Don't Avoid the Voidal - The Long Reach of Night by Adrian Cole

My review of the second volume of Adrian Cole's Voidal trilogy went live at Black Gate last week. It's a wonderfully psychedelic trip across the Omniverse by the Voidal and his batrachian sidekick, Elfloq.  I can't believe how snide I was about these stories when I first dipped into them only a few years ago.

When I started writing about swords & sorcery, I wasn't as ready to just appreciate stories just for fun. I was reading some of the new, "serious" fantasy. I read R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing trilogy. I heard tell of George RRRR Martin's Game of Thrones and how it was revolutionizing fantasy by making it more realistic. They and other writers were getting away from simplistic ideas of black and white morality. They saw the world in shades of gray. Grim, bloody gray, but still gray. Together, fantasy was being made more realistic and more relevant.

Now, none of those things are bad. Fantasy, as it has become a more widely read and accepted genre, has changed. Lots of genre writing, whichever one it is, stinks, and it always has. Fantasy had gotten pretty stale in the eighties. If Terry Brooks' Shannara books were knock offs of JRRT, then there were lots of books that weren't more than xeroxes of Brooks.

Writing for a genre tends to follow certain rules. A mystery has to have a mystery. Fantasy has to be, well, fantastic. It's the nature of things. What it's meant over the years is that a lot of stories just tick off boxes to qualify for inclusion in a certain genre.

Also, when there's evidence that something sells, people are going to replicate it. Hence, the endless series of series with secret heirs, dark lords, orc stand ins, and all manner of same old same old.

So efforts by certain authors to revive fantasy came as good news to me. Why shouldn't the genre be more realistic or relevant?

So I dove into some of this new fantasy and found lots of it good. I also found that lots of it took itself way too seriously. In their effort to be better, a lot of these books were less than fun.

There's a lot I like about the Prince of Nothing series; the worldbuilding, the history, the even some of the characters. But what it isn't is fun. It's a bleak slog at times, filled with torture, cynicism of the darkest sort. If there's any lightness of tone let alone any humor in it I sure as heck don't recall it.

When I first started reading books like Bakker's, I was pretty excited. This was surely the future of fantasy. It was what needed to be done to make the genre "better." A sad side effect was that I became a little too dismissive of any fantasy that I deemed too frivolous or pulpy.

That's where my early review of the first couple of Adrian Cole's Voidal stories came from. It just wasn't serious enough. Fortunately, I got out of that phase quickly.

I came to the conclusion that I read fantasy for fun. REH may have wanted to make some sort of point about barbarism and civilization, but what makes his stories work are the killer action, the heroes, and worlds filled with demon-haunted jungles, and cyclopean ruins.

Michael Moorcock might have been taking the piss out of S&S in his Elric books but the reason they're great is because of Stormbringer and crazy-ass monsters. Giant, golden, pyramidal battle barges are much cooler and more memorable than any sort of Freudian mumbo-jumbo supposedly underlying the stories.

And it's the same thing with the Voidal stories. There's a magnificently crazy degree of inventiveness in all dozen or so stories I've read. I've included a lot of excerpts in my two reviews over at Black Gate to give you a taste of what you're in for if you open the covers of these books.

And you should open them. Once I dropped my internal barriers (composed of 100% self-important-bullshitium, I should note), I was able to let Cole's mad creation wash over me. It's a rewarding trip any S&S fan should treat himself or herself to. Trust me, your reward will be great.

Don't get me wrong. There's a place for deeper element in heroic fantasy. But Imaro isn't great just because it brings up issues of race, but because Charles Saunders can write one helluva an adventure and knows how to craft horrifying villains and monsters.

I remember reading about some panel discussion in the UK decades ago about why the participants read HPL. Karl Edward Wagner gave a long, artistic reason. Then an artist, three sheets to the wind, roused himself, and said he loved HPL "for the effing monsters." Now I haven't been able to find where I read that, and if forced to testify I'll admit I might have all the facts wrong. Still, it's how I feel about S&S. I read it for fun, and that tends to involve swordplay, rousing adventure, scary monsters, and exciting characters.


NOTE: I haven't abandoned the Chaosium Project, just delayed it. A few folks have mentioned how difficult it is to read the small print in the books. Well, they're right and my cataracts have only made it worse.

