Spiralchain: Gatemaker
Special Edition
A teenager comes into his own in the moving, series-opening fantasy novel Spiralchain: Gatemaker, which boasts portals between worlds.
In Jeremiah L. Schwennen’s poignant fantasy novel Spiralchain: Gatemaker, a small-town teenager is pulled into an epic battle that spans dimensions.
Jara’s arrival upends Adam’s peaceful life in Iowa: She unlocks a special gift within him. Indeed, Adam is a Gatemaker, a guardian warrior with the ability to open and maintain portals between dimensions. His kind—the Children of the Line—were seeded on Earth and kept safe until they were needed to fight a never-ending corruption, the Foreverot. Further, Adam learns that an anchor planet has been captured by a warlord who’s determined to dominate all worlds. Adam and his friends work to master their latent abilities, stop the warlord, and prepare for a larger battle to come.
Juggling multiple storylines, this tense novel is best centered by Adam’s personal struggles. Elsewhere, infighting between the warlord and his witch consort, Jara’s quest for genealogical understanding, and the stories of a cabal of exiled Gatemakers crowd the story. A dearth of contextual clues and chapter delineations make its progression messy. Further, between Earth and Onus, the central planet, exist a bevy of strange places and characters that make for too-dense reading.
The prose is straightforward, and its worldbuilding descriptions are sparing. The portal system between worlds is introduced in summary form, for example—as “geometry written in Latin by a hallucinating genius—it made perfect sense, but only to people in a similar frame of mind.” People’s conversations sometimes have the same serviceable quality, focused on didacticism rather than characterizations; further, the exaggerated speech patterns of the warlord’s consort clash with the way other people from her world speak, resulting in unevenness.
Adam is well-fleshed out, though. At first concerned with school and his personal identity, he is thrust into his consequential role as a Gatemaker, forcing a recalibration of his priorities. Still, even as he hops between worlds, he remains introspective, processing his feelings among his friends and newfound allies. His understanding of himself deepens as the book progresses, helping him to unlock his magical abilities. And the book works toward a satisfying ending that answers almost all of the questions raised in the course of the narrative, with the added benefit of a clear lead-in to coming series titles.
In the resonant, series-opening fantasy novel Spiralchain: Gatemaker, an inquisitive teenager grows into a capable warrior.
Reviewed by
John M. Murray
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
