Andre Norton - Witch World Covers

If you haven't followed me here or at Black Gate for very long, you might not know I'm a fan of Andre Norton's sci-fi/swords & sorcery mashup series, Witch World. The first book, titled just Witch World, came out in 1963. It was followed by an immediate sequel, Web of the Witch World in 1964. I reviewed the latter here.

The following trilogy - Three Against the Witch World, Warlock of the Witch World, and Sorceress of the Witch World, tell the adventures of the three children of the original novels' heroes. I reviewed all of them at Black Gate and found them, if not as good as Witch World and Web, at least interesting and occasionally quite creepy.

The most interesting thing about these is the lack of artist continuity across the series and editions. I get not keeping with the first design for Witch World, but I would have kept it, emphasizing the pure pulpy goodness of the book. The later Jack Gaughan covers, more impressionistic, are excellent advertisements for the sort of monster-killing and spell-casting pulp inside.

I'm torn between saying the Philip Castle covers are bad and saying they're good. They are surprisingly connected to the actual stories, something covers are known for NOT doing many times. On the other hand, they're done in a really unremarkable airbrush technique that's both bland and garish at the same time. Every time I want to defend the aesthetics of the 70s, something like this comes along. Who at Tandem ever though those colors said "Pulp adventure inside?"

I love the Breslow art and wish he'd done covers for the whole series. He did a few others for the High Hallack Witch World books, but not all of them.

The Jeff Jones and Davis Meltzer covers are not bad, but a little bland and not especially specific to the books. The less said about the Jack Pound cover the better.

                            Jack Gaughan      J.H. Breslow      Philip Castle

                            Jack Gaughan      Davis Meltzer   Philip Castle

                            Jack Gaughan    Harry Borgman  Philip Castle

                           Jack Gaughan     J.H. Breslow      Philip Castle

                               Jeff Jones        John Pound        Philip Castle

A Disappointment

I've written a fair amount about Andre Norton's Witch World series at this point. Just this morning my review of Sorceress of the Witch World posted at Black Gate. In the past between this site and Black Gate I've reviewed Spell of the Witch World, Three Against the Witch World, Warlock of the Witch World, and Year of the Unicorn. 

Sorceress concludes the trilogy started in Three and continued in Warlock. I was pretty keyed up to read it. While there's some great stuff in it, including a wizard being used as a power source for a city of cyborgs, it's a disappointment.

All the novels in the series I've read suffer from a stilted style I assume was meant to sound more olde tyme. That's something that doesn't alway work and it totally fails in Sorceress. It makes the heroine sound dull and affectless when she definitely shouldn't.

She's smart as well as clever. Even stripped of her overt magical powers as a consequence of things that happened in Warlock she's still a dangerous foe. But she sounds like she was hit in the head one time too many.

Then there's all the action she's in the middle of. The way she tells it she might as well be describing paint drying. It's just dull, dull, dull.

Still, this is a pretty great series overall. The very first book, Witch World, starts with some terrific world-building and mind-blowing pulp plotting and great action scenes. From there it only gets niftier.

Actually, the books seem to get less pulpy as they go on but I don't hold that agains them. The first two, Witch World and Web of the Witch World are pure science fantasy, complete with ray guns, flying cars, and super computers along with swords and psychic talents.

The later books are more serious and darker. The the stories set in High Hallack focus on the effects of a long, brutal war. War in these stories is less of an excuse for the heroes to be heroic than a terrible thing that must be done to survive. The cost in human lives and human potential is tremendous and is rarely recovered.

For what were initially marketed as YA books, there's a lot of heavy stuff going on. There's genocide, the aftermath of war, opressive gender roles, and lots of violence.

There's a constant atmosphere of loss that permeates much of what I've read so far. There are constant reminders that times were better in the past and the future may not get better. Even when the good guys win it's at terrible costs.

Norton hit on something and then ran with it pretty much for the rest of her life. Unless the rest of the books become amzingly bad I easily see myself finishing this series in the next year or so.

The next book for me is one I'm really looking forward to, The Crystal Gryphon. It features characters from "Dragon Scale Silver" and "The Sword of Unbelief", two excellent stories. I'm not sure when I'll get to that. I've written before that as much as I've like the novels, the short stories are what I've liked best. Probably not until next year.

So my carefully planned reading schedule has gotten knocked out of order already. Next week I'll have my review of Charles R. Saunder's first work of epic fantasy: Abengoni: First Calling. From what I've read, this is a book he's wanted to write for a long time. Thanks to the changed nature of publishing, technology, and the mighty Miltonn Davis, it's finally happening. With Milton behind him I thhink it's a safe bet that the rest of the series will actually get published unlike when DAW and Night Shade were involved.

Then I've got to do the short story reivews. HFQ came out the other day. Without even looking at I feel safe in saying I'm bound to find at least one story I like in it. Plus Swords and Sorcery Magazine's usual two stories and whatever else I can finnd in BCS and the last Fantasy Scroll.

I guess then I'll get back to P. C. Hodgell's Seeker's Mask and Lin Carter's first three Thongor books. And really, if Robert Price is overseeing Carter's bookks why the heck hasn't he let someone make cheap e-books of these things? Very annoying.

Musically, it's been a very Southern time here in Vredenburgh Manor. In anticipation of the Gov't Mule show we're going to in December, I've been listening to a lot of them. Also, lots of Allman Brothers and Derek Trucks Band. Right now I've got a video of Skynrd playing Freebird in England back in 1976. Watching Gaines and Collins play off each other is a blast.

Oh, yeah, this blog is supposed to be about swords & sorcery

One plug ugly cover

Until today's review of John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian over at Black Gate. I haven't been writing about swords & sorcery much of late. Between hardboiled crime stories and light fantasy, I've drifted away from my core subject. And it still is what I want to write about most.

Maybe that's part of the reason I reacted so favorably to Jakes' blond hero. The stories are a mixed bag: the first two are eh, the second one okay, and the last two almost pretty good. But in the end I liked the entire book. It's like a palate cleanser. After weeks of reading light books by Teresa Edgerton and James Blaylock, and crime stories set in the real world, Brak's adventures were just the sort of pure heroic fantasy fun to reset my engines. 

Jakes' stories have a stripped down feel to him. He wasn't trying to anything but write good adventure tales and at that he succeeded. He isn't interested in barbarism vs. civilization or collapsing the genre's assumptions. He just wanted to set a guy with a sword loose against villains and monsters. 

While the last two stories, "Ghosts of Stone" and "The Barge of Souls" are really good, I'm looking forward to checking out at least one of the novels. Jakes clearly hit his commercial stride as a novelist, not short story writer. I'm hoping the same skills that led to his success as a historical novelist will be present in the Brak books. I'll let you know how that works out.

I'm really looking forward to getting into Sorceress of the Witch World tonight. I've written several times about how I came to Andre Norton's series later in life. I'm still so grateful I finally decided to give it a chance. All five novels and two collections of short stories I've read previously are great. Her world and characters keep growing and getting richer with each new work. 

Anyhoo. After turning Howard Andrew Jones' discussion of the terrific Fast One by Paul Cain into an discussion of the merits of James Ellroy's White Jazz, I figured I'd take a look at it. I haven't read it since it first came out in 1992 and I pretty much abandoned his books after American Tabloid and Hollywood Nocturnes. He just kept working the same ideas over and over again to no end and the violence and plots became increasingly baroque and ludicrous. 

But I remembered that White Jazz had brought the monumental L.A. Quartet (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, and L.A. Confidential) to a dizzingly psychotic close. Its machine-gun paced prose and brass knuckles to the side of the skull craziness were the culmination of everything Ellroy had been doing before. 

I'm only a few chapters in so far but it's been worth it. I don't remember a lot of the book's details, but I'm hip to the sorts of games he plays so I can see certain movements in the plot forming already. And I don't care. It's like jumping onto an out of control train careening down the rails, getting faster and faster. Once you get on you really can't get off. Gripping stuff.

I met Ellroy at New York is Book Country back in early nineties. He was sitting at a table signing and selling books. He asked me to buy his latest, American Tabloid. I told him I already had. So buy something else, he said. I told him I'd bought and read everything he'd written. So he thanked me. Then he signed my friend's girlfriend's balloon with these immortal words: "Cougar Blood Boil!" Still no idea what it means but it was pretty cool.

High Hallack

I've written before about my discovery of Witch World before. Reading that first story, "The Toads of Grimmerdale", by a long dead author, courtesy of an even longer dead editor was some sort of blessing from the book fates (you know, the same ones that let you find that near perfect first edition paper back original you've been hunting for years while rummaging through the boxes at a church book fair). I really didn't expect to discover a decades old series that would so catch my attention. Four novels and two collections of short stories in I have yet to be disappointed.

If you haven't tried Witch World yet, I'd say give the story collection Lore of the Witch World. It's got the aforementioned "Toads" and six other stories. The novels, especially Witch World and Year of the Unicorn, are very good, but the short stories are even better.

Year of the Unicorn (which I just reviewed over at Black Gate), is the first book in the High Hallack sequence (the Estcarp sequence is the other). Norton based High Hallack on Yorkshire during the time of the viking invasions. She mimics history with the terrible war between the various small kingdoms of High Hallack and the invaders from Alizon across the sea.

