Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, The
Clockwork Century #1
Sixteen
years ago, gold brought hordes to the frozen Klondike. Fanatical in their
greed, Russian prospectors commissioned Dr. Leviticus Blue to create a machine
to mine Alaska’s Ice. Thus the Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine was born.
But the Boneshaker went awry, destroying downtown Seattle and unearthing a
subterranean vein of blight gas. Anyone who breathed its fumes turned into the
living dead.
The
devastated city is now walled in to contain the blight. But unknown to Briar,
his widowed mother, Ezekiel is going in. His quest will take him into a city
teeming with ravenous undead, air pirates, criminal overlords and heavily armed
refugees. And only Briar can bring him out alive.
Steampunk is genre that comes in many
shapes and sizes, and in my endeavors I have read the classics Victorian London
inspired with secret agents steampunk, New York themes superhero steampunk and
a few more. Now Boneshaker again shows of the creative imagination of another
author, Cherie Priest, who allows you to travel to Seattle, for this time a
clever steampunk story filled with the undead. I do think that genre wise it is
important for authors to explore more possibilities within their theme, and
Cherie Priest manages to just do that.
One thing from the synopsis of
Boneshaker really caught my attention, “ravenous undead”. I was really eager to
find out how this was incorporated into the story. Boneshaker takes place in an alternate
Seattle, where the Klondike Gold Rush has happened a few years earlier and
where the American Civil War is dragging on towards the late 1800’s. And for
the gold rush, Dr. Leviticus Blue was tasked with building a machine to dive
deep underneath the Alaskan ice to mine the gold. However the machine that was
build and the first excavations went horribly wrong. Releasing the terrible gas
know as the Blights that turned everyone who inhaled it into the undead. Now
several years later the part of the city has been walled in to contain the living
dead and the blight from spreading. But for young Ezekiel Blue this isn’t a
problem as he wants to get to the bottom of what truly happened in order to
clear his father’s name.
Boneshaker has some great elements of
which some are : a set of fascinating characters, a great setting wherein this
story unravels and takes place. And further more Cherie Priest writes this all
up in a great way and caused me more than once to end up on the edge of my
seat! The story of Boneshaker takes place in only just a part of the city of
Seattle, where the Boneshaker machine wracked havoc. Even though the story
takes place this walled off part of Seattle, there is still a lot of ground
being covered and mainly due to Cherie Priests livid writing style it doesn’t feel
any bit short, she actually manages to show you this part from top to bottom,
going from the height of the airships to the depths of the metro underground.
Next to the setting of Boneshaker there
is also a great cast of primary and secondary characters. There are two main
protagonists that you follow; Ezekiel and his mother Briar who both have a
harsh life on the Outskirts. First up there is Ezekiel, the son of Dr.
Leviticus Blue, who has had enough of the bad name that his father got when his
drilling machine went haywire. Ezekiel wants to travel to the ruined part of
the city and find conformation to clear his father’s name once and for all. Secondly
you have Briar, who has to work hard to get enough money to get her and Ezekiel
through the day, after what Leviticus did, both Ezekiel and Briar have been
treated as cast offs. Brair has a very strong motherly instinct in her that
comes to lights after her son sneaks into the ruined part of Seattle in search
for the truth. Using the introduction of mother and son, instead of two
youngsters going into the city and the constant dangers that were in store for
both really added another level to Boneshaker.
Not only Ezekiel and Briar are great to
read about, Cherie Priest also invests enough time to make a set of secondary
characters come to life. One of my definite favorites was Jeremiah Swakhammer. A
mercenary who lives in the walled city. He is equipped with numerous gadgets,
but more importantly for me was how he was shows with the nature of his character,
when I ever get in to troubles I want him to be around to help me! But just as
you read about him first time, his description top to bottom and breathing
through and talking through those filter masks, really adds a great imagination
by this character, next Jeremiah there are a lot more different character that
let Boneshaker together with the setting and Briar and Ezekiel really come to
life.
As you can read above, there is a place
reserved for the ravenous undead in Boneshaker. The ravenous undead are
zombies! Well I haven’t read that many books that feature zombies but have seen
a lot of movies that have them. A lot of zombie themed films feature them in a
different way, either sluggish or really fast etc. Now reading the synopsis of
Boneshaker I was trying to guess what would be in store for me but found it
pretty hard. Once I encountered the first zombies in the book it was just
amazing. Mainly after the venture of Ezekiel and Briar into the walled city
does this horror/thriller aspect of the addition of the zombies really come to fruition.
Being both separated in the city, both Briar and Ezekiel get there encounters
with some packs of zombies, and are in for a mad dash to get safe. And once
they got to safe position, the impending feeling of another encounter did not
go away for me. In here Cherie Priest’s writing style really does bolster the
impending doom effect. This while feel is quite amazing.
Though the start up of the story might
have been a bit linear in where you have some dialogues between Briar and Ezekiel. These however turn into the quest for Ezekiel to search for clues of his father. The parts
that take place inside the city completely transform this. In the end there is
a big revelation in the plot of Boneshaker, totally unexpected, and completely
knocked me over. Because of the people that Ezekiel encounters and his perseverance
of that his father is innocent I started to believe this to be true. However
Cherie Priest does something quite different in regards to this in the plotline by
introducing just one last character, Minnericht, and now I am going to stop! It’s
quite the turnaround of events that again pushed me to the edge of my seat.
Boneshaker is an amazing start of the
Clockwork Century series. Cherie Priest combines a great set of characters that
you can really relate to and for which I started to feel for to as well. With
combining both steampunk and zombies I first didn’t know what to expect, but it
worked out very well, and on a certain level, these aspects both added a
humorous take as well as a more impending doom/horror element to the book. The
merry chase through the city of Ezekiel to discover his father’s past and for
Briar to find her son were shown in just an marvelous way. Cherie Priest really
is on top of her game in terms of writing, she knows how to keep you up at
night with this edgy, gripping, turn-pager of a book, creating a scene that forced me to find out what
would happen in the next chapter. And just as you would have guessed what the
ending would be, she brings the plot to a completely different turn of events! You have
to experience this book for yourself.
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