I'm getting my first eye operated on tomorrow and that should make finishing Mysteries of the Worm much easier. With luck I'll polish it off next week.

Return of Oblivion Hand

One of my earliest reviews was for the first two chapters of Adrian Cole's Oblivion Hand (reviewed on Black Gate today), and it was pretty harsh. I came down on Cole for everything from the names of characters to his purple prose. While I enjoyed the stories I still felt the need to hold them at some sort of critical distance. It was if a book was too nutty and too much fun it couldn't be that good, it must be defective in some way.

Well, in my two and a half years of reading lots of S&S and puzzling out precisely why certain books work for me and others don't, I've grown out of that attitude. John Clute's Encyclopedia of Fantasy called the Voidal stories "not serious" and I find I not only disagree with that statement, but I also find it obnoxious. 

I mean what is meant by that? Do all stories have to have some deeper meaning or make some larger artistic statement? Is it saying that the stories were just something Cole spun out to make some quick cash? 

I understand disliking the stories. They are crazy, thick with adjectives, and the character doesn't have much personality (though that starts to change as the book goes on and the imp, Elfloq has loads of character). But Cole was just writing some fun, colorful tales where his penchant for HPL, CAS and Druillet could be indulged. If the stories hold your attention what else do they need to considered successful? And if the art is intentional how is it not serious?

For music this week, Queens of the Stone Age. I like Josh Homme's first band, Kyuss, but I really like QotSA. His project with John Paul freakin' Jones and Dave Grohl, Them Crooked Vultures packs a mighty wallop too.

Mail Bag

   Cheap books from Amazon almost make up for lost used book stores my friends and I used to haunt. It took me several years to find a copy of K. W. Jeter's Morlock Night in a real store. Now, one-click and it's mine.
   The downside of not having physical book stores anymore is I don't just chance upon something and buy it because the blurb on the back makes it sound great or the cover calls out tome.
   Books at the now-closed Book Pit in Red Bank, NJ went for under $2. I always walked out with a bag of books at least half by people I had never read before. It was great when there were a dozen different stores I could visit regularly with similar results.
   Even with Amazon Prime, the cheapest a book at Amazon costs me is $4. At that price, if I'm going to buy something by an author I'm not familiar with I need to know a little about a book from reviews or recommendations before I spend my cash.

This I bought because Bill Ward recommended it. I'd been curious about Brust but never bought it. Now I have.

I read "Bones for Dulath", the first Ki and Vandien story in Amazons! and really liked it. This $.01 omnibus (plus $3.99 S/H) gets me the original trilogy.

Read some good things about this someplace I can't remember and that was good enough for me.

Bill Ward reminded me about first volume, The Oblivion Hand, which reminded me I never got these. So I did.

Finally, the Deep Down Genre Hound himself sent me some of his latest collections. I've already read the three Shan and Bao stories and they're a blast. Further proof of the ongoing S&S renaissance. Note the very cool colophon.

It'll Make Your Nape-Hairs Standup - "Young Thongor" by Lin Carter (with Robert M. Price tagging along)

   After my harsh review of "Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria", I never thought I'd go back to Lin Carter's character. Then I saw something positive about "Young Thongor", edited by Adrian Cole.  I never knew there where stories about Thongor's early days and here they were collected in one volume.  As an added bonus there were three new stories written by Robert M. Price (of Crypt of Cthulhu fame).  I've enjoyed all Price's Mythos stories in the absolutely indispensable Chaosium Mythos anthologies, so I figured that would be a nice bonus.  So I took a chance and bought it.  Okay, so at $3.43 it really wasn't much of a chance, but if you've read "Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria" you might think otherwise.

   The Thongor novels are mash-ups of Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  You get your standard issue, square-cut, black haired barbarian together with super-science which should be the right concoction to get any S&S fan's blood pumping.  The problem is, while I haven't read the entire series, I can safely say the ones I have stink.  His syntax is awful, the monsters are dull and Thongor's got no more life than the ink on the page.

   In "Young Thongor" it turns out Lin Carter could actually write exciting and engaging, if still derivative, stories.  The stories ditch most of the Barsoomian trappings found in the novels, sticking to mostly pure REH and are the better for it.  Maybe he took a little more time on the stories, maybe he had learned his craft a little more.  Whatever, the short stories, though not on a level with his seventies compatriots like Wagner or Saunders, are solid, S&S fun that I can imagine rereading someday.

