All was black.

Am I back? Checking in with his body was fruitless. He felt only a cold and stoney numbness. Every impulse he sent was ignored by every part of his body he sent it to. All was nothing and a complete lack of sensation. No. This is the worst yet, Grady decided. He frantically searched for any of the small background sensations he habitually ignored. No heartbeat pulsed in his neck. No rush of air entered his lungs. Come to think of it, there wasn’t even a desire for air. He felt no thirst and, when he thought about it, no hunger. A horror settled into his soul, chilling his being.

What did they do to me?

Being an unstoppable killing machine sucks, actually. An Oath Sworn is about a dwarf who gets turned into one, and he doesn’t enjoy it very much, which makes him rethink his dedication to rising to the upper crust of dwarven society.

Grady of No Clan is about the lowest that you can get in Rockhome. Working as a clerk in a mine and belittled and pushed aside by everyone around him, he signs up for a sketchy program that’s looking for someone with no friends or family or attachments and figures it’ll probably be fine. Spoiler alert, it’s not fine. He gets kidnapped and turned into a golem that has no choice but to obey orders, primarily those of Keyrdegen Salzum, an ambitious military leader who plans to revolutionize his people by force, and is aided by an evil mad scientist, Artificer Plenebus. What follows is a combination of body and psychological horrors as Grady tries to maintain his identity and escape his new living prison before too many people get hurt.

Salzum and Plenebus are, in many ways, the two main characters of the book. For a long stretch of chapters, Grady can’t do anything but obey them, and as he struggles to maintain his autonomy internally, we often see his narration falling away to just a bare description of what is happening, and we get a lot of their relationship and characterization. They’re super interesting villains who don’t have the same goals or motivations and are helping each other without really planning to stick through that to the end. It’s very fun to watch them banter and argue, and very fun to watch them scheme and plan together and apart. They’re not the only characters we see doing this, but they’re the most interesting and menacing. I liked them as villains but I wasn’t hugely enamoured with the idea of them being fat and disabled (through age) respectively. I find that in a lot of stories in this subgenre tend to focus on some version of the hyperperforming masculine ideal body, and though Grady isn’t really that and when he becomes it, it’s part of the trauma, that way too often comes with a side order of a villain whose body doesn’t fit that ideal at all, and it results in a lot of fat, old or disabled villains in a way that I find a bit uncomfortable. I don’t think it says anything bad about author M.T. Kadisin or the book, it’s just that when it appears I tend to notice it very critically.

On the topic of genre, An Oath Sworn is advertised as a dark fantasy, which it definitely is, but it also has a tinge of comedy running through it that I quite liked. Grady’s narration is sardonic and biting throughout, and though he feels more and more crushed by his situation, he still finds humour to remark on once in a while. He’s very inept and bumbling at the beginning and watching him anxiety-rehearse his conversations or get excited about pens is very fun. I really like the comedic elements of this, which break up the otherwise hopeless feeling narrative. They’re a welcome addition and it made the narration a delight to read throughout the book.

I enjoyed quite a bit about An Oath Sworn; I think it was very fun and the characters were compelling and I wanted to see what would happen. I wish that the lengthy training/testing chapters had been a bit shorter or less numerous as it was a lot of Grady not doing anything while his new abilities were tested in great detail that, as a reader who is not really interested in what abilities a character has, I didn’t personally find hugely interesting. However, readers who are more interested in that element of a fantasy novel than I am will probably quite enjoy that sequence, and it does have good voice moments from Grady throughout.

All in all, I think dark fantasy fans will really like An Oath Sworn, especially those who are looking for something a bit different from your usual fare. Grady the dwarf and his underground city and his adventures in body horror are not what I normally associate with this genre, and I think they’re a great fit for it that are sure to delight and horrify (this is a compliment) a lot of people in equal measure.