From what I've read so far, her greatest concerns with the war are appear to be not the battles but the dislocation of people and the overturning of the traditional order in High Hallack. There are too many widows and too few people tending the fields. Refuge is found only in distant, barren places.

There's a realistic current of steady loss that runs through the High Hallack stories that gives them more resonance than encountered in much standard heroic fantasy. Even with the happiest of endings in her stories there's an understanding that prices must be paid, even if willingly remitted. I've read that some of the later books are a little dull but they're all pretty short and all together (according to ISFDB) they only add up to about 3500 pages. That's what, four Steven Erikson books? It's only a little more than the first five Wheel of Time books.

Musically, this past week has been a deeper digging into British music. first I kept listening to Ocean Colour Scene. Then I mixed it up with the Charlatans, a band that came out of the Manchester trippy dance scene best typified by the Stone Roses. When Britpop hit in the mid-nineties, the Charlatans added some traditional rock sounds to their looser, more dance floor ones and created some really great music.

After that I went back to the Modfather himself, Paul Weller. That led directly to digging out the other mod revivalist that appeared in the wake of Weller and the Jam in the seventies, like Secret Affair and the Lambrettas. This past week all these bands made me almost wish I was someone who'd get out on the dance floor.

Andre Norton - 1912-2005

"I am Elys. If my brother said aught of me, you also know that I shared his upbringing in part. Sword and shield-work I learned even as he did in his childhood. Though when we were grown we went separate ways. However, there was a bond between us, and when I was warned that he was in peril, I came, even as he would have come had he heard I walked into danger."

"But -- but how did you know he was gone -- lost in the hills? No messenger has ridden from here. We have kept it secret lest worse happen if it were known."

Brunissende watched me now with the same side-look I had seen in other women.

from "Dragon Scale Silver"

The Spell of Witch World - An Unknown Land

Andre Norton's Witch World books are another series I've avoided for way too long. There were two things that kept me away from them over the years. The first, when I was younger, was their name: Witch World. It seemed a little too twee. When I was older there were just too many other things I wanted to read that it just never crossed my mind to investigate Andre Norton's catalogue. If she ever occurred to me at all it was as the author of Starman's Son and several other books shelved in the children's section at my local library.  Later I found a few scattered Norton volumes in the boxes of paperbacks my dad kept in the attic but, again, nothing prompted me to read them. At the time the cover of "Witch World" turned me off (today I love the goofy looking thing).

   Not until I started contemplating this blog did I actually read anything by Andre Norton. There were several anthologies I had never managed to buy copies of until the last two years, one being "Flashing Swords #2", edited by Lin Carter.  I had read some of its stories before but not "The Toads of Grimmerdale" set in Norton's Witch World.

   I was surprised by the darkness of the story.  Like I said, I had assumed the Witch World stuff was light and airy and my first encounter with it was a story of revenge for rape set in a country savaged by years of war.  Well, I was hooked.

   I quickly read "Spider Silk" in Flashing Swords #3 and "Falcon Blood" in Amazons!, edited by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. I finally rooted through boxes in my sister's attic and dug out my dad's ancient copy of the first novel, Witch World, and devoured it. Its inventiveness, fast pacing and the sheer fun of it made me an instant fan.

  Finding a new author amid the endless shelves of crap is a one of the great joys in my life. That Andre Norton had left a fairly large supply of Witch World books for the newcomer was exciting. That it might fit in with the ideas I was playing with for what would become "Swords & Sorcery" was an added bonus. Very cool.

   Spell of the Witch World is the seventh book published in the Witch World series. It contains three stories set in High Hallack, a region on the western continent of a world where magic sits beside super science and mind powers.  One of the major events in High Hallack is a brutal war with a nation from across the sea that drags on for years and results in dislocation of peoples and an upsetting of the pre-war order.  The first story, "Dragon Scale Silver" takes place just before and during the early stages of the the war.  The second, "Dream Smith" occurs long before it and the final tale, "Amber Out of Quayth" takes place after its conclusion.

   "Dragon Scale Silver" is the story of Elys and her birth as a refugee from the east and her training as both spell caster and swordswoman.  Born to castaways fleeing war across the sea on the eastern continent, Elys and her twin brother Elyn, are raised and trained in the fishing village of Wark.  Both children are trained to war by their father but Elys, taking after her mother, is also trained in the ways of understanding and using magic.

   When war begins, Elyn longs to go off and fight.  Not until after the presumed death of his father does he.  Elys remains with the villagers and later shepherds them to safety in distant valleys.  Despite the protection and help she provides them with they never view her as one of their own.  She is an alien and a wielder of unnatural powers.

