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Scar Night Hardcover – December 26, 2006
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The last of his line, Dill is descended from legendary Battle-archons who once defended the city. Forbidden to fly and untrained even to wield the great sword inherited from his forebears, he has become a figurehead for a dying tradition. Now he lives a sheltered existence in one of Deepgate’s crumbling temple spires under the watchful eye of the Presbyter who rules the city.
Spine assassin Rachel Hael has better things to do than oversee the Presbyter’s angel. Each dark moon she must fight for her life among the city chains, hunting an immortal predator with a taste for blood.
But when a traitor brings enemies to Deepgate’s doorstep, Dill and Rachel are forced into an uneasy alliance with the city’s oldest and most dangerous foe. They must journey down into the uncharted chasm to save their sprawling metropolis—and themselves—from annihilation. Once they descend however, they learn that what lies below is far more sinister than what they’ve been taught to expect.
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSpectra
- Publication dateDecember 26, 2006
- Dimensions6.44 x 1.25 x 9.55 inches
- ISBN-100553384163
- ISBN-13978-0553384161
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“[A] stunning debut…. Campbell has Neil Gaiman's gift for lushly dark stories and compelling antiheroes.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"A chain-wrapped industrial city so real you can feel the iron and smell the fumes—and a violent tale told in murderously beautiful prose."—Sharon Shinn, author of Archangel
"Vividly imagined, visceral and intensely involving...a stunning debut. I can’t wait to see what follows in the next volume."—Sarah Ash, author of the Tears of Artamon series
“With undead armies, psychotic angels and exploding airships, Scar Night is a gripping, ripping yarn which rattles along at a great pace. Tether all that to the knock-out image at the heart of the novel—Deepgate, a Gothic city built on a network of chains over a great abyss—and you have urban fantasy at its best.”—Hal Duncan, author of Vellum
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
DILL
Twilight found the city of Deepgate slouched heavily in its chains. Townhouses and tenements relaxed into the tangled web of ironwork, nodded roofs and chimneys across gently creaking lanes. Chains tightened or stretched around cobbled streets and hanging gardens. Crumbling towers listed over glooming courtyards, acknowledging their mutual decay. Labyrinths of alleys sagged under expanding pools of shadow; all stitched with countless bridges and walkways, all swaying, groaning, creaking.
Mourning.
As the day faded, the city seemed to exhale. A breeze from the abyss sighed upwards through the sunken mass of stone and chain, spilled over Deepgate's collar of rock, and whistled through rusted groynes half-buried in sand. Dust-devils rose in the Deadsands beyond, dancing wildly under the darkening sky, before dissolving to nothing.
Lamplighters were moving through the streets below, turning the city into a bowl of stars. Lanterns on long poles waved and dipped. Brands flared. Gas lamps brightened. From the district known as the League of Rope, right under the abyss rim, and down through the Workers' Warrens to Lilley and the lanes of Bridgeview, lights winked on among thickets of chain. Chains meshed the streets, wrapped around houses or punctured them, linking, connecting, weaving cradles to hold the homes where the faithful waited to die.
Now all across the city, sounds heralded the approach of night: shutters drawn, bolted with a clunk and snap; doors locked, buttressed; padlocks clicked shut. Grates slammed down over chimney tops, booming distantly in all quarters. Then silence. Soon only the echoes of the lamplighters' footsteps could be heard, hurried now, as they retreated into the shadowy lanes around the temple.
The Church of Ulcis rose unchallenged from the heart of Deepgate, black as a rip in the blood-red sky. Stained glass blazed in its walls. Rooks wheeled around its spires and pinnacles. Gargoyles crowded dizzy perches among flying buttresses, balconies, and crenellated crowns. Legions of the stone-winged beasts stared out beyond the city, facing towards the Deadsands: sneering, grinning, furious.
Lost amidst these heights, a smaller, stunted spire rose from the shadows. Ivy sheathed its walls, smothered one side of a balcony circling the very top. Only a peaked slate hat broke completely free of the vegetation, skewed but shining in the waning light. A rusted weathervane creaked round and round, as if not knowing quite where to point.
Clinging to this weathervane was a boy.
