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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
In Eli Quinn’s Godless, every child is branded by a god at age nine, but Cal receives no mark and is cast outside the city’s sanctioned paths. Years later, while working near the Bone Market, he handles a relic taken from a corpse and awakens a spiral brand that should not exist. The mark draws power from all six divine domains, placing Cal between Varric, an Undervault power broker who studies illegal brands, and Eldrin Vale, a renegade scientist building false godmarks through human experiments. As Cal learns that his dead mother, Linnai Mercer, may have carried the truth of his origin, he must train the Godless Path before rival factions turn his body into their weapon. His target becomes the gods who shaped his life.
Eli Quinn’s Godless is incredibly creative speculative fiction, and the world-building is excellent. The post-collapse industrial future and Nirren Kai's ranked divine paths are fully fleshed out, and I love the Ring Seven, an outer zone with trade in unbranded corpse scraps. It's so macabre but so roped into the story's texture that it works. Cal is likeable and the perfect counter to the baddie Vale, who treats Cal’s Godless Path as the real-world equivalent of a lab rat. The author paints a scene where he pins a subject to a steel table and cuts into the glyph that's hair-raising in how diabolical it is. Where the author shines brightest is in the visual prose, from a freight depot near the Ring Six border to a barricaded yard where bone rigs hum beneath rail noise. Well written and immersive, readers who enjoy gorgeously grim science fantasy will adore this book, as I have. Very highly recommended.
