Through the Groaning Earth (Tales from the City of Bathos Book...

An unnatural storm arises with great fury and breaks the spine of a foreign warship upon the reefs of Bathos, casting the few survivors into the merciless machinery of the City of Corruption; A silver mine haunted by the vengeful dead; An Assassins Guild that will stop at nothing to slay one that was formerly their own--the woman known as the 'siren of slaughter'; a perilous journey through the bowels of a mountain where lurk the half-breed children of man and demon. Welcome to the City of Bathos! Through the Groaning Earth picks up where the groundbreaking cult novel of paranoid fantasy, Tales from the City of Bathos left off, introducing us to new characters, visiting old acquaintances (would you ever want to call any of these characters friends?) and bitter enemies, and leaving us stranded in the streets of Bathos, The City of Corruption--which is really the central character of the novel. With a Tarantino-esque story structure, Leiber-like characterizations, Lovecraftian elements, Howardian-style verbage and a grim dollop of the Orwellian dystopia that has overtones of modern Socialist government, Through the Groaning Earth is a thought-provoking as well as an entertaining read.

From the Inside Flap

The City in DarknessYou can cover a lot of miles in the darkness. And there are a hundred thousand directions to ride in, but they always lead to the city. Whether it's called Lankhmar, Sanctuary, Tanelorn, Ambergris or New Crobuzon, all roads lead to the city in the darkness. In Joel Jenkins' stirring dark fantasy epic, Through the Groaning Earth, that city is Bathos. Bathos the savage. Bathos the corrupt. Bathos of the guilds. It is a facet of a dark crystal, one of an infinite number of decadently beautiful iterations of the Ur-city. The remorseless urban sprawl that carries humanity into darker, deeper depths. Gods roam its streets, but like the Gods Of Lankhmar or the Graycaps of Ambergris, they are foul things, not in the least anthropomorphic. They are Lovecraft's Gods, crawling out of the secret bowers of Lost Leng and icy Kadath, dripping through convoluted streets like ichors in an alembic. Monsters from the stars, trapped beneath cramped streets.But these nightmares are as babes before the wolves in human clothing that compete with them for territory within these pages. The tropes and archetypes jumble and intermingle, coming out wrong-footed and fittingly savage. There are no heroes in Bathos but there is heroism, though it's of a world-weary Chandleristic variety. Men and women forced into brute combat with a hostile world, trapped in the belly of a stone beast, fighting to not be digested by the City that at once shelters them and damns them. That is the story of Bathos.-Joshua ReynoldsAuthor of Knights of the Blazing Sun

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