I enjoy playing catch-up at year’s end – time is ever a limited resource and great books fall through the cracks more often than I’d like. One such prime example is The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, the first part in The Black Iron Legacy sequence, a wildly imaginative work. This is the author’s debut and it has put Hanrahan on just about every book blogger’s radar, at least in my tiny corner of the internet. Many have called it “the best debut of 2019” and now that I’ve read it, I can see why.
The Gutter Prayer is immensely imaginative, one of the first books I would hand over to someone who used to love fantasy but has gotten worn down by the conventions of the genre. It is an ambitious novel, unafraid to tackle the nature of gods and their relationship with their faithful, as well as economic inequality, the effects on deadly disease ravaging through the populace and more.
Guerdon is a fully realized city, every detail you could ask for mapped out and integrated into a heterogeneous whole. I wouldn’t say it’s seamlessly done – no great city, no harbor port town in our own history could be described as seamless in that sense – but it is masterfully executed. This is a city of industry, with all that comes with that, from the shit-filled gutters and quarters dominated by crime and poverty and the stone plague to the homes of the middle-class and the boroughs of the rich, all the way to the city-within-a-city that is the Alchemist guild’s district. And that’s not even touching on the catacombs and tunnels down below, housing their own chthonic horrors…
So much is at play here, and it is slowly revealed through the eyes of an increasing cast of stellar characters, the first among which is a gutter rat of a thief called Cari, the lost daughter of a once-prominent Guerdon family. Cari is angry, brash and vengeful but above all else, she is as unlucky as they come, as before too long at all, she finds herself under the assault of strange, nightmarish visions whose appearance spells a great deal of trouble not only for Cari but for the city entire.
Her two friends, Spar and Rat – a Stone Man and a ghoul, respectively – further complicate matters. Spar is afflicted with a disease that slowly turns him to stone from the inside out. Before too long, he will be a prisoner of his own body, a living statue dependent on the mercy of others, until his lungs, his heart, his veins and blood also harden and calcify, and he expires. The only stop-gap me
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Title. The movie rants are some of my favorite bits, and I feel like we could get a lot of great content out of this from the crew.
I was 20 when I first denounced the church and 25 when I was sucked back into it. I met the right (wrong) person at the right (wrong) time and ended up nose diving back into the delusion. I married the guy, got abused, got divorced, and finally healed enough to take myself out of the church as well.
But I hung on HARD. The church, the gospel, became my security blanket. I was the atheist who found the light. I was a Mormon poster girl, a bit of a celebrity in my home ward. All the mom's wanted me to talk to their apostate children and convince them that the gospel is the way.
I have been hit with this incredible dilemma of understanding how and why I was sucked back in so deeply. A friend of mine said, it's similar to an addiction. When you relapse, you relapse hard.
I know the church isn't true. I know the history and the contradictions in doctrine--thats not what I'm so upset about. I'm upset, angry, hurt, SCARED, that someone like me, an atheist, was able to be sucked back in so hard to the point where I was SURE I would never back out again. With the same passion and vigor I had leaving the church, I rejoined it. I've got whiplash. I feel like someone went into my brain and changed the circuitry on me and I can't figure out what the fuck happened.
But no one did it to me--I did it to myself.
In my opinion, this is the stuff we need to talk about in order to help people get out and STAY out of the church. Rather than pointing out how factually incorrect the book of Mormon is or exposing inconsistencies and contradictions in history, we need to talk about HOW and WHY people fall into delusion SO EASILY. We need to come from a place of understanding, love, and compassion in order to make any kind of impact.
How do we do this? Is this futile? Thoughts?
