James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s Dragonfired is the third installment in J. Zachary Pike’s Dark Profit secondary-universe fantasy series.

Good has triumphed over evil and the universally acclaimed hero Johan is king! His beloved Marja is queen! All shall celebrate! The humans and other Lightling races because they’re on board with Johan’s glorious plans (or at least the version Johan is sharing). The gnolls, trolls, and other Darkling races pretend to celebrate because the price of open dissent is death.

It’s possible that Johan presents a carefully curated version of himself and the events that led to his ascendance, and that what he plans to do is perhaps just a smidge different from what he says he is going to do. It’s hard to say. Anyone who digs too deeply into material related to Johan has an unfortunate tendency to be painfully incinerated.

According to King Johan, the mysterious outbursts of all-consuming fire are clearly the work of a dragon, although since the conflagrations never leave any eyewitnesses, verification is difficult. In any case, a crisis of this magnitude justifies extreme measures.

It might happen that these measures look an awful lot like stuff Johan was going to do anyway, but that is the sort of talk that attracts dragonfire for some reason. In any case, if you can’t trust the king who benefits from a major crisis to tell you when a crisis is major, who can you trust?

Dwarf Gorm and his surviving band of professional adventurers, each with a tragic backstory more tragic than the last, take a closer look at the conflagrations. Suspicious minds might expect evidence that the fires were conventional arson or magical arson, and that claims of a dragon are a ruse. That cannot be shown to be the case. Neither is there unambiguous evidence pointing at a dragon.

There is a well-known accelerant known as Arson’s Friend. Arson’s Friend leaves no traces at all, thus the name. If someone is using Arson’s Friend to stage the attacks, they must have a prodigious supply of an otherwise scarce and expensive material. Tracking down the source might lead to the culprit.

Alternatively, taking too close an interest in a chain of events whose source may or may not be the tragically widower-ed King Johan is an excellent way to discover the lengths to which John will go to silence impediments.

~oOo~

This may seem like an odd thing to praise an author for, but Pike’s website is easily found and at least from the perspective of a reviewer looking for links — I’m looking at you, Apple!1 — functional. At the risk of appearing like a wild-eyed extremist, I believe ease of use can facilitate use.

The series began as a parody of the 2008 financial crisis projected onto a secondary world. Dragonfired feels different. Where Pike might have encountered the idea of an opportunistic popularist exploiting bigotry and blatant lies to establish himself as supreme oligarch I could not say, but whatever that source was, it seems to have trumped the financial crisis.

As in the previous installments, it’s clear that Pike wants to be Terry Pratchett. He’s not. The humor is sometimes forced, Pike lacks Pratchett’s subtlety and the story goes on longer than necessary to the plot.

On the other hand, there are much worse ambitions than trying to be Pratchett. As well, in the entire history of writing, there’s only been one Terry Pratchett. Attempts to be Pratchett have, with that singular exception, generally been unsuccessful2.

In the grand world of authors trying to be Pratchett, Pike comes closer than many others. His characters are a bit thin, but they’re functional. The jokes are recognizable as such. The author’s irritation at certain human foibles is plain, and conveniently from my perspective, overlaps with the things about humans that irritate me. I don’t regret the time spent reading Dragonfired.

Dragonfired is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (the author’s own website).

I did not find Dragonfired at Words Worth Books.

1: Finding books at Apple is such a pain in the neck, I am thinking of binning the idea of linking to them.

2: Although people are getting better at writing like Pratchett. Prior to, oh, 1971, attempts to emulate him were so subtle as to be undetectable.