What do you think?
Rate this book
Jackelian #6
[From the Deep of the Dark] [By: Hunt, Stephen] [September, 2012]
The sixth marvellous tale of high adventure and derring-do from the master of steampunk literature, set in the world of The Court of the AirA daring underwater chase ends in a battle for the Kingdom itself…The streets of Middlesteel are under attack by an unseen enemy, leaving bloodless corpses in its trail. The newssheets scream vampire, but the truth is even more deadly than anyone knows.Charlotte Shades, Mistress of Mesmerism, is a thief – and a darned good one at that. When two mysterious men ask her to steal King Jude’s Sceptre from the Parliament vaults, the challenge (and reward) is too great to pass up. After all, Charlotte’s natural charm and the magic of the gem she wears – the mysterious Eye of Fate – have never failed her before.Only consulting detective Jethro Daunt and his steamman companion Boxiron know there’s more to these two men than meets the eye. Yet even as they rescue Charlotte from a fate worse than death, they are thrown into a plot thicker than even they realize. They escape beneath the waves in an ancient submarine led by Commodore Jethro Black, where they encounter stiff resistance from the strange people who inhabit the vast underwater kingdoms. But man, woman, seanore and gillneck alike must band together if they are to defeat a danger that might not even be from this world…
Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
14 people are currently reading
517 people want to read
About the author
Stephen Hunt
287 books345 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Stephen Hunt is a British writer living in London. His first fantasy novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, was published in 1994, and introduced a young officer, Taliesin, fighting for the Queen of England in a Napoleonic period alternative reality where the wars of Europe were being fought with sorcery and steampunk weapons (airships, clockwork machine guns, and steam-driven trucks called kettle-blacks). The novel won the 1994 WH Smith Award, and the book reviewer Andrew Darlington used Hunt's novel to coin the phrase Flintlock Fantasy to describe the sub-genre of fantasy set in a Regency or Napoleonic-era period.
Stephen Hunt is a British writer living in London. His first fantasy novel, For the Crown and the Dragon, was published in 1994, and introduced a young officer, Taliesin, fighting for the Queen of England in a Napoleonic period alternative reality where the wars of Europe were being fought with sorcery and steampunk weapons (airships, clockwork machine guns, and steam-driven trucks called kettle-blacks). The novel won the 1994 WH Smith Award, and the book reviewer Andrew Darlington used Hunt's novel to coin the phrase Flintlock Fantasy to describe the sub-genre of fantasy set in a Regency or Napoleonic-era period.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
August 19, 2012
As I've said before, one of my favorite things about Stephen Hunt's Jackelian series is the way that each book uses an entirely different assortment of tropes from Victorian literature. This, the sixth and, I believe, final volume in the series is no exception, bringing in elements of Sherlock Holmes and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, amongst others. Yet again, the Kingdom of Jackals and, in fact, the entire world is menaced, this time by a conspiracy hatched at the very bottom of the deepest part of the ocean, a conspiracy fought by a mixture of returning characters (Commodore Jared Black most notably) and new arrivals. As ever, Hunt's worldbuilding is wildly imaginative as we travel from familiar locations to lost islands and deep beneath the surface of the sea. (It also becomes increasingly apparent that the Jackelian world is, in fact, our own, albeit several million years or more in the future -- long enough for the world to be populated by any number of mechanical races and mutant offshoots of humanity.)
July 28, 2016
Quite a spectacular ending to the Jackelian Series. And, rather unexpectedly, at the end, I could imagine the late Lemmy Kilmister as Jared Black and read the commodore's last lines in Lemmy's voice. Thank you for another memorable novel, Mr. Stephen Hunt!
January 1, 2019
This might be my favorite of Hunt's Jackelian series. I say that about most of the books in this series, though - it's one of the few series where I have a hard time picking out a weak addition. What I love about this series is how Hunt uses fantasy steampunk tropes to highlight a different Victorian literary type with each book. With From the Deep of the Dark, Hunt combines two of my favorite types - the mystery novel and the deep sea monster adventure - into a really fun and twisty story. And it ends up being an inter-dimensional alien invasion tale - very Lovecraft! And now I want nothing more than a tv show about Sherlock Holmes vs. the Old Ones.
August 19, 2019
God this was an awful book. So boring and hard to get through. I had to put it aside for three months to convince myself to finish it, and honestly, it was not worth it. I should've just left it when I did and never gone back. It was so confusing and hard to follow, most of the time I couldn't even tell what was going on. I still don't know what that ending was. Huge waste of time and paper.
May 24, 2018
A spectacular end to a marvelous series!
November 21, 2019
Good to see Daunt, Boxiron & Black back. Seriously creepy and dangerous bad guys, some great new characters and a good ending. Next please!
