A Return to Flashing Swords

I made it through eight sci-fi books during my hiatus from swords & sorcery. I didn't abandon it completely (see three roundups, Swords of Steel III, and Nyumbani Tales), but I really made an effort to thing about and read other things. Now I'm done with that. I have to admit I started getting a little bored with sci-fi. At least bored with picking shorter sci-fi works I want to revisit (Dune was a bit of cheat, having started it several months ago). I couldn't just keep reviewing Dickson, Anderson, and Niven over and over again. I mean I could, but I'm not sure John O'Neill at Black Gate would let even me do that.

At the same time as conversations have swirled around on the net and several boards got me jazzed to dive back in with both feet. Finishing Purity of Blood, the second of Arturo Perez-Reverte's swashbuckling Captain Alatriste novels was just the right thing to get me fully primed. This coming week I'll be reading Scott Oden's take on the Northern Thing, A Gathering of Ravens.

Looking ahead, I'm not sure exactly what I'll end up reading. It won't all be pure S&S. There'll be my usual mix of historical adventure and probably some planet adventure stories as well. Grimdark Magazine released an anthology called Evil Is a Matter of Perspective and there's a novella (novelette?) by Howie Bentley I need to read. I'd like to something about R. Scott Bakker's epic series. It's not S&S, but it's harrowing stuff and I've been meaning to take a longer look at it. Then there are all the older works I've been planning to write about as well. There's a lot to choose from.

So, starting next week, it's back to swords & sorcery. Come on over to Black Gate and let me know what you think.

Awesome Swords & Sorcery Covers II: Eternal Champions

I probably read more Moorcock when I was a teenager than any other writer. I really have no idea how many times I read the various Eternal Champion series. In addition, I read the Dancers at the End of Time series, and various stand alone novels. I particularly liked the Nomads of the Time Stream and their proto-steampunk setting, even if I didn't get all the political, literary, and cultural references. I'm not sure how many books by Moorcock I've read, but I suspect it's around thirty.

I must write, with some sadness, that recent visits to Moorcock's literary landscapes have been a little disappointing. While there's a wild originality to his stories, there's also a sense of playacting that undercuts much of the drama. When Conan growls and swears a mighty oath I buy it. When Elric does the same thing, I don't, and it's because I don't think Moorcock does, let alone can. For all his love of Edgar Rice Burroughs, he's too much of a modern aesthete to really submerge himself in the bloody sinew and gristle of heroic fantasy and let himself go.

While in better hands it wouldn't be a problem, Moorcock seems to have been unwilling to just tell a story. His stories always seem written to make some larger point; humans are destructive and untrustworthy (Corum and The Eternal Champion), the UK's demented and evil (Hawkmoon), and that good and evil are simplistic notions (nearly everything). These are neither deep nor original thoughts, nor does he dig too deeply into them (it's hard to deep thoughts into a slim book when it's already packed with tons of plot). That's not immediately apparent at fifteen, but it is at fifty. There is a thick strand of pedantry that rings too loudly of the waking world, and detracts from the dream world of the story.

Be that as it may, Michael Moorcock's stories still manage to hold a dear place in my heroic fantasy mental landscape. There are few characters more vivid than Elric, Corum, and Dorian Hawkmoon. I still want Jhary-a-Conel's cat, Whiskers, and a friend as loyal as Moonglum. To not read the those three series is to deprive oneself of some of the most original and important writing in heroic fantasy. All those flaws I've found might only be the result of diving into these stories too many times, and becoming too familiar with them, gaining too much insight into the mechanics and the stagecraft. There's so much good stuff in his books that will linger in my mind and outlast any disappointing rereading for a very long time.

Here is a selection of the covers of his books that thrilled me most. Looking at them today, they conjure up not only the stories, but the time when I first read them, discussing them with my friends, and then starting all over and reading them a second and third time.

These six covers by American artist David McCall Johnston are my favorite covers of my favorite books by Michael Moorcock. I just plowed through a lengthy and highly disapproving review of the two series over at Ferretbrain. Many of the critic's points mirror my own, but he clearly had much less tolerance for the books' problems. 

I like the contrast of an essentially realistic Corum against stylized backgrounds. It's as if the flesh and blood Prince in the Scarlet Robe is entering a dreamscape, where nothing is quite tangible, be it a field of leaves, waves, flame, or dust. As he spends much of the first trilogy in the ever changing realms of Chaos and the second in magical locales,this seems a reasonable interpretation. 

I'm struck by the color choices. On each cover, red is what draws the eye, whether it's Corum's crimson robe or Xiombarg's Medusa-like hair. The colors are bold but not bright. As much as they draw your eyes in, they aren't harsh or jarring. Again, they have the soft muzziness of a dream, not the razor-clean edges of a photograph. Definitely not covers you see on today's shelves.

Painted by Richard Clifton-Dey, these covers for the First Chronicles of the Runestaff are weird and bad. They are incredibly realistic, but also incredibly stiff and lifeless. The lizard heads on the last two covers appear drawn from real life, but with the tacked on wings and tentacles, they seem as believable as the poor lizards with glued on fins in Irwin Allen's dinosaur movies. Nonetheless, I dug these books, and still have a fondness for them. Sure, he cranked them out like he was on crank, and wrote them for the money, but they are chock full of madness and gonzo images: war flamingos, imperialists all wearing bejewelled animal mask, a withered emperor kept alive in a crystal womb by super science. Pretty awesome stuff. These are editions I first read and the ones that stuck most deeply (and still do) in my brain.

I haven't included the Michael Whelan Elric covers because I already highlighted them a little bit in past posts. I also discovered I was a lot kinder to Moorcock's books than I am today. It's just one those things, I guess. Tastes and attitudes change and there's not much you can do about it, even in as short a time as two years. 

Lo-fi Swords and Sorcery Art

To continue on the discussion started in the comments on the last post, here are some of the best lo-fi swords & sorcery art I could find in a quick scouring of the web. I'd been planning to do this, but Raphael Ordonez's comment inspired me to actually do it.

I have to like the cover if I'm going to read the book. I'm embarrassingly superficial like that. I recently saw a number of old Arkham House books for sale, and I totally would have bought them for the dust jackets, if I'd had the money, which I didn't. It's interesting what you say about the amateurishness, which I've often noticed. For some strange reason that only increases the appeal for me. It seems to go hand-in-hand with their unapologetic enthusiasm.

I see nothing strange at all about liking the "unapologetic enthusiasm." That's what gets me the most about this art. It makes no bones about being done by fans for fans without the mediation of professional marketing or focus groups. It was created by artists who love monsters, heroes with big honking weapons, mad sorcerers, and exotic, dangerous worlds and know that's exactly what we S&S fans love as well. 

Other than pictures my friends or I drew, the earliest fantasy artwork that stuck in my brain were from the original D&D pamphlet my friend Densel E. used to teach us how to play. I was only eleven or twelve, so I didn't understand they were "crappy," I just knew they were cool. And I still do.

I don't hate covers that don't take the lo-fi road, not at all. There's just something cool about illustrations that don't try to include every detail, and every shade mentioned in the text. Instead, they present a picture that's impressionistic, capturing the feel and intensity of what it's depicting but leaving the details for my brain to fill in. 

Several people have told me that the awful photshopped art endemic to modern fantasy covers are what have been proven to sell. Even though the many of these covers still contain some of the standard fantasy elements (swords, magic blasts, etc.), they seem like they're reluctant to embrace the genre. They seem to reject the pulp roots of fantasy, instead striving to look more mainstream. I get it, but I just don't like it. These pictures, I like. Can you imagine any of these being in a gaming supplement or on a cover today?

Once More Into the Primal Land

While I had known for a long time that Brian Lumley wrote a series of swords & sorcery stories set in HPL's Dreamlands, I only discovered his Primal Land stories two years ago. I devoured the first collection, The House of Cthulhu, and reviewed it at Black Gate (here). It's not poetry, but it is a great big helping of Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany-inspired S&S. 

