![]() Polansky is judicious in their deployment, understanding that sometimes the threat of a presence can bear more weight than the presence itself. ![]() And there are a few well-placed doses of horror in the Lovecraftian sense: unsettling beings that leave trails of blood and instances of madness in their wake. Rigus, the city where the novel is set, comes equipped with a palpable sense of history, including a brutal plague a generation before the events described in the novel there’s also a well-developed sense of how class works. When Low Town works, it works well - Polansky neatly conveys the gritty underside of a fantasy world. ![]() Taken as a whole, Polansky’s setting suggests an unexpected yet surprisingly viable blend of the aesthetics of Walter Mosley, George R.R. He is a veteran of trench warfare, the experience of which has left him scarred, patrolling one corner of a world of reduced technology and a hierarchical system of magic. The Warden, narrator and protagonist here, is a disgraced ex-cop turned bar owner and informal fixer, the sort of wounded soul one tends to find at the center of noir-tinged mysteries. Daniel Polansky’s novel Low Town is also a fantasy novel, with magicians, supernatural creatures, and metaphysical MacGuffins cropping up at significant moments. Daniel Polansky’s novel Low Town is a violent procedural with an embittered antihero at its center. ![]()
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