December 21, 2020
One more to go as this whole series has been an entertaining romp through a mix of storylines and genres.
September 4, 2012
So we've reached this, what I would like to call the end of the Jackelian saga. I can't confirm that there won't be any more, and Hunt has written himself into corners in about four out of the six books in this series to date, but this is as logical a place to call it quits as any.
If you've read all six of these novels, you'll know that Hunt likes to revisit familiar ground, and so this is a remix of elements of The Kingdom Beyond The Waves and Rise of the Iron Moon, although mercifully more covert than that last one. Jared Black, along with an assortment of faces half old and half new, is entangled in a covert war masquerading as an overt war. The very bottom of the ocean will have to be scraped to solve this one, and countless nameless citizens will have to die so that Hunt can deliver a result.
The characters in From the Deep of the Dark are more sympathetic and more serviceable than Hunt has wielded for a while. Those on the side of the angels are treated well and mostly have their moments to shine; Hunt even has the decency to give a new flavour to betrayal and brave sacrifice this time out. Sadly, the villains are something of a morass by design, and Gemma Dark, villainous sister of Old Blacky, doesn't get near as much play as she deserves. By making large parts of this story about Black rather than merely having him tag along as the sole thread linking all six of these books, Hunt has raised expectations for the characters relating (and related) to him. By calling back to the strongest chapter of the saga, and by specifically invoking the name of Bull, Hunt makes Gemma seem all the weaker by comparison.
Black has been the heart of these books, and so to see his position in the series gradually weaken (or not make sense, as his brief tenure as a Aerial Naval officer pretty much didn't) has been painful. Hunt has at last tried to tie together Black's evolving feelings on the monarchy, but he doesn't quite get there. Were it not for the traditional epilogue, the ending of this novel would be both fitting and a squib. But who knows if this is truly the cap?
While the Jackelian series isn't a write off (although Jack Cloudie is so ridiculously close to crashing into the ditch of offensively conceived fantasy ideas you have to read it with your finger poised on the ejector button), it is clear that the world Hunt has created was at its deepest and most developed. As the series progressed beyond the first two flavoursome entries, Hunt added more and more ideas without lending any real weight to them. A half-glimpsed new society, barely mentioned in the previous novels (but at least, unlike the Pericurians of Secrets of the Fire Sea, you get the impression the gill-necks have existed all along) is implemented in place of something established for the reader to hang onto. The Court of the Air material is strong, the Advocacy is not. This book is the traditional mixed bag but there's definitely something to it if you've made it this far.
Strangely, despite this being another "the fate of the very world hangs in the balance" novel, the stakes seem dangerously low. Perhaps Hunt doesn't juggle a lot of balls. Perhaps the threat coming from the bottom of the ocean isn't described ominously enough. But for now, at least, Jared Black can rest.
If you've read all six of these novels, you'll know that Hunt likes to revisit familiar ground, and so this is a remix of elements of The Kingdom Beyond The Waves and Rise of the Iron Moon, although mercifully more covert than that last one. Jared Black, along with an assortment of faces half old and half new, is entangled in a covert war masquerading as an overt war. The very bottom of the ocean will have to be scraped to solve this one, and countless nameless citizens will have to die so that Hunt can deliver a result.
The characters in From the Deep of the Dark are more sympathetic and more serviceable than Hunt has wielded for a while. Those on the side of the angels are treated well and mostly have their moments to shine; Hunt even has the decency to give a new flavour to betrayal and brave sacrifice this time out. Sadly, the villains are something of a morass by design, and Gemma Dark, villainous sister of Old Blacky, doesn't get near as much play as she deserves. By making large parts of this story about Black rather than merely having him tag along as the sole thread linking all six of these books, Hunt has raised expectations for the characters relating (and related) to him. By calling back to the strongest chapter of the saga, and by specifically invoking the name of Bull, Hunt makes Gemma seem all the weaker by comparison.
Black has been the heart of these books, and so to see his position in the series gradually weaken (or not make sense, as his brief tenure as a Aerial Naval officer pretty much didn't) has been painful. Hunt has at last tried to tie together Black's evolving feelings on the monarchy, but he doesn't quite get there. Were it not for the traditional epilogue, the ending of this novel would be both fitting and a squib. But who knows if this is truly the cap?
While the Jackelian series isn't a write off (although Jack Cloudie is so ridiculously close to crashing into the ditch of offensively conceived fantasy ideas you have to read it with your finger poised on the ejector button), it is clear that the world Hunt has created was at its deepest and most developed. As the series progressed beyond the first two flavoursome entries, Hunt added more and more ideas without lending any real weight to them. A half-glimpsed new society, barely mentioned in the previous novels (but at least, unlike the Pericurians of Secrets of the Fire Sea, you get the impression the gill-necks have existed all along) is implemented in place of something established for the reader to hang onto. The Court of the Air material is strong, the Advocacy is not. This book is the traditional mixed bag but there's definitely something to it if you've made it this far.
