Title: The Library at Mount Char 
Author: Scott Hawkins
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Broadway Books
Publication Date: 2015
Format: Paperback
Length: 388 pages

Read if you like: genre-bending fantasy, murder and mysteries, horror-style events, science-based magic, revenge plots, black humour, major plot-twists

Rating: 

I feel like nothing could have prepared me for the ride that was The Library at Mount Char. The synopsis, while accurate, fails to capture the pure insanity and weirdness that is in this book, and I feel like I’m still reeling from the whole experience. 

Touted as a fantasy, to me, The Library at Mount Char was more of a genre-bending rollercoaster of a novel. Alternating between horror, mystery, and black humour, weaved around a cast of hyper-weird characters and even weirder circumstances, I had a full spectrum of emotions as I made my way through this book.

All this said: I loved it. It was wild and original and one of those rare instances where as a reader you can’t help but think “How the hell did someone even come up with this concept???” It was an intense and mind-bending experience and it is my most sincere hope that Scott Hawkins writes more weird and wild fantasy in the future for us to enjoy.

The Book Synopsis: The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

A missing God.

A library with the secrets to the universe.

A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away.

Carolyn’s not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts. After all, she was a normal American herself once.  

That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father. In the years since then, Carolyn hasn’t had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father’s ancient customs. They’ve studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they’ve wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God.  Now, Father is missing—perhaps even dead—and the Library that holds his secrets stands unguarded. And with it, control over all of creation.

As Carolyn gathers the tools she needs for the battle to come, fierce competitors for this prize align against her, all of them with powers that far exceed her own. But Carolyn has accounted for this. And Carolyn has a plan. The only trouble is that in the war to make a new God, she’s forgotten to protect the things that make her human.

The Review

This is one of the most unique books I’ve ever read and I’m still wrapping my brain around it.

Like I said earlier, the book is technically a fantasy, but it feels genre-bending in some ways. At times, it feels sci-fi-like, particularly in the more science-based version of magic or the alternate universe kind of premise that is ongoing. The gratuitous violence often feels like a horror, especially with the frequency that hits later in the book. There’s a murderous crime at the centre that feels like a mystery, and while I suspected some aspects, much of the major plot twists caught me by surprise. And then somehow, with all this going on, there’s also a decent amount of dark humour and wit. It’s one of those stories that you wonder how someone dreamt this up, how the premise was ideated and came to fruition because it’s so beyond anything I think I could have imagined on my own. There are so many components and stories and twists that you get a bit of whiplash as you rotate different perspectives and get to see snippets of how things are coming together. 

The characters were all interesting and unlikeable to varying degrees, and the “magic” that wasn’t magic was complex and mysterious in ways that never fully unravelled. Somehow, that never bothered me though—usually I like to understand the ins and outs of a magic system pretty thoroughly, but the way that this one is presented, from the start it just feels like you aren’t meant to know. You get windows into pieces of it, but most of it stays largely hidden behind the scenes with some vague scientific references. I loved this presentation, it suited the story perfectly. 

The plot was dense and it took a fair bit of time for the connections to start weaving together but once they did, I couldn’t put it down. Carolyn is presented as the main character, but it’s quite some time before you start to see her perspective more at the forefront, and many of the characters around her are so wildly insane and/or fascinating that I wasn’t even really thinking about her until the plot gets to such a point that you can’t ignore her any longer. That, in and of itself, was an incredibly clever twist to me, since this is exactly how she’s meant to be portrayed. I think most writers would struggle to pull this off the way that Hawkins does, and it was delightful to see it executed so perfectly. 

This novel was a ride that I wasn’t expecting and I loved every minute of it. I felt like the story was masterfully constructed, with everything from the world to the characters to the pacing all working together to create a perfectly executed narrative. This was an easy 5 stars for me and I’ll be eternally hopeful that we get future fantasy novels from Hawkins that have as much going on as this one did.