The Gutter Prayer

The Gutter Prayer presents an imaginative fantasy world populated by so many different horrors – eldritch and scientific – that its inhabitants live in a constant state of fear and shock. Its plot may be convoluted, but this only reinforces the overwhelming feeling that besieges the characters, who are hopelessly manipulated by unforgiving, inscrutable forces.

The book opens with a description of the city of Guerdon, marking the importance of the setting to the story. Guerdon is presented as a derelict place haunted by its past, the urge to escape from it, and its inability to do so. As the narrator describes it, “Guerdon has always been a place in tension with itself, a city built atop its own previous incarnations yet denying them, striving to hide its past mistakes and present a new face to the world.” It’s a city plagued by a disease that slowly turns people into stone, patrolled by guards that have blazing eyes and bleed wax – the fearsome alchemy-created Tallowmen –, and populated by ghouls, nightmarish creatures consisting of hundreds of worms, and poor people.

The city’s past was buried but remains very much alive. There’s a whole world underground, where ghouls and the worms – the Crawling Ones – live in a fragile truce, consuming the decomposing bodies of the people of Guerdon and fighting to keep eldritch horrors at bay. For besides ghouls and the worms, the world of The Gutter Prayer is also infested by gods, old and new, and some of their most hideous acolytes hide in the depths of the world:  “As the city above grows, those below dig deeper and deeper, maintaining the distance between them, and forcing those things that dwell even further below to retreat into earth. There are wars in the dark that the surface folk never know about.”

The first chapter introduces us to the young thief Carillon during an ill-fated heist. Cari, as she’s called, is trying to run away from the guards while a government building goes up in flames. She prevents one of the guards from getting burned alive, a scene that shows us that – despite her job – we are dealing with a heroine with a good heart. A Tallowman, however, manages to catch Cari but fails to finish her off because the building falls on top of them, leading Cari to suffer a strange out-of-body experience: from this moment on, she is plagued by visions of murders and monsters, looking at the city from the perspective of a god.

The Gutter Prayer follows three main characters, which are an odd sort. We have Cari, the young thief who receives unwanted visions from eldritch gods. Her best friend Spar is the son of the past leader of the Brotherhood of Thieves – and so the main target of the present leader – and a stone man to boot, which means he’s got a contagious death sentence and the strength to level buildings. And there’s their friend Rat, a ghoul, who is a being of darkness that feasts on dead flesh. And each one has their own narrative arc.

Rat’s is about his constant internal struggle with his animalistic nature. Ghouls are wild and deadly, they’re beings of horror stories, but in Guerdon they live alongside the people – when they decide to leave the underground tunnels of the city, that is. Their elders have “dog-like muzzle, glowing green eyes, the stench of rotten meat,” and Rat’s name is even shared by most ghouls, denying him this bit of identity.

Cari and Spar, then, are more than friends to Rat, but anchors that pull him to civilization, they are living reminders that he can preserve his mind and not go feral. When Cari becomes connected to eldritch gods, however, this internal struggle is put to the test, as Rat can sense their presence, making his instincts turn every bone in his body hostile: “Spar doesn’t move. Rat leans forward and – rips her throat out, letting her blood spurt out across the table – tugs on Cari’s arm.”

Spar, meanwhile, has to fight the disease that slowly petrifies him – he can never stay put, lest his flesh and organs calcify – and deal with his father’s legacy, who was executed without ever breaking and ratting his people, becoming a symbol of resistance and resilience to the whole brotherhood. The disease, however, tests Spar’s resilience: if ever he gives up for just one second – and stops moving, stops doing things, stops fighting it – he will turn to stone. This is why Spar welcomes his condition, for it forces him to feel like a man his father would be proud of.

