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Back in the summer of 2018, I read Rich Larson’s debut novel ANNEX and fell completely in love with that book. While I don’t recall there ever being an official cover reveal, somewhere along the way, the title (CYPHER) and cover art for the second book in the THE VIOLET WARS made its way online.

But then it was just…quiet. In doing a little digging while reading YMIR, I learned that at some point, THE VIOLET WARS was reimagined as a duology, and not as the trilogy it was originally planned to be. And then, according to an interview with Larson that I found, he just…could not get CYPHER in the kind of shape that it needed to be, and it doesn’t sound like the book will ever see the light of day. I’m not sure I can recall a situation like that, at least in terms of a book/series that I felt super emotionally invested in after the first book. It’s sad and disappointing, but that’s just how things go sometimes.

The upside to things is that Larson was able to rework his contract with Orbit in order to write YMIR, an extremely loose (according to the author) Beowulf retelling. I mention all that above because, due to some weird algorithmic nonsense (I guess?) there are plenty of places online that show YMIR as THE VIOLET WARS #2, but it very much is not that!

YMIR was one of those books I anticipated struggling with, or maybe just “not getting it,” since I’m largely unfamiliar with Beowulf (again, keep in mind the author’s own sentiments about this being an extremely loose retelling), and I fucking loved this book. It’s a harsh & brutal story in so many ways, but it’s got a propulsive page-turner quality to it, and I found myself flying through it…it’s also got super short chapters, if you’re into that…I am!

The book has a really cool cyberpunk feel, set on a bleak, dark, desolate ice planet. Survival on this world is tough, and our protagonist Yorick thought he had escaped his home world of Ymir forever. Yorick is a company man now, and a grendel hunter. Grendels are these vicious cybernetic beasts and you seriously do not want to run into one in a dark alley.

Getting the call to return to Ymir dredges up a whole lot of trauma for Yorick, after a violent episode with his brother left Yorick missing most of his lower mandible (replaced with a prosthetic). There’s a lot of flashbacks to Yorick’s childhood, and we see that he & his brother grew up in an extremely abusive environment. They were each other’s lifeline, until they became strangers. Possibly even enemies.

There are some pretty classic sci-fi tropes that Larson kind of turns into wildly fresh (and/or disgusting) new ideas. How many books have you read or movies have you watched where the character goes into some form of like, cryo-sleep or something? They go into a little pod, a spaceship takes them far away, and they stay the same age while x-amount of years pass them by? YMIR features a similar plot device, only in Rich Larson’s hands, it’s not so much a sterile sleeping pod as it is a giant pool filled with gross slime & a lot of bodies floating around in it, bumping into each other.

I mean, fucking yikes.

Body modification is a big theme in this, as it seems to be in a lot of Larson’s work. There’s a decent amount of…maybe not quite body horror, but also not not body horror. There’s a fair bit of squicky moments & bodily fluids & just…yeah. YMIR can be a bit gnarly that way.

This book is fucking wild & hard to really pin down. It is very darkly humorous, but also really sad & upsetting. I would definitely want people to go into it knowing there’s the aforementioned body horror stuff, as well as: child abuse, drug abuse, a lot of violence, and a very visceral suicide attempt.

This is the third Rich Larson book I’ve read (in addition to ANNEX and YMIR, I also read TOMORROW FACTORY, his collection of short stories), and I’m just a big fan. Really looking forward to whatever’s next from him!

Huge thanks to Orbit for sending this one my way!!