“After everything, when I was staring down the guillotine with chafed wrists and broken teeth, I decided this was the only fitting way to go.”
With The Diplomacy of the Knife, C.M. Caplan absolutely nails the sequel to their raucous debut, the SPFBO9 finalist The Fall Is All There Is. Petre, the first-person protagonist of the series, is a whirlwind of chaotic neutral entropy.
The youngest among quadruplets, Petre was born mere minutes after his older siblings, Anoïse, Edgar, and Desmon. When their monarch father dies, Petre finds himself on the losing side of a war for succession:
“If we were lucky, this war would end in the least dramatic way possible—ironing out an agreement in a cramped office, over cups of coffee.”
Yeah, I don’t think so—the unhealthy familial dynamics in The Diplomacy of the Knife are enough to make George R.R. Martin blush.
Petre is impulsive to an anarchic degree, creating chaos wherever he goes. He’s also neurodivergent, often struggling to understand the unspoken subtext of family conversations. He has adopted the unhealthy habit of shooting up Intramuscular Memory Injections to maintain basic human functioning:
“What kind of man, would you say, prepares for a family visit by injecting himself with Intramuscular Memory Injections?”
C.M. Caplan writes with a frenetic vibrancy that makes The Diplomacy of the Knife impossible to put down. Caplan also strikes just the right balance between fantasy and science fiction in this post-post-apocalyptic world, which suffered a First Annihilation from magic and a Second Annihilation from technology.
Everything that I loved about The Fall Is All There Is feels bigger and better in The Diplomacy of the Knife. You can fight entropy, or you can embrace it. I highly recommend grimdark fans to embrace the anarchy with C.M. Caplan’s Four of Mercies series.