   Despite her separation from Elyn, Elys maintains a magical tie to him through deep magic conjured up and created by her mother in the form of a dragon scale silver chalice.  When it darkens she knows he is in some sort of grave danger she sets off to rescue him.

   Elys is accompanied on her mission by Jervon, a High Hallack warrior who wandered into her people's settlement wounded from battle.  After his recovery he is clearly smitten by Elyn, and unlike the villagers, he is not particularly discomforted by her talents and abilities.  He is willing to put himself at risk in order to provide her aid and support.

   Reaching her brother's keep, Elys finds he has married and her sister-in-law is no more at ease around her than the villagers were.  He is also missing having fallen subject to a curse of the Old One laying on the castle.  With sword, spells and a ferocious will, Elys wades into the danger.

  "Dream Smith" reads much like a fairy tale.  Collard, one of a smith's sons, is crippled and disfigured to a hideous degree by an explosion caused by a strange ore.  Only later is it learned that it probably comes from a some lost cache of the Old Ones.  He is so malformed that he must wear a mask to even walk about in his village.  

  The explosion also leaves Collard with strange and powerful dreams.  When he wakes from them he is able to craft the creatures from his dreams and cast them in the remaining pieces of the metal that damaged him.

   Collard soon becomes acquainted with and enthralled by the young and sickly noblewoman, Jacinda.  She is sent to the village because her father's new wife claims she can not conceive a "straight son" if she even sees "such a twisted, crooked body."

   Fascinated by someone he senses might be a kindred spirit he sends her gifts of some of his dream creations.  Overcoming his fear and self loathing he eventually meets her and their fates become entwined.

   The last tale, "Amber Out of Quayth" is pretty much a traditional Gothic tale.  To more or less quote the late Donald Westlake, "A gothic is a story about a girl who gets a house".  

   Ysmay, the daughter of the late lord of Uppsdale loses her place as chatelaine of the house when her brother comes home from war with a wife.  Uppsdale is a poor place and with little hope of being able to provide a dowry Ysmay believes she's condemned to a hopeless life of loneliness and no authority over how she lives it.  All this changes when a fair brings Ysmay's household into contact with Hylle, a lord and craftsman from an unknown land in the far north.  

   Uppsdale's wealth had been built on a rich supply of amber but an unmovable rockslide destroyed access to it.  Hylle, who works strange and beautiful crafts from amber, claims to have a way to free the vein of wealth.  In exchange for asks for half the supply and the hand of Ysmay in marriage.

   While Hylle is strange the prospect of escape proves strong to Ysmay.  She willing accepts the offer much to the joy of her brother and sister-in-law.  Soon they are wed and headed north to places beyond Ysmay's knowledge.

   Hylle's home, Ysmay, learns, is an ancient castle.  She quickly learns that she will be left to her own devices.  Hylle promptly tells her he will be gone on many journeys related to his alchemical studies and he will only be her husband in name, not in any other way.  He also tells her there is one tower she must never enter.  Which of course she does.

   I loved these stories.  By themselves they are well wrought but as part of the tapestry of Witch World they are amazing.

   In the single short novel and ten stories I've read I've encountered a detailed and textured world with more color and character than any number of doorstopper fantasy novels I've wasted time on.  Taking place in different eras the stories create a true history containing numerous presents.

   Witch World is a at once familiar, with medieval keeps and  development, yet filled with wondrous strangeness.  We hear of ancient races and suffer the effects imprinted on the world by their long ago presence.  War washes over the land and displaces people who don't even know why the war is happening.  There is folk magic and high magic and both operate differently and serve different purposes.

  Witch World is also one of much sadness.  It is not unbearable sadness but instead the steady debilitating kind that comes from onslaught of custom and daily hardships.  Women are constrained by the need to marry well and poor ones face spinsterhood and purposelessness.  Common people are driven out time and time again by war and suffer from their own countrymen turned brigand.

  And still there is happiness.  Strength of soul is rewarded and goodness prospers.  It often comes after anguish and suffering but it never seems unwarranted.

   You might argue about my inclusion of Andre Norton among the ranks of swords & sorcery writers.  Well, tough.  "Dragon Scale Silver" has swords AND sorcery and Norton was a member of Lin Carter's SAGA (Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America) back in the genre's first great revival forty years ago.  

   Honestly, Witch World is a legitimate part of the genre.  There is swordplay and thrown spells aplenty alongside transdimensional portals and submarines.  As concerned as they are with the interiors of their protagonists and the thoughts behind the decisions they make their is derring-do, harsh violence and powerful sorcery.

   Check it out.  They're all available fairly cheap on Amazon so spend the lucre and give them a shot.