is called 'Searching for the Eminent' so one measure of success would be whether we found him or not. Well, we do find him and, what's more, we find him in an appropriate fashion at an appropriate time, in a way that serves the wider story. It's not underwhelming for arriving so late and it's not disappointing for not seeming like it would ever happen.

And successes like that one underline that I'm leaving this trilogy with the acknowledgement that Marvin North, an independent Arizona writer, chose to start his career as a published author with a sprawling trilogy that flouts convention, ignores genre boundaries and boldly goes to places few established authors would dare, and yet he made it work. There's no way that it should, because a whole slew of written and unwritten rules decree that in textbook after textbook, but he still made it work and that's impressive. It's almost a bonus that I enjoyed the ride. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by Marvin North click here.

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