Mark Charan Newton’s Nights of Villjamur was one of the first books I received unsolicited from a publisher, and I really enjoyed it. The sequels, City of Ruin and The Book of Transformations just got better and better. Now, with the final book in the series – The Broken Isles – hitting shelves, I thought I’d send Mark a few questions to see what’s been going on since I first interviewed him, back in February 2011.
Legends of the Red Sun #1-3 2012 Edition Covers
The Second book in the Legends of the Red Sun
Villiren: a city of sin that is being torn apart from the inside. Hybrid creatures shamble through shadows and barely human gangs fight turf wars for control of the streets.
Amidst this chaos, Commander Brynd Lathraea, commander of the Night Guard, must plan the defence of Villiren against a race that has broken through from some other realm and already slaughtered hundreds of thousands of the Empire’s people.
When a Night Guard soldier goes missing, Brynd requests help from the recently arrived Inqusitor Jeryd. He discovers this is not the only disappearance on the streets of Villiren. It seems that a serial killer of the most horrific kind is on the loose, taking hundreds of people from their own homes. A killer that cannot possibly be human.
The entire population of Villiren must unite to face an impossible surge of violent and unnatural enemies or the city will fall. But how can anyone save a city that is already a ruin?
I read Nights of Villjamur a good while back, at a time when I was only just getting into reading fantasy. It was a revelation, proving that my opinion on fantasy had been based on generalised misconceptions. The novel weirded me out, at times, and I couldn’t always relate to the characters, but I was nonetheless impressed with Newton’s imagination and prose.
City of Ruin, which I left for far too long on my shelf, is improved in almost every way and I was hooked very early on. This is a truly superb novel.