   The first story is the weakest in the book and it's still stronger than "Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria".  In "Black Hawk of Valkarth", we meet the teenage Thongor, sole survivor of the Black Hawk people. Only chance saved him from death during the massacre of his tribe by the Snow Bear tribe.  Armed only with Sarkozan, the sword of the ancient hero and tribal founder, Valkh the Black Hawk, and taken from the hand of his dead chieftain, Thongor sets off across the snowy countryside seeking bloody revenge.  Thongor's plan is pretty nifty but the story suffers from a little too much been-there-done-that as far as origin stories go.

   Following his successful revenge against the Snow Bear tribe, Thongor begins a long trek towards the warm, jungled lands and mighty kingdoms of southern Lemuria.  The next three stories, "The City in the Jewel", "Demon of the Snows" and Price's "The Creature in the Crypt" cover the barbarian's southward journey and Carter starts showing a little flair and the sort of over the top craziness I prize in S&S.

   With "The City in the Jewel", we get exactly that; Zazamanc, a sorcerer, has sought immortality by creating an entire world for himself and hiding it away from Death's sight in a great gem. For his own amusement he tricks and traps men and women into his realm. Once captured, the mighty thewed Thongor is forced to fight in an arena for the sorcerer's pleasure. Thongor, of course, soon becomes involved in plans to kill the unkillable Zazamanc and free himself from bondage.

   The story's highlight is Zazamanc.  Through all the stories, Thongor suffers from being a little too bland and cookie cutter of a barbarian. It's as if Carter had a checklist; square cut, black hair, might arms, big sword, more honorable than civilized men.  He's rarely the highlight, even in the best of the stories.

   Convinced by divination Thongor will cause his death, Zazamanc is still reluctant to kill him when a demon he summons warns that "if you slay him, or order him slain, or set him in such danger that his death ensues, your own death will follow swiftly".  Carter offers some insight into a seemingly all powerful wizard and the things that actually cause him fear.  Almost bored with his deathless existence he is still terrified at its coming to an end.

   "The Demon of the Snows" introduces Thongor to women and the ways of love.  He also gets to explore a possibly haunted keep and tangle with a horrifying worm-monster.  The first two thirds of the story are action-free but tense.  Carter did a great job depicting what Thongor finds in the castle and his effort to solve the mystery of what happened to its inhabitants.

"They went on searching for some signs of life.  Behind them, dangling limply in the iron chains, the dead man hung, turning idly this way and that as a gust of wind moved down the draughty halls.  The skull-like face of the old man still bore the rictus of silent laughter.  Thongor wished he knew what had made the old man smile."

  The finale with the demon is sufficiently fun but it's the horror story mood that precedes it that makes the story a success.

   "The Creature in the Crypt" is notable mostly for having served as the genesis of "The Thing in the Crypt", a Conan story Carter wrote for "Conan".  According to Adrian Cole's excellent foreword, Carter had planned to develop the plot into a Thongor story but never got around to it before his death.  Price took it upon himself to make the effort. It's okay, what with a revivified blue skinned, three-eyed ancient king in a mysterious cave, but that's about all it is. Like it's Conan version it's only a trifle of a tale.

   In "Mind Lords of Lemuria", also by Price, Thongor, after establishing himself in the civilized south lands, has entered the service of an ambitious lord, the Sark Arzang Pome of the city of Shembis.  Thongor is part of an expedition into the Lemurian jungles in search of silver for the greedy Sark.  Along the way they encounter the major plot element of "The Shadow Out of Time".  I'll just let you know "Mind Lords" features mind-swapping aliens and chapters entitled "Thongor against Thongor!" and "Thongor Berserk!".

   "Mind Lords" just doesn't feel right.  Carter's stories work because, unoriginal as they are, clearly spring from deep inside his great, beating, fan-boy heart.  They overflow with the intense enjoyment Carter seems to have gotten from trying to recreate stories in the styles of his literary heroes.  This story is too labored.  It feels like a parody of something that's already, even if unintentionally, a little parodic.  Everything's a little too much, too over the top.  I also think Carter would've used the actual Great Race of Yith and made the HPL-crossover explicit.

