Dumpstermancer 1: Discarded--Magic Incorporated?

I've always believed that fantasy should be imaginative and entertaining.  I want to be immersed in a plot that keeps me turning pages, a well-developed magical system and characters that I can care about.  Yet I also believe that fantasy can be more.   It can grapple with issues that are relevant to the real world lives of readers.  Canadian urban fantasy author Charles de Lint is such a writer.  He deals with important themes in a lyrical style straddling the modern world and the world of myth.  He writes books that make fantasy seem true in a very deep way that connects with readers.

Michael J. Allen isn't the same sort of writer as Charles de Lint.  His world is a good deal darker than Charles de Lint's Newford.  Yet, like de Lint, he also deals with significant real world issues in the context of urban fantasy. This post is a review of his first  Dumpstermancer novel, Discarded.  I agreed to review the second in the series, Duplicity.   When I told Allen that I hadn't read Discarded.  He generously sent it to me via Bookfunnel.

                           

The central theme of Discarded is magic for profit.   This is the first time I have ever seen the corporatization of magic in a fantasy novel.  There is nothing inherently wrong with making a profit.   The problem arises when profit becomes a service provider's only consideration.  In the real world, we have seen people robbed of their life savings by schools for profit that didn't provide students with any skills.  Thoth, the corporation that is the antagonist in Allen's series,  doesn't care whether the spells they sell actually benefit their clients. Protagonist Elias Graham, who had once been a spell designer for Thoth, cared very much about helping people.  Thoth didn't just fire him. They completely destroyed his life.

Racism is more of an implied theme than an explicit one in Discarded.  Elias is an African American, but this is only mentioned once late in the novel.   It was then that it hit me that he had been the victim of racial prejudice.  Thoth's successful plot to frame Elias for a crime he didn't commit was facilitated by a justice system that was inclined to look the other way when people  of color were railroaded.

All of this had happened before the novel begins.  Discarded opens with Elias on the street after having served a prison term.   As we know from the title of the series, Elias eventually learns to use the resources available to him as a homeless mage.  Some readers might have a visceral response of disgust to the concept of a dumpstermancer.  I was intrigued by the idea of a homeless individual in an urban fantasy being empowered by magic.

Elias, who is often referred to as Eli, is definitely a sympathetic character.  His circumstances showed me why someone who was homeless might want to remain on the street.  Allen also gave us a female sympathetic character in Sunny, the operator of a Christian homeless shelter, that Eli visited briefly.  What I enjoyed most about Sunny is that she was a woman who got things done.  I also very much liked Razcolm, the entity who possessed the origami spider that Eli created and animated, in order to spy on Thoth's activities.  Razcolm provides some much needed doses of humor through snarky dialogue.

Discarded is one of several indie published fantasy novels that I read this year which I found to be both well-written and provocative.  I look forward to reading and reviewing the sequel, Duplicity, early in 2019.