The Clinic by Jay Andrade-Hunt
Grimhold Vol. 1
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by AstilbeAfter the Collapse, the world wasn’t rebuilt. It was scavenged.
Grimhold is a vertical city of rust, failing magic, and borrowed time. In its lowest districts, survival is negotiated through scraps, favours, and quiet threats.Henry runs a back-alley clinic there. He treats anyone who makes it through the door, no questions asked. In a city carved up by gangs and syndicates, the Clinic survives by staying neutral.
That neutrality is beginning to crack. As tensions rise and the systems holding Grimhold together strain under pressure, the Clinic becomes a fault line where power, loyalty, and obligation collide.
A slow-burn, character-driven post-apocalyptic fantasy about endurance, moral compromise, and the quiet work of keeping people alive when stability is already gone.
Cooperation is underrated.
The world building in this novel was utterly fantastic and quite possibly the best example of how to do this I’ve read so far this year. Grimhold was a gritty, dangerous place where one wrong move could mean the difference between life and death. It was also a community filled with people working themselves to the bone on shoestring budgets to help others, often accomplishing things no one believed was possible along the way. These juxtapositions of kindness and unrelenting workloads not only helped to explain the sometimes rough demeanors of certain characters but also expressed the many different faces of this city.
There were times when I struggled with the slow pacing, especially in the beginning when more attention was paid to describing how Grimhold worked than the people who lived there or the conflicts they dealt with. Some patience is required for those chapters while everything is getting set up, but the payoff in the end was more than worth the wait. While I can’t go into much detail about how everything ended up fitting together later on for spoiler reasons, what I can say is that getting to know this world so well meant that later scenes became incredibly meaningful as the pacing picked up.
Some of the most memorable scenes in my opinion were the ones that explored the many ways someone can express platonic love for another person without the use of words. This may not sound like a theme one would necessarily expect in an urban fantasy novel, but it was woven into the plot seamlessly from beginning to end and added yet another layer of emotion and meaning to both the story as well as to the main characters’ lives. I adored these moments and hope there will more of them to come in the sequels.
Grimhold Vol. 1 – The Clinic was overflowing with both adventure and heartfelt emotions.