   With "Silver Shadows", Price succeeds at creating a more Carterish feeling story.  Tired of working for others, Thongor has turned his hand to banditry.  Still, though an outlaw, he finds himself again in the service of Arzang Pome in search of silver.  This time it's a cursed hoard of the metal hidden in the tunnels under Shembis.  There's a kindly wizard, a delectable courtesan and a reptilian ape-monster.  Not a bad story at all.

   "Keeper of the Emerald Flame" is my favorite tale in the collection.  Thongor now leads a band of outlaws in the regions around Shembis and the Sark has sent out troops to run him to ground.  Evading the Sark's forces, Thongor and his band find themselves in unknown lands.  They meet a jungle girl and find a pre-human city out of dark legends. Those legends also include stories of great quantities of gems just waiting to be found.

"The colossal stone wreck was one of incredibly detailed and curiously unfamiliar architecture. The eye became lost in a maze of balconies, towers, colonnades and buttresses. The mind was baffled and confused among the mad profusion of wall and arch and wing and extension. It was not so much one building as a cluster of buildings, all built together in a man-made mountain of stonework....Like a titanic idol, hewn from a solid mountain of dead black stone..it squatted, brooding, amid dreary waste of desolation."

   It's not the most poetic of descriptions but it works well conveying the alien nature and scale of the ruins.  From the girl, Thongor learns that the place is haunted by Shan Chan Thuu, a wizard who came out of distant Omn centuries ago to learn the secrets of the dead city.  Still hiding from the Sark's men and hoping to find the gems, Thongor and his crew risk a night in the ruins. Soon enough his men start dying in horrible, bloody ways.

   Again, like in "The Demon of the Snows", Carter's aim appears to be tension and atmosphere, not action. S&S's roots are as deeply planted in horror as adventure tales.  Chelim, his lieutenant, says to Thongor, "I get the feeling this place is somehow alive - watching me - waiting for me to take a false step, before it pounces; or does something worse."  As his men start to die, fear grows and Thongor sets out to confront whatever horror is stalking them.  

   The foreword to "Black Moonlight" tells us Thongor was eventually captured by Arzang Pome and set to work as a galley slave.  Freeing himself in a bloody uprising, Thongor makes it to the pirate city, Tarakus, and becomes famous as the captain of the "Black Hawk".  This story brings Thongor and his shipmates to the haunted island of Zosk in search of legendary treasure.  The usual lunacy transpires - savage beast-men attack, the moon runs red and a stone monster lurches into action.  Short, sharp and bloody.

   "Young Thongor" comes to its conclusion with "Thieves of Zangabal".  Thongor has run afoul of the pirates' king and finds himself forced into robbing a sorcerer for a Lemurian nobleman.  The story's a little long and the fights are a little dull, but the complicated demon that serves as Thongor's primary antagonist is a clever creation.

   Where "Young Thongor" fails too often is with the character of Thongor.  He's too perfect a hero.  A teenage barbarian never exposed to civilization, he's too knowledgeable about too many things too quickly.  He also seems too young to be leading bands of experience bandits and pirates.  He never quite seems as young as he supposed to be and too mature.  Mostly, though, he's a bit too dull. He's brave, noble and rarely unsuccessful. It's a little hard to suspend all my disbelief every time.

   Fortunately, the book succeeds at creating a fun, ruin and demon haunted world at the dawn of time.  Almost overstuffed with background, Carter's Lemuria teems with vivid life and adventure.  It doesn't aspire to the same depth as REH's Conan or Wagner's Kane stories or break ground like Moorcock's Elric or Saunder's Imaro series.  What it does is provide great, straight up S&S that'll give readers looking for a few hours of thrills a good time.  I'm really grateful to Adrian Cole for overseeing this collection and getting out there.

NOTE: I am surprised how hard I've been on the late Mr. Carter. I tend to keep my claws sheathed even when writing about authors/stories I despise. I suspect it's only because he's dead that I'm so harsh and dismissive about his books. I struggle not to be mean spirited or flippant about writing I don't like because I think it's cheap and serves no good purpose. Criticism should be about promoting the good and seeking to explain why failures fail in hopes of encouraging better writing in the future. Ripping people and their works does none of that.

