The Crimson Road by A.G. Slatter: Review by Ian Mond

The Crimson Road, A.G. Slatter (Titan 978-1-80336-456-8, $18.99, 368pp, tp) February 2025.

Every time I review a new novel by A.G. Slatter set in the Sourdough Universe, I suggest you go back and read the other books – whether it’s the collections Sourdough and Other Stories and The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings or the novels All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, and The Briar Book of the Dead – to get a real sense of Slatter’s marvellously intricate world. With the latest Sourdough novel, The Crim­son Road, I’m not suggesting; I’m mandating! To be clear, The Crimson Road is standalone and self-contained. You don’t need to know anything about our narrator, Violet, or the portside town she inhabits. But I promise your reading experience will be enriched if you read the abovementioned works. Slatter is gradually and steadily developing her equivalent of the Marvel (Sourdough) Cin­ematic (Literary) Universe. The Crimson Road is the most overt example of this and all the more thrilling for it.

The Crimson Road takes us to the port city of St. Sinwin and into the thoughts of 20-year-old Violet Zennor. We meet Violet on the day her father, Hedrek, dies. She is not unhappy with this turn of events. For over a decade, her father, one of the wealthiest men in the city, has sought to mould his daughter into a weapon. The abuse, the pain, the denigration, all in service of a single mission: to journey to the Darklands in the north, find the Anchorhold – the home of an immensely powerful Leech Lord – and kill her brother. We’re told that thirteen years prior, her mother died giving birth to Violet’s sibling. Devastated by the loss, Hedrek is convinced by a stranger offering abundant wealth to sell the stillborn child. He discovers later, to his horror, that the corpse was taken to the Darklands as part of a prophecy that will unleash an all-powerful Leech Lord onto the rest of the world once Violet’s not-so-dead brother turns thirteen. For Hedrek, only one person can end the coming apocalypse: his daughter. Except now that he’s dead, now that Violet is free of his cruelty (whatever the justification), she has no intention of following through with his instructions, even if it means losing her inheritance to the Church. But then, assassins from the Darklands arrive at St. Sinwin and make Violet’s decision for her.

If that précis sounds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, don’t worry; it’s deliberate. Slatter tells us in an Author’s Note that while she was “determined for a very long time to never write a vampire story,” once she decided to take that dive, it was necessary (a) they not be called vampires, (b) that “I picked at what I knew about vampire lore… and worked out which bits I really liked” and (c) she take inspira­tion from gothic horror, Buffy, and “a bit of Eco’s The Name of the Rose.” The end product is a novel that wears those influences proudly but is also very much its own thing, drawing on a mythology that Slatter has been carefully and meticulously weav­ing for over 15 years.

A hallmark of Slatter’s prose is how much she packs into a small space without having to temper the natural elegance and the beauty of her autho­rial voice. Take her description of St Sinwin: “a sloping sort of town; built on a hillside that feeds down to the harbour, the entire place has a vague air of sliding into the sea,” which, in fewer than 25 words, paints a postcard picture of the place while also evoking a sense of instability, of everything falling apart, a state of mind that Violet can relate.

As for Violet, like all Slatter’s heroes, she is an exuberant character – a complicated mix of vulnerability and confidence. She is helped along by a fleshed-out group of peripheral characters, like Mrs. Medway, Temperance, Freddie, and Rab Cornish, all of whom are memorable in their own right. But the true joy of the novel, lovely writing and beating up Leech Lords aside, is the appearance of several familiar faces. I love how carefully these characters (you don’t expect me to mention them, do you?) have been integrated into the plot, to the extent that if you don’t recognise them (because foolishly you haven’t read the other Sourdough books), you won’t feel left out. But if you do know who they are, you might cheer. I know I did. The insertion of these old friends (to us, not Violet) is more than just fan service; the cross-over plays into the overarching themes that have come to shape the Sourdough Universe: The depiction of brilliant women working together to free themselves, to be independent of a patriarchal society, and the way storytelling and the myths, fables and dreams we share define us individually and as a community. I have no idea if The Crimson Road marks a new phase in the Sourdough Uni­verse where the links between the novels and short fiction become more noticeable. But whatever Slatter decides to do next, I’m here for it.

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This review and more like it in the February 2025 issue of Locus.

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