Dunmorian Worlds
The fantasy of Ian Dunmore
Today’s Champion post is written by , who tells us:
I’ve made no secret of my real-life friendship with
, but it would be a mistake to think that I champion his writing because I like the guy personally.If anything, our friendship only compounds the mercilessness of my criticism—as Ian will be the first to tell you.
Honesty (and trust) from an editor can be hard to come by. You might think that I offer that to Ian simply because he’s my friend. You’d be wrong.
Instead, I’ve spent I-don’t-know-how-many hours reading, pondering, and analyzing Dunmore’s stories for one simple reason: he’s a damn good storyteller.
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And now the Champion series:
Dunmorian Worlds
Recently Ian shared a draft with me and asked one of the most important questions a writer can ask: Do I have something here? Is this story worth pursuing?
I told him something that I’ve found myself saying more and more lately:
“You’ve got a solid story here, man. It’s very Dunmorian.”
What exactly do you mean by that? he asked.
Let me tell you.
Every piece of Dunmore’s fiction has its own poignant sense of place.
Lumping this feat under the word “setting” does it a disservice. The world of his stories is so irrevocably braided into his narratives that it functions like a character all on its own. That remains true whether the story brings us leaping over pure glacial streams or into the fecal gutters of an overpopulated city. It’s the kind of thing you can’t edit into a work—it has to be there at the first conception of thought.
Dunmore writes high fantasy. For the genre, setting is the fulcrum of the narrative; if the setting fails, the story fails. Most of us fantasists settle for a secondary world which won’t break the story, and if we’re lucky it will add a memorable flavor.
Dunmore puts that standard to shame. His settings don’t add a bit of flavor, they add backbone. They are like bedrock beneath the narrative. Even when the fantastical arrives—in the form of a ghost, or a werewolf, or a spellcasting presbyter—it usually feels like finding the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The shape of the picture was already there, but only now is it seamless.
The distinct sense of place is a hint of something deeper within Dunmore’s writing; paradoxical as it sounds, he often manages to craft a fiction of unbridled reality.
Yes, even in fantasy.
A Dunmorian story is one that contains exactly zero sugarcoating, but never reaches for cheap shock value. More importantly, it does not bend to the lazy, grimdark nihilism of other so-called “realistic” fantasy.
Sometimes, the unbridled reality takes the gritty form of a character accidentally urinating on another man…
When I swung to regard him, so drunk was I that I brought my golden stream with me and blessed the highwaymen’s shank with its warmth. (A Luten in the City)
Sometimes, it appears more poetically in those moments of breath between faster action…
The pottage continued to seethe upon the small brick oven, its aroma mixing unpleasantly with the soldiers’ damp equipment laid out to dry by its heat. Rain danced on the roof. Somewhere outside a bolt pulsed from the sky and drew the white shape of shutters on the opposite wall. Hammerstrike followed. (How a Magister Fights)
Often, the reality of a story is bone-deep. It shows up in humanity’s willingness to kill, rob, pillage. But it also shows through tiny acts of charity—a bit of bread for a starving girl, strong drink for a freezing man—that bring redemption greater than suffering. It can show up both in the death of the innocent and in a character’s resolute choice of hope over despair.
On a more specific level, I appreciate Dunmore’s commitment to the craft of prose writing and the commitment to play to the strengths of the written medium. In “Wyrmslayer,” he displays the grotesque appearance of serpentine monsters while also implying the grim barbarity required to slay them. Then, using only a series of images in a character’s mind, he shows that character’s past, motives, wounds, insecurities, and failures.
“Esteemed subjects and friends,” he began. The hall echoed with cheers. […] He faltered as he looked at their faces. Two hundred men stared at him. Among them, he was youngest. He had trained for this hunt for over a year, yet here at the start of his journey he felt not a speck of the brimming virility this whole company seemed to embody. Every step, every toast, every morsel of food on this journey was as choreographed as a court dance, as empty as the nag’s gaze, as shallow as the rain puddles on the flagstones.
He thought of his mother and her smothering affection. He thought of the tears she’d shed when the expedition had cast off from Vilkinia’s quay a few days prior, and the mortification he’d felt at her bawling even as the fleet left port. He thought of his father, who hadn’t even bothered to be there, likely in another town with another of his many mistresses, busily producing more bastards.
Rain tapped on stone. Burning logs popped and spat. Smoke drifted into the young man’s eyes. Surely, it was smoke. Why else would he be smudging away tears? Why else would the Guardsman put an arm around him and mercifully ushered him away? Why else would the lodge’s merriment have ended so soon and so somberly?
Other writers would bend their narratives to “show” these things or would find ways to shove all this into dialogue. Not Dunmore, because he uses prose do things visual media cannot. And the story is all the more intimate for that.
Prose, of course, often comes down to taste. There are those who use prose to show a movie in the reader’s head, leaving the medium’s unique tools unused. There are also those who stretch every sentence to the edge of its own logic—speaking almost entirely in metaphor—as a way to get the most out of every word. Personally, I prefer neither. I want both, interspersed. It’s what I think delivers the best impact for most stories. Dunmorian prose hits that mark.
I’ll tell you one more thing I love about a Dunmore story: it will always give you something new.
It’s all high fantasy, but he can tackle disparate subjects and story structures. It’s something many writers strive for but few accomplish.
Everything I said above was about depth, but Dunmore has breadth too.
In his corpus of work you can find first-person ghost stories and third-person action-adventures. You can find stories that read like dark fairy-tales, and monster thrillers packed with symbolism and ethnic division. A Dunmore story might be interspersed with metered poetry or with philosophical treaties.
I’m afraid I’m making it sound eclectic. It’s not. Each of these conceits serves the story in which it lives. Nothing is extra. There are tragedies and comedies. Happy endings and melancholic ones.
And under it all is that same bedrock of place and realism.
Not sure what else to say. I just think it works!
They say you should write the sorts of stories that you want to read. That motivation doesn’t work for me all that well, because Ian Dunmore is writing those stories faster than I am. You should read them.
— Eric Falden
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