He hugged the iron with thin white arms. Tufts of hair shivered behind his ears. His nightshirt fluttered and flapped like a tattered flag. For a long time he held on, all elbows and knees, turning regularly with the weathervane, studying the surrounding spires with quick, nervous eyes. His toes were cold and he was filthy.
But Dill was happy.
Warily, he stood upright. The north-south crossbar tilted under his bare feet, moaned in protest. Rust crumbled, murmured down the slates below. A flock of rooks broke around him, screaming, then uncoiled skywards to scatter among the gargoyles and jewelled glass. Dill watched them go, and grinned from one pink ear to the other.
Alone.
He took a deep, hungry breath, and another, and then unfurled his wings and let the air gather under his feathers. Muscles in his back tightened. Blood rushed through his veins, reached into his outstretched wings. The wind buoyed him, tugged him playfully, daring him to let go. He leaned out and threw back his head, eyes bright. The weathervane spun him like a carousel. An updraught swelled under him. He flexed his wings, straightened them, and pulled down on them. His feet lifted and he laughed.
Someone hissed.
A hooded figure hunched at a window, yellow lantern raised.
Dill scrambled to clutch the weathervane to his heaving chest. He folded his wings tight and dropped to a crouch, heart thumping.
The figure hovered for a while, the shadow of its cowl reaching like a talon over the temple's steeply canted roofs. Then the figure lowered the lantern and moved away.
Dill watched the priest's shadow flit over the glass before the same window went dark. A hundred heartbeats passed while he clung there shivering. How long had the priest been there? What had he seen? Had he just then happened to pass by, or had he been hiding there in the room, waiting, watching, spying?
And would he inform on Dill?
The tracery of scars on Dill's back suggested he certainly might.
I didn't fly. I wasn't going to fly. He'd only unfurled his wings to feel the wind. That was all. That wasn't forbidden.
Still shaking, Dill climbed down from the weathervane and squatted where the moss-covered cone capped the surrounding slates. At once there seemed to be watchers hovering at every window, hooded faces scrutinizing him from all around, unseen lips whispering lies that would find their way back to the Presbyter himself. Dill felt blood rise in his cheeks. He tore free a scrap of moss and feigned interest in it, scrunching it in his palm without feeling it, examining it without seeing it. As he let it go, the wind snatched it and carried it out over Deepgate.
It was said that once, you could have stood on the lip of the abyss and peered into the darkness below the city with nothing but the foundation chains between you and the fathomless depths. A sightglass, perhaps, might have offered views of the ghosts far below–but not now. The great chains were still down there, somewhere, hidden beneath the city that a hundred generations of pilgrims had built. But time had seen cross-chains, cables, ropes, girders, struts, and beams grow like roots through those ancient links. Buildings had been raised or hung, bridges and walkways suspended, until Deepgate had smothered its own foundations.
Dill lifted one calloused foot and thumped it down. A slate shattered under his heel. He picked up a fist-sized chunk of it and swung his arm to throw it at the window. But he stopped in time. The windows were old, maybe even as old as the temple and the foundation chains. As old as the roof tile he'd just broken, he thought miserably. Instead he hurled the slate into the sunset and listened hard to hear whether it hit anything before falling into the abyss beneath the city.
Glass shattered in the distance.
He flopped back, not caring if he crushed his feathers, and gazed past the twinkling streets to where the Deadsands stretched like rumpled silk to the horizon. Purple thunderheads towered in the west, limned in gold. To the east, the Dawn Pipes snaked into the desert, and there a ripple of silver in the sky caught his attention. He sat up.
An airship was purging its ribs for descent, venting hot air from the fabric strips around the liftgas envelope. Turning as it descended, it lumbered toward the Deepgate shipyards, abandoning the caravan it had escorted in from the river towns. The caravan threaded its way between water and waste pipes, the camels trailing plumes of sand. Behind the merchants, a line of pilgrims shuffled in their shackles between two ranks of mounted missionary guards.
"See you tomorrow," Dill murmured, but he didn't really imagine he would. It would be days before the pilgrims died.
