In Casey Sutton’s dark fantasy GREEDY AS A GHOUL, Malfus is a mage in Monrovia, a region on the outermost periphery of the Ossory Empire, from which it is separated by the Scar, a massive rent in the world from which spreads “blight, calling the dead from their graves”. Malfus is a practitioner of necromancy, but fled the academy where he learnt the sinister practices of the discipline in order to research ways of saving his beloved Kiara, who has died.
The book–mixes pitch-black humor with an eye for detail and breathless action–is a prequel short story to the full-length novel MALFUS: Necromancer Unchained, which is scheduled to be published later this year. (While it is hard to judge on the basis of such a short tale what the forthcoming novel will be like, one thing is certain – it won’t be boring.) At times the story has an ephemeral feel: the expository burden it is forced to carry hampers plot development a little. But the stakes are set up well enough, and are worth recounting. As it was the “negative energy” in the world that caused the Scar to appear, it is this energy that needs to be understood, and properly harnessed, in order to close it. Hence Malfus’s decision to skip the academy with a clutch of scrolls and an ancient spell book in hand, and head for Monrovia, where the people are likelier to turn a blind eye to his practice of “the subtle arts”. The protagonist – perhaps that should be anti-hero; one of his very first acts in the story is to loot the corpses of the dead, employing the labor of reanimated corpses to do so – has the ultimate idea of solving “the problem of death”, and possesses a reliquary in which he holds his beloved’s finger, which is all that remains of her, for reasons as yet unknown. But then a ghoul appears, and Malfus’s plans for assembling a hoard of scrap metal big enough to ensure his comfort are thrown into confusion – and an exceptionally gory ending.
Exceptionally gory, heady, and darkly comic, Casey Sutton’s GREEDY AS A GHOUL serves as an intriguing prequel to a full-length novel on the fantastical adventures of mage and novice necromancer Malfus.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader