The West Passage by Jared Pechaček
This seems to be the first novel by Seattle-based author and Tolkien podcaster, Jared Pechaček. He is also an artist; the odd drawings at the start of each chapter—which look like the illuminations on an ancient manuscript—are all different, and done by the author. It’s an incredible first effort, beautifully written, strangely illustrated and bizarrely wonderful.

The West Passage has the melancholy feel of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, with it’s enormous, ancient halls, empty except for long-forgotten rituals and artifacts. It reminds me a bit of Crowley’s Engine Summer, where things that seem to be bits of old advanced technology are put to odd uses by people who have no idea what they really are. The nameless threat of “the Beast” lurking somewhere is also not a particularly new idea. But this Beast is revealed only in patches of remaining knowledge and seems hardly more dire than the dangers of the decay of a civilization from which entire branches of information have been lost. Put together, the story is utterly unique.
The young people who the story follows are cheerful and plucky, and naively uncaring of the dangers. There is Yarrow (who was Pell until her master died and passed on her name) and Kew (who should have, but somehow didn’t, become Hawthorne when his master, the last Guardian, died). They both grew up in the Grey Tower, where the women of Grey House conduct funerals and the single remaining Guardian trains her apprentice for a threat that seems non-existent.
Yarrow and Kew are teenagers whose masters died untimely, before full knowledge could be imparted to them. The reader has the impression that this is not the first time over the centuries this has happened, and that any knowledge they might have received would still have been incomplete and insufficient. They are sent on separate adventures, largely unaware that they are off on world-saving missions.
They show us a world enclosed by the immense towers of five castles. There are uncounted passages and stairways, chasms filled with garbage and jackals, and chambers the size of cities that house the Ladies who vie for power. There are vast, unused libraries and rooms full of inexplicable, dusty items. There are places where humans (or part humans) still try to fulfill their ancient roles, performing rituals whose meaning has been lost.
But it all starts, and ends, in the West Passage, where the legion of Guardians of the Grey Tower once fought the Beast, but are now reduced to one girl who knows nothing except ancient funeral songs and one apprentice who did not receive his name.
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