Review: A Trade of Blood

A Trade of Blood by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Robert Jackson Bennett confuses me, because I shouldn't like his books, and yet I do. In fact, I consistently rank them among the best books I've read in a given year.

This is basically SF/horror/mystery in a setting that feels like fantasy because the technology is biotechnology, and the mechanical tech is at a medieval/renaissance level, like a lot of fantasy books. I am not at all a horror reader. I usually favour cozy fantasy or cozy mystery, and this couldn’t be less similar in most ways. But what it has that cozy fantasy usually falls very short on is a high concept and a richly developed setting, and what it has in common with my more usual reading is that Din, the viewpoint character, is at heart a decent person doing his best in bad circumstances. And the mystery is well done, too.

There's extensive gore and mass murder and a gritty, oppressive-feeling empire full of people (and animals and plants) that have been horribly distorted by the biotechnology - derived from massive kaiju, though that doesn't come into this book as directly as in the previous ones in the series. It features a sweary, ill-tempered, annoying detective and her sad-boy assistant, who’s just discovered that the time when he’ll go mad from his bioenhancements is probably not as far away as he’d hoped. Also, fungal mind control.

And yet Bennett does it so well (and somehow conveys that he, too, hates how the world is, rather than celebrating it in a torture-porn sort of way like, say, Terry Goodkind) that I can’t help wanting to read it anyway.

There's a strong theme, for instance, of the cattle industry, which is the dominant industry in the area of the action, being not only wasteful of resources but also morally degrading, because of the way in which it normalises the suffering and slaughter of living creatures.

It isn't perfect, certainly. There are too many exclamation points in the dialog, too many commas between adjectives that aren't coordinate, the occasional number disagreement between subject and verb, and a couple of words that don't mean what the author thinks they mean. (I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, so some of this may be fixed before publication.) But none of these things much inhibited my enjoyment of an excellently-crafted story with top-notch worldbuilding.

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