Darkness was creeping into the sky now, pierced by the first evening stars, and so he slid the rest of the way down the roof, hitting the gutter with a thump and a tussle of feathers. A rotting trellis, overgrown with ivy, formed a rustling, snapping ladder back down to his balcony. When his feet finally found solid stone, he was shaking more than ever.
Once inside, he closed all four of the bolts in the balcony door, then checked the window, making sure both locks were also tight. The fire was uneasily low, and deep shadows lurked at the edges of his room. Dill piled on more coals, then knelt before the hearth, prodding them with a poker. The fire snapped and popped and sparkled briefly, billowing heat. Orange embers spiralled up the flue; coals crumbled and settled. He tapped the poker against the iron-toothed fender, and hung it back on its hook. Then he took an armful of the big temple candles from their chest and circled his cell, lighting each with a taper from the fire before pressing it down on yesterday's melted stub, where it would best keep the night at bay.
When he was satisfied, he looked up to the wall above the mantle, to the sword.
His sword.
He raced over to the weapon and slid it free from its mount. His soot-smeared fingers barely managed to close around the leather-bound hilt, but that didn't worry him. Tomorrow he would wear it, all the same. Firelight washed over the curved hand guard and blade. He dipped the sword and raised it again, measuring the solid weight of it. It was still too big for him, too heavy, but he took a step back, thrust forward the blade, and raised his other hand the way all great swordsmen supposedly did. His nightshirt sleeve slipped down to his elbow. The sword tip wobbled.
It took a moment to muster his grimmest expression. He covered his uneven teeth with his lip, thrust out his chin, and spread his wings.
"Are you afraid?" he asked the wall.
His brow furrowed as he swished the sword through the air, once, twice.
"Do you fear this weapon? Or its wielder?" He arched an eyebrow. "My name?" He snorted, rubbed a sooty hand on his nightshirt. "That doesn't matter. I'm an archon of the Church of Ulcis, Warden to the Hoarder of Souls." He hesitated, thinking. "And mortal blood of his Herald, Callis."
That sounded right.
In his mind's eye, an army of heathens advanced, sword hilts drumming on their shields. They cried out in voices edged with fear:
One archon against a hundred warriors.
"A hundred?" Dill laughed. "No wonder you tremble." With a twist of his w...
Product details
- Publisher : Spectra (December 26, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0553384163
- ISBN-13 : 978-0553384161
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.44 x 1.25 x 9.55 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,719,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #596 in American Horror
- #183,757 in Fantasy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Alan Campbell was born in Falkirk, Scotland, and grew up there, before moving on to study Computer Science at Edinburgh University. Before writing, he previously worked as a software engineer for various companies, developing numerous games including the Grand Theft Auto series.
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The reason I tell that story is so you can understand that the bits I did read were good enough that I never forgot about them after nearly ten years of waiting to finish the damn thing. The fact that I'm awful at finding time to read didn't diminish my desire to keep reading this book.
The writing itself is beautifully descriptive. The author is fully capable of describing complex action scenes in a way that allows you to fully absorb the magnitude of it all. This is especially nice when you've got angels fighting airborne battles with crazy stuff crashing down all around them.
The plot itself is fun and full of thinky moments that force you to reconsider how you feel about characters.
It got a little sleepy on occasion when I was reading about characters I had no attachment to, but I get like that with almost every book.
Overall, it's a really book and was absolutely worth buying twice and keeping on the back of my disorganized mind for a decade.
The concept is an interesting concept. Fallen angels living in a chain city. The promise behind such a premise was enough to make me continue on and read to find out. But this is where the story begins to falter because of where the angels live. Two of them, a young angel and an immensely old angel, live in a city held together by chains above the abyss. This could be good as an intermediary to hell down below. The problem is that the city is held by chains, but it is connected to land. People live in squalor and fear, when all they have to do is walk away from the city and build their own community on land with deserts, trees, seas you name it. So what is the point of having a city suspended above the abyss? It makes no sense at all. Presumably because the city was put there to guard the abyss and as some sort of religious pretext for why their god chose that spot and built that city. But this is hard to get over, especially with an angry tribe marching to destroy the city.
