TITLE: Ghost
AUTHOR: Carole Cummings
GENRE: Fantasy | LGBT > MM
PUBLISHED: 1th Edition Feb 2012, 2nd Edition Oct 2014
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: 2nd Edition DSP Publications
MOBILISM LINK: 1st Edition Read
Description: “No one's son, no one's brother, no one's father, no one's lover. He is Untouchable. It is his fate!”
Dwelling in the land of Ada and defending magic users called the Jin, Fen Jacin-rei is a trained assassin and an Untouchable, one whose mind hosts the Voices of the Ancestors, spirits of long-dead magicians. His fate should be one of madness and solitude, yet Fen Jacin-rei desperately clings to his sanity and ferociously protects the family he loves.
He crosses Kamen Malick's path who has all intention to find out all there is about Fen Jacin-rei. Reluctantly Fen joins Malick who has his very own compelling reasons to help the former.
Review: Carole Cummings' Ghost was one of my first adventures into the LGBT genre. I had no expectations when I opened my first, badly-formatted copy on the reader - which turned quickly to be a minor issue because I fell in love immediately with the characters and could not stop reading.
Ghost is complex, the worldbuilding magical and colorful, a vast and well developed cloak-and-dagger environment worth a reader's time to explore. Cummings' system of religion is heavily influenced by Far East mythology. Six Gods are implemented and two of them, Raven and Wolf, play perhaps the most important role, if only in the background. The gods’ peak of strength depend upon their representative namesake moon being in it’s primary cycle. And that is when Wolf stole the Untouchable Fen Jacin-rei from Raven.
Twins born just as moon Raven changed to moon Wolf, one still with the former the other with the latter, writing the beginning of new history. The twins belong to the Jin, a magical people ascended from the Ancestors - long dead magicians - that are suppressed, tortured, and hunted by the Adan, the people of the six gods.
As Fen grows older his Change is coming and that day sets his future, the long braid marking him as an Untouchable, an oracle of the Ancestors. But the Ancestors have gone mad and so have gone their oracles. Never ending whispers, voices in their heads babbling nonsense driving the Untouchables - or Ghosts as they are called derogatorily - crazy. None of them ever reach their maturity. Except for the one named Fen Jacin-rei.
Malick’s obsessed. With braids, specifically with one very long, thick and far too fascinating, as he thinks to himself. His eyes wander over the body and face attached to the braid, an edgy young man, all sharp angles, delicate cheekbones. Malick’s on the hunt, not that his teammate Samin approves of his methods in this case. But a job is a job and this one’s to acquire that young man. The Untouchable. The Ghost.
It had been quite a time since Malick felt that much alive, challenged… aroused. Further ravaging his quarry with his eyes, Malick observes how the Untouchable approaches one of the male whores and disappears in the baths. A male whore! Convenient, at least for Malick’s tastes. He follows the man and unsurprisingly, the whore grins at him as he slips out the baths, something else that goes like planned. But then not everything goes like planned:
The blatant sexual attraction in this first chapter promised a lot of sex but I quickly discovered that this is not so at all. In fact, Carole Cummings keeps up an attractive, steady erotic undercurrent instead.He’d been wrong. The knife hadn’t been behind the screen in the man’s right hand, it had been twisted into the bathsheet in his left. Now its tip rested just below Malick’s chin, and he couldn’t even care, because the grip on the sheet had been forsaken for the advantage and now lay puddled about the man’s ankles.
Malick didn’t even reach for his own knife, didn’t slip his fingers through the loop of the garrote, didn’t try to step back or attack. He merely stared, raked his gaze up and down, groaned a little, and tightened his grip on the braid. Fizzy little bubbles went pop-pop-pop in his brain when his gaze instinctively hitched and hung between the man’s legs— gah, yum—before he forced it on. “Mm,” was all he said.
The Ghost agrees to meet Malick outside. But the Untouchable manages to slip through the guarding ranks of Malick’s peers.
The Ghost refuses Malick’s offer to join his small team of assassins. Only Malick’s quick reflexes save him and finally he overpowers the man thanks to his greater experience. An ungodly amount of blades are extricated from all the hidden spots in the Ghost’s clothes and as Malick touches him in the course of the search, the Untouchable goes still, very still, as if something in him has gone still.It was pure chance that Malick looked up when he did.
Pure chance that he’d been growing bored and a little edgy, and a child’s song about Wolf and Raven and Bear had flitted through his head. Pure chance that he’d peered up to check which phases they happened to be in. Pure chance that Wolf was gibbous tonight, and backlit the creeping figure on the second floor’s terrace roof as though it had been limned in silver.
“Oh,” was all Malick managed as he stood there and watched the figure swirl down two stories from the sagging eaves, gliding to the ground only steps away from him with an ease he wouldn’t have credited had he not seen it himself.
Long knives left smeary trails behind Malick’s retinas as they glittered in the moonlight, almost forming a tangled orbit about the Ghost as he advanced like a silent, twisting storm, the ropy length of braid trailing and fluttering behind him. Not graceful—it was too economical for that. Not a single unnecessary move, not a breath wasted. A perfect, spiraling tempest of ice and fire.
Fen Jacin-rei is defeated and - decidedly unwilling - joins Malick’s assassins. Fen represents a miracle and one Malick wants to explore. Unseen he follows Fen and discovers something surprising. A sister and a brother hidden out of town. Another unspeakable thing. Untouchables are not supposed to be attached to their original families. They are not supposed to have a sane mind either…
Slowly Malick unravels the secrets surrounding Fen and is sucked in deeper and deeper in to a fight of survival against powerful enemies. In the midst Malick tries to keep safe the ones he’s entrusted with, fights to win Fen’s trust and - yes, as much Malick is inclined to deny the fact - his love. But then Malick learns that Fen is entangled with the one he set out to hunt a long time ago.
The author's language is intense, nothing is simply described. It flows, cloaks, reveals, moves around the reader transporting them directly in to the scene granting great liberty to their imagination despite the accuracy - or even bluntness - of her words.
As well fleshed-out as this world is, so are its characters. Feelings, expression, individuality - all is there and consistent for each of them. Even minor characters are distinguishable. Cummings uses third person to tell her tale and writes not only from Fen’s and Malick’s point of view but also from other’s, every one of them another puzzle piece falling into place.
Backflashes tell us about Fen’s childhood and how he made it to maturity against all odds. It’s not pleasant and quickly we understand how near on the edge to insanity Fen lives every day. How much he needs his rude borderline facade. But Malick is a cocky and overconfident bastard with his very own exceptional skills and that goes a long way to pry away Fen’s protective walls.
I enjoyed Ghost, the first book of a series, immensely. Blades, magic, secrets, gods and battles, complexity, a well-developed plot topped with mythology and psychologically believable issues; in short, real fantasy. All I need to tempt me and immerse myself for hours and only emerge for needed food and drink.
A note: The ending of Ghost is an abrupt cliffhanger which is rather annoying. I’m confident though that the purchase of the rest of the series, or even only the second book, is well worth the price.