The woman without air shifts, makes a softly questioning sound.

Arahab understands the query, so she nods, and then she says, “I will tell you why. It is because of the thing that sleeps down below. He sleeps much farther down than I hold you now. He sleeps at the center of the world, almost. He sleeps beyond the touch of men, or machines, or even me. Or so I’ve come to fear. That thing that sleeps, he coils himself so tightly because he must – his size is so great, and his body so tremendous, that he scarcely fits within this world at all.”
- Fathom, by Cherie Priest

I first realized Cherie had me when she read to me.

Most book readings are tedious affairs; authors are generally crap at reading their own work, and you struggle to stay awake in those awful gaps between paragraphs. But when I ran across Cherie at Penguicon, she read a story about a supernatural fixer investigating some torn-up sheep…

…and she stopped.

When an author runs out of time at most book readings, you sigh with relief and move on with your life. But with Cherie, stopping in mid-story was like having the spoon yanked out of your hand just as the ice cream sundae arrived at your table. She actually had to issue an emergency post later from the torrent of people who had emailed her (including me) to tell us where the story had been published so we could find how it ended.

That is the kind of storyteller Cherie Priest is. And now she has her first hardcover book out. Who wouldn’t dash out to pick it up?

Cherie has a light, easy prose style that pulls you through her stories as easily as a boat tugs a waterskiier. She chooses her words with the deftness of a man making a beautiful mosaic, fitting just the correct word into a description to make it come alive. Her prose isn’t dense, but light and airy yet somehow filling.

I don’t want to tell you what Fathom is about, because I didn’t know myself until about two-thirds of the way through the book, and I liked not knowing all the things that the rude bookflap would have oh-so-casually spoiled for me. Fathom kept throwing new twists and turns at me where I went, “Okay, what’s happening now?” It felt like there was some underlying structure to it that I hadn’t quite twigged to, and even though I was on the plane and had a new movie I wanted to watch on my iPhone, I kept muttering, Just one more chapter.

The thing about Fathom is that it’s a joy to read because of its tone. Terrible things are happening, but there’s no horror to be found; instead, the book has a distant, engaging tone narrative voice that walks you through these dreadful things with a sense of “Oh, that’s curious, isn’t it?” Which is, in a sense, a lot more entertaining than a story that rubs your nose in the blood and wails how this is awful, awful, awful.

The characters are wonderfully defined, because most of the people in this book are monsters. Monsters generally get a bad rap; most authors give a monster one or two obvious hooks (I’m FULL OF BLOODLUST!) for you to remember them by and then they give you nothing else. The monsters and Gods in this book have distinctly inhuman powers and bizarre motivations, and some of them are so gigantically powerful that the other characters can barely interact with them, and yet they remain their own entities, fully-fleshed (or, in some cases, fully-mudded or fully-oceaned) and believable.

I realized that I didn’t want the book to end. Endings are often just as dull as author readings, where all the lovely surprises you get in the introduction can’t possibly be as good as the stuff that’s set up. And Fathom has such beautiful setups, such strange and wonderfully-described ideas, that much like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (a very different book, by the way), I regretted it as the messy tangles of the plot began to smooth themselves out into an actual ending.

If there’s any ding to be given to Fathom, it is in fact that the ending can’t quite live up to the delight of the first three hundred pages; it’s one of those times when getting the answers isn’t as cool as the theory. That doesn’t make it a bad ending by any means, but it does mean that the finish isn’t as good as the beginning (and the ending isn’t quite as character-specific as I’d like, though that may be a Clarion Workshop hangover).

That beginning, though, is well worth the rest of it.

This is, as I noted, Cherie’s first hardcover from a major press, and this is what can make or break her career. If you enjoy fiction at all and what I’ve written sounds interesting, then take the twenty bucks and buy yourself a copy immediately; the worst thing of all would be discover, years later, that this was the book you loved and then the author couldn’t write any more because she didn’t sell it.

And Cherie is the kind of author that, I assure you, you want to encourage.

(Tell me I'm full of it)