Two other parts that ruin the book. A poisoner is somehow privy to exactly how Deepgate's military will fight and knows exactly how and what they will do militarily and politically. The logic behind this is just not there, leaving you with a flimsy reason to further the story. Finally the book culminates with a mad group of decaying angels (which, by the way, did have promise and it would have been much better if we would have seen more of them and what they could have done) flying after the two other angels out of the abyss. Yup, flying to the surface with no restrictions. So what is the point of staying in the abyss with no light, food or anything else except decaying flesh and dead bodies? None apparently, but it helped to facilitate the story so it was added to it.
I really can't say that I enjoyed Scar Night, although I won't necessarily go so far as to say it was horrible. It is a decent first book with a ton of room for improvement. I may read the next in the series if only to see if his writing improves and to see if the decaying angels make another appearance. Not a recommend.
2.5 stars.
Top reviews from other countries
The storytelling is excellent, and gallops through what looks like a huge text of 550 pages, towards an ending that actually comes all to soon. It's thoroughly enjoyable, mostly because the author skillfully keeps us entertained by providing an almost film-like skipping between characters, but also becuase of the characters themselves. Each of them is strong, clearly defined, and likeable in their own way, even the sinister or misguided ones. Dill is the only surviving angel in Deepgate, bar the monstrous scarred fallen demi-god Carnival, who hurls herself about the city in her rage every Scar Night, when the moon is darkest, to feed her unslakable bloodthirst. Rachel is an assassin-in-training, leather-bound and skillful despite having not taken her initiation into the sinister society of the Spine. Devon is the Chief Poisoner of the Poison Kitchens, a smoky, toxic quarter of the city devoted to the development and distribution of deadly substances to the assassins of the church. And Mr Nettle is the hulking father of a dead girl, whose soul has been taken for a sinister purpose; he only wants to get it back, and will do whatever is necessary.
I can't praise this book enough. It's essentially flawless, apart from the odd page of clumsy exposition, but in a volume this size it's forgivable. Recommended to all fans of the grimy fantasy style of authors like China Mieville, of whom this book is strongly reminiscent. For a debut, this title is remarkably accomplished and genuinely unmissable. Thankfully, a second volume in what has become a series is already available - "Iron Angel".
9.5 / 10
The world of Deepgate, balanced on its chains over the Abyss of Ulcis, is brilliantly portrayed. The `pure' dead of Deepgate are sent to the Abyss to their god, but those who die in an `unnatural' way, particularly those finished off by the mysterious Carnival, are doomed. This is the way of life, and has been for as long as the Church has been in control. But in this story we find things start to change, with the Angel Dill, and Mr Nettle, and the Poisoner Devon among others, making decisions that will alter Deepgate for ever.
What seems to start off as quite a `nice' book turns rapidly into a dark novel of hate, greed, ambition, destruction and rather gruesome nastiness. When I finished the book I thought that really every character in the story carried with them scars and nightmares - not one character was free from darkness of one sort or another.
This was absolutely brilliant to read, and I think it would be great to see visually - perhaps in a mini series. Evocative, thoughtful, exciting, horrifying, wonderful and leaves the reader really eager to read the next in the series. Totally recommended to anyone looking for a new, fresh series to read.
However in this field of fantasy writing is a corner that is forever Deepgate! A very weird, slightly disturbing gothic fantasy / horror highbred. Very original though the early chapters more than tip a wink to Mervyn Peake.
Picture a city suspended over an abyss by giant chains where the cheap streets are determined not by the expense of the architecture but by how likely they are to tumble into the void! A city menaced every 'scar night' by a fallen she-angel who takes PMT to previously un matched heights. A crazed poisoner out to avenge his dead wife on the whole city and a God who is definately not what the populace hope he is!
A heady brew! Unusually for a book written by a man, the most complex and engaging charactors are female.
The writing style is witty and fast moving and the story if you haven't already realised is incredible far fetched and fantastic, so if you can't suspend belief or find yourself shouting 'oh that's just stupid!' at Dr Who then this book may not be for you. If you just go with the flow, strap yourself in for the ride and see the black humour I think you'll enjoy it I certainly did.