This disease has an ambivalent nature. As it petrifies its victims, it gives them raw strength, making them formidable fighters capable of breaking a man’s bones with one punch. But it also makes them vulnerable: they can’t swim, sinking like a block of stone, and if they get hit, the disease spreads and worsens. Sometimes, the narrative lingers on the descriptions of its victims to display the full horror that is to be locked inside one’s own body:

“He can’t move. He’s all stone. All stone. A living tomb. He screams, because his mouth still works, shouts and begs and pleads and cries for them to save him or kill him, or do anything but leave him there, locked inside the ruin of his own body. The thief-taker vanishes, and the flames get closer and – he assumes – hotter, but he can’t feel their heat. After a while, more guards arrive. They stick a rag in his mouth, carry him outside, and eight of them heave him to the back of a cart.”

It’s a passage about impotence, focusing on a feeling of powerlessness, which actually permeates the entire narrative. There are too many different monsters in Guerdon, each with their own agenda. There are gods at play – and a war between gods in the lands outside Guerdon – with their inscrutable but often violent designs. There’s the leader of the brotherhood going after Spar, fearing the fame of his dead father. There are secret plans abound, betrayals, death, and carnage. Characters in The Gutter Prayer are understandably overwhelmed: there is too much happening at the same time, too much chaos, too much injustice and violence to actually register what they mean.

Spar, despite his fantastic disease, is the more grounded character of the main trio, the one that seems most stunned by the amount of strange stuff happening, and who has the most down-to-earth goal (fight the Brotherhood’s leader). During the climax, when the horror and the bizarre are turned up to eleven, it’s Spar who captures the feeling of being overwhelmed by the world, when tragedies blend with each other, death counts become abstractions, and your everyday life seems futile and insignificant:

“We don’t know everything. Everyone’s in the grip of these tremendous unseen forces, thrown this way and that. Not just gods – they’re in there, yes, but they are part of it. Fate, circumstance… fuck, money and power and family, too. Economics and politics and history. Necessity, maybe. Like the world’s on railway tracks. Things happen even though no one sane wants them to happen, when no one involved wants them to happen, but everyone’s caught by circumstance. Actually, if we’re going to have this conversation, hand me that bottle.”

As a man who cannot touch broken skin without transmitting his curse – and who is avoided by everyone like the plague for the very same reason – Spar values intimacy and companionship. Cari’s attitude towards him – she doesn’t recoil when he gets close – warms his heart even if they never get to display physical signs of affection: “He never embraced Cari. Maybe, he thinks, he should have. He takes the pain of jealousy and loss and cherishes it as he walks; his heart, at least, has not yet turned to stone.”

Finally, we come back to Cari, who must deal with her visions and the past returning to haunt her: her family was murdered many years ago, for reasons that remain a mystery. It’s a narrative arc also related to a feeling of powerlessness, of being the puppet of unseen forces.

But the problem with Cari is her relationship with a young man named Miren, who appears to be the apprentice of a scholar who, out of nowhere, offers to help her with the visions. The problem is precisely the fact that Miren is engulfed in mystery – he couldn’t be fishier even if he tried –, so Cari’s lack of interest in asking him important questions, even though his actions become increasingly strange and bizarre, starts to hurt her development – painting her as stupid and reckless –, especially when she begins to care more about Miren’s looks than the fact that he can basically teleport. Get your priorities straight, Cari.

The feeling of impotence and insignificance is also a perfect fit to the cosmic horror genre and The Gutter Prayer has many descriptions that belong in a horror story about ancient, inscrutable beings. One of them is a shapeshifter monster called the Raveller, and its description focuses on its danger, its unnatural features, and its association with old, forgotten gods:

“the Raveller borrows shapes because it is inherently shapeless. It doesn’t have bones to break or organs to burst. It doesn’t bleed. In the dark, endless catacombs beneath the world, the Ravellers writhe and slither and feast. It’s a spirit made flesh, the shadow cast by a dark god, a stolen form assembled from dried blood and the leavings of sacrifices. A thing of nightmare.”

The book also excels in the climax, succeeding in making each closure distinct from one another while making them all fit the horror atmosphere of the story: while some endings are tragic, and some are even poetic, others are violent and sad.

The Gutter Prayer offers a great mix of fantasy and horror, presenting a world brimming with creativity while not losing sight of what makes most of its characters work.

May 23, 2023.