Eric Del Carlo

In a fantasy world were people are divided into Village and City, Wyst is a young guy from Village. The separation is not only physical but also in behavior: Villagers are simple men who live of barter and of what the nature gives them, hunting, fishing and harvesting; free love is a normal behavior, but people are safe and health in the small community of the village. In the City instead everything has a price even sex; and the sex is something dirty, something that is seen with suspicious. In the City there is a virus which is killing people and everything and everyone is suspected to be the source of the disease. Fear, suspicious and rage is arising.

Wyst is "touched" by the goddess who protects his village, and having contact with the goddess is a taint punishable with exile. Wyst is forced to leave the Village and he goes to the City, but he is perplexed, in the City everyone wants something, everything has a price, and Wyst is not used to this. Lucky him he meets Gamomal, a gentle man who like him, for different reasons, is a banished among his people.

The story is very strange, and I don't know if you can define it a romance; there is not actually a love at first sight between Wyst and Gamomal, also since Wyst is not used to consider sex a way to express love; sex is a common practice, something Wyst is used to share without problem during the ceremonial Galas in his Village. And so he slowly realize that he loves Gamomal not since he enjoys sex with the man, but when he realizes that he can't no more bestow his favors indistinctly to men and women alike.

Gamomal is a difficult character to understand, he doesn't speak much. He is for sure gentle and he cares for Wyst; he is very proud and generous, what he has he shares freely. He is not a particular clever man, but he knows that: he was the son of a troubadour, but he had not the skills to continue his father's profession, but still he is probably more cultured than the people he is forced to live with.

The nice and original parallelism between the fantasy world in the story and the real world, is that in this fantasy world the virus is spread through breath and cured through blood, and so Wyst and Gamomal's lovemaking is not a death risk, but the reason why Gamomal is safe from the virus.

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This is the classic apocalyptic futuristic tale. In the previous book, Nickerson, an enhanced paid assassin for the government, was sold for an illegal hunt from his employers; Nickerson is more than forty years old and for the legal government he is too old to do the job, and so, since he has feline genes in him, he is the right target for an illegal hunt. Only that Nickerson was not of the idea to willing go to death, and with the help of a streetmuscler, BalqJaq, a young con who lived in the underneath city, he fough against his old alleys and won.

The story is set in a three way world: there are the underneath cities, almost an hell where people try to survive, there is the superficial terrain, a wild zone abandoned by human beings, and there are the space colonies, the civil and "legal" new world. The last book dealt with Nickerson and BlaqJaq's adventures in the underneath world; this one is the tale of their experiences in the superficial world... I have the impression that the next one will be set in the new space world.

Nickerson and BlaqJaq are at the opposite. Nickerson is older, wiser and more experienced, while BlaqJaq is younger, impulsive and a bit naivee, even if he has seen more thing a boy of twenty should see. On the other hand, BlaqJaq is stronger, with a very impressive body, while Nickerson has the grace of the felines of whom the genetic is in his body. Those counterbalanced elements make them a complete couple: no one of them is the master or the slave, no one is the boss or the boy; they have their own duties, Nickerson put the experience, BlaqJaq the refreshing thirst of life, something that Nickerson thought to have lost.

There is sex in this tale, but it's not the main event of the story, it's almost a pass by event, something that is good, but not something that you absolutely need to enjoy the story.

Again the story is not too long, less than 120 pages, and again it has an open ending, to make you want to read the next book in the series.

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