Strangely, despite this being another "the fate of the very world hangs in the balance" novel, the stakes seem dangerously low. Perhaps Hunt doesn't juggle a lot of balls. Perhaps the threat coming from the bottom of the ocean isn't described ominously enough. But for now, at least, Jared Black can rest.
October 30, 2013
Definitely a step up from the last book and a fitting finish to the series, though as with all the others, it could easily stand on its own. After Court of the Air it seemed that the world had change sufficiently for most epic fantasy series to put a stamp on it and call it done, but Hunt wasn't done. He went on. He put forth epic cataclysms in one book after another. But then suddenly with the last two (4 and 5), the stakes went down. While there isn't anything really wrong with that, it made the world seem suddenly smaller, less amazing, pedestrian. Granted, this is in comparison to what came before since even those later books were more ambitious than many fantasies I've read both in scope and wonder.
And let's face it, that sense of wonder is a huge reason many of us read fantasy to begin with. We want a world bigger and more wondrous than our own and Hunt delivers that over and over.
Here we get more superscience, more creeping evil, more of the wonder that felt absent in the Cassarabia expedition. But while Boxiron and Daunt and even Dick Tull are fleshed out and explored well (possibly due to being recurring in the case of the detective and the steamman), Charlotte felt a bit neglected and therefore shallow. It's too bad too, because she's an intriguing concept that deserved more narrative time and attention than she got. I suppose that's a risk anytime you have an ensemble cast the way these books often do, but she doesn't resonate the way Molly or Amelia or Purity did.
At any rate, I'm happy that Hunt wrote these. I've had a fantastic time reading them and wholeheartedly recommend the entirety of the series to anyone that enjoys epic high fantasy and steam punk fiction, though I use both terms loosely.
And let's face it, that sense of wonder is a huge reason many of us read fantasy to begin with. We want a world bigger and more wondrous than our own and Hunt delivers that over and over.
Here we get more superscience, more creeping evil, more of the wonder that felt absent in the Cassarabia expedition. But while Boxiron and Daunt and even Dick Tull are fleshed out and explored well (possibly due to being recurring in the case of the detective and the steamman), Charlotte felt a bit neglected and therefore shallow. It's too bad too, because she's an intriguing concept that deserved more narrative time and attention than she got. I suppose that's a risk anytime you have an ensemble cast the way these books often do, but she doesn't resonate the way Molly or Amelia or Purity did.
At any rate, I'm happy that Hunt wrote these. I've had a fantastic time reading them and wholeheartedly recommend the entirety of the series to anyone that enjoys epic high fantasy and steam punk fiction, though I use both terms loosely.
May 29, 2013
There was nothing precisely wrong with this book - it just failed to totally grip my attention. Probably this was partly aided by the elaborately constructed world, which is huge and diverse and interesting, but which has been introduced in bits and bobs in the previous fie instalments, as have the characters. And I have not read those books. This is the only Stephan Hunt book I have ever read. The plot was interesting, and as I have mentioned: the world is very well developed, but I could not properly immerse myself in it. In the future, I might be inclined to pick up the earlier volumes and see how they go.
October 8, 2014
Stephen Hunt is one of my favorite authors. This book continues his steampunk writing in the Jacklian universe, which may or may not be the earth somewhere in our distant future. Another great adventure bringing back old characters and new ones. One of his greatest literary inventions are the Steam Men and their Loas (gods). With names like BoxIron and Coppertracks how can you go wrong?
March 20, 2013
Loved it! took a little bit to get over some of the gaps in the story, but considering the amount of time covered in the book I can understand why the gaps were there. Excellent author for anybody that's a fan of steampunk!
January 26, 2013
missing them...
June 16, 2012
Argh. I read book 6 before book 5... so dumb.
Terribly interesting though.
Terribly interesting though.
September 20, 2012
I enjoyed this thoroughly. Even more than the previous books in the series.
December 30, 2014
I still wouldn't want to live in this world, ever.
This seems like this was the final chapter with our friends in Jackels. I've enjoyed the series quite a bit.
This seems like this was the final chapter with our friends in Jackels. I've enjoyed the series quite a bit.
August 21, 2013
An excellent book. You don't who's going to live or die and the ending is neat indeed.
August 28, 2014
I'm going to miss our friends.
June 8, 2015
A few too many deux ex machinas. Stylish though.
Read
November 26, 2018Crap
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews