The Human Dress

Graydon Saunders

Mar 2018 · Tall Woods Books

About this ebook

This isn't a Commonweal story.  This is something Past Me wrote, and refered to as The Doorstop.
It's been said that everyone of a certain age who winds up writing fantasy in English has a response to The Lord of the Rings in them.
This book is mine.
It's about grief, duty, and royalty as responses to violation of the natural order.  Also adversity, social change, terrible sartorial choices, and an obscure literary revenge on Thomas Hardy.
The acts of vengeance taking place in the text aren't obscure at all.  Some people make Adversity very, very sorry it ever said anything.  Gruesome and terrible things happen.
There were giants in the earth in those days.

Ratings and reviews

I bounced off of this about 20% of the way through and I'm not sure why. It's extremely different from Saunders' other works and (to me) not nearly as engaging.

If you've read and enjoyed other books by Graydon Saunders, you'll enjoy this one. If you haven't read other books by Saunders you may well enjoy The Human Dress, if you are willing to do some of the work. The writing and world-building are excellent, but the book is long and the author does not spoon-feed the reader. The characters are busy getting on with the story, and do not stop to explain things that "everybody knows". It's up to the reader to pay attention. The world-building is 'typical' of Saunders's books in the best ways. The milieu is embedded in time - lots of it. It takes place in a world where dinosaurs kept evolving, rather than being destroyed, and humans eventually evolved along-side - in a very dangerous world. Encounters between humans and dinosaurs tend not to end well for the humans. There are records or folk-memory of the most-recent ice age. There is magic, but it is approached as a technology, not as a mystery. For example, runes and chants can be used to transfer kinetic energy from a river to a ship - but the degree of transfer is controllable. It is also a technology that is advancing. Some uses of magic were developed in living memory. We also have experts arguing over whether a particular use of magic is impossible, which is reassuring. The society has premodern trappings (some elements are evocative of early Norse, and favored weapons include swords, axes and spears), but it is not stuck in a timeless generic medievalism. The greater part of the book deals with the immediate threat - the settlement is under both magical and necromantic attack - but the end looks forward: The world is changing, and it will take forethought and effort to survive and prosper.

I had the pleasure of reading an early version of this book many years ago, when it was known to some as The Doorstop, and my opinion hasn’t changed: it’s outstanding. Beyond that I will just point to Dani Zweig’s review, with which I am in full agreement.