   With Lin Carter, though, it's unfortunately too much a part of the general S&S community. Sure, he could be a sloppy writer. Too often his stories seem more like fan-fiction than original writing. Still, the general attitude toward him seems a little too much. A lot of it comes from his association with Sprague de Camp and his control over Conan for so many decades. From all accounts, Carter was a decent guy undeserving of the sort of dismissal he often gets. He also did more than so many others to promote fantasy and specifically S&S. In the future I'm going to try to show a little more respect for someone incapable of fighting back and who did so much for a genre I love.

Voidals and Spydrons and Ratlings, oh, my!

   Until recently, I'd never even heard of Adrian Cole.  Then, whilst tooling around the 'net looking for blog material, I came across the man and his bibliography.  I read great things about his Omnaran series (I'm presently in the middle of the first book, "A Place Among the Fallen") and some other things.  And then I saw this:

   Apparently, Cole had a series of short stories and connected novels going back to the late seventies.  They concern an accursed traveler,  the Voidal, bereft of memory and cast into the darkest reaches of the omniverse for unremembered sins against the dark gods.  Well that got me.
   There was also a lot of comparisons to Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock.  That was the final bait.  I ordered my cheap used copy from Amazon and counted the days till its arrival.
   Let me start by saying I'm getting a great kick out of "A Place Among the Fallen".  It's got that real basic ur-fantasy thing going on that puts me in mind of "The Fionavar Tapestry" or ""Red Moon and Black Mountain".  It's not swords and sorcery but straight up high fantasy with heroes, mad emperors and gold and white giant owls.  Good stuff.
   The Voidal, though, hoo boy. Let me start by saying I don't hate it.  It's just that it's, what can I say, overwrought?   The prose tends to the more violent shades of purple.  In the opening paragraph of "Well Met in Hell", a revised version "The Coming of the Voidal", the first story of the series, the dimension of Phaedrabile is described as being "Beyond natural laws, at the far reaches of reason, shunned by all but the perverse in spirit.  It has many dimensions: they twist and fuse, baffling the mind itself with their deranged patterns, their layer upon layer.  A veritable universe, unique to itself, enclosed, locked."  It only gets more colorful and elaborate from there and not in a great way.
 
   His choice of names isn't much better.  I've only read the first two stories, "Well Met in Hell" and "The Lair of the Spydron" so far but in them we get the wizard Rammazurk, the aforementioned Spydron, Xalganash of the Thousand Teeth, the Arachniderm and Grabulic the Songster.  It's like a cast listing for an episode of "He-Man".  These are just bad sounding names.  I don't even think that's a subjective statement but an objective one.
  I laud Cole for his work at creating a non-standard fantasy world in the stories contained in "Oblivion Hand".  Like Vance and Moorcock and Clark Ashton Smith, the tales he's woven are not from the usual bits and pieces of medieval European flotsam that get cobbled together too often. The laws of nature have been superseded by those of magic and monstrous ratlings and demonic Screamers are the normal fauna.
   This is the sort of stuff I'm dying to see more of.  I can only take so many blond Nordic barbarians and wily Semitic wizards and clever Latin thieves.  This is the sort of psychotic, lysergic acid swilling craziness I love to find between the covers of a book with such an over-the-top cover as "Oblivion Hand".
   And yet.  And yet.  John Clute's "Encyclopedia of Fantasy" dismisses the Voidal sequence as "not serious".  I think that's a harsh and incorrect judgment.  Cole's effort at creating an omniverse that isn't right of the Fantasy 'r' Us shelf is laudable and even a bit exciting.  It's just that the writing is often a barrier to appreciating the stories.  Cole is clearly as in love with words and language as Smith and Vance and seeks to create atmosphere with the use of evocative adjectives.  The problem is he always seems to choose poorly.

In the Mail

   Went to sunny Bermuda to visit old friends for the Thanksgiving week and came home to the following in the mail:

 

   I'm still waiting for this:

   I love Amazon.  Only ten years ago finding these books might have taken a summer of driving up and down the region and rooting through often badly organized stacks in often unpleasant used book stores.  Today, with the pushing of a few buttons they're at my home in splendid condition at reasonable prices within a a few days.  I'm just not sad about the passing of so many of the book traders and junk stores that my reading habit necessitated me frequenting.  And what with gas being what it is and the Staten Island to New Jersey bridge tolls being pushed up to $12 Amazon looks all the better.  Woo hoo!

Any comments, pro or con?