Looking for some pure S&S for this week, I settled on the second Primal Lands collection, the woefully named Tarra Khash: Hrossak!. Tarra Khash is the name of an adventurer born of the stepped-dwelling Hrossak people. Until you actually know that, it's just a string of nonsense syllables, but then naming has long been a source of amusement in S&S. Whatever. So far, like the first volume, this one's a lot of old school fun.

Here's some covers where the stories in Tarra Khash first appeared

Grimdark Magazine #5

I just got myself on the review copy list of Grimdark Magazine and issue #5 just hit my inbox this evening. I've read the first four issues and been adequately pleased. While I think there's a lot of marketing hype behind the term grimdark, I do think much of the best sword & sorcery being written at present comes out under that description. The last issue had a great essay by John Fultz making same basic argument that essentially grimdark=swords & sorcery.

I'm planning on reviewing it along with the usual monthly suspects and some stories from back issues of Fantasy Scroll. Probably in the second week of October. 

The point being, Grimdark Issue 5 has hit the digital bookshelves. At $2.99 you really, really can't go wrong. Now if only the next issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly would hurry up and get here already.

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.

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.

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.

Some Books Are Only OK (and I'm cool with that)

   So I just read and reviewed Daughter of the Bright Moon by Lynn Abbey over at Black Gate. I've meant to read it for years but didn't. Overall, it's a decent book. Nothing special but I didn't feel like I'd wasted the five or six hours I spent on it.

   In fact the story of how it came to be is even better than the book. According to Abbey, she was going to pick up Gordon Dickson for a convention had a bad accident. He felt bad and that someone just trying to get him to the show on time got hurt, so he offered to read anything she had. With his advice she turned her ideas into a finished book.  Then he helped her get it published. Pretty cool.

   When I finished reading DotBM my initial reaction was, okay, that's done. I was sad that it was over. I hadn't rushed through it because I couldn't wait to find out what happened next but because I didn't want to miss my deadline at Black Gate.

   Only when I started describing the book to the luminous Mrs. V did I realized how many thing about it that I really liked. There's some good things going on in it and Rifkind is a great hero. In a genre that has way too many wish-fulfillment characters, she's pretty believable. I admit to having problems with a lot of the amazonian characters I've come across in some modern heroic fantasy. Few women are going to be able to go head to head with a man in physical combat for an extended period of time. That's not the case here. Rifkind's victories are hard and smartly bought. In retrospect, I had really sort of enjoyed the book.

   Most books I finish are just like that. Not great, but a good way to pass the time. I read for entertainment. Now it can be at a more sophisticated level of entertainment like The Master and Margarita or at a simpler one like Beyond the Black River, but most books aren't going to be that good.

   And that's ok, it doesn't make them bad books. Heck, the law of averages says most of what I read is going to be, well, average. And I'm cool with that.  Sometimes I just want a little adventure or humor. Maybe a some mystery.   Is every football game you watch or album you listen to the greatest? Nope, but you still enjoy them.  Same thing with books.  If a book delivers what it says on the cover then I'm happy.


Next week, provided an essay I'm working on about why I blog doesn't come together (which I'm can safely guarantee it won't), I'm going to review the fricking awesome God Stalk by the fricking awesome P. C. Hodgell.  It's one of my all time favorite books and I hope I'm able to convey some of that love.

This past week's music (and at least the coming week's as well) was various live Led Zeppelin recordings the studio albums Presence and In Through the Out Door.

"Filed Teeth" - First Reading in Glen Cook

 Sometime in 1982 or 1983 my dad, source of so much of my early fantasy and sci-fi reading, picked up a copy of Orson Scott Card's anthology Dragons of Darkness. There are stories between its covers that might be so amazing that they could change my take on fantasy fiction forever.  I don't know and I don't care. That's because the book's first story is "Filed Teeth" by Glen Cook, the first story I ever read by him, and the story that made me a fan of his for life.

  In the first few pages there's adventure and mystery.  A band of soldiers and their employer, Lord Hammer, have just finished a brutal mountain crossing only to find their hoped for rest ruined by the onset of an ice storm. Trudging over the ice the men learn they must march "another eight miles...More if the circle isn't alive."  When I first read that, I was hooked.  Where were they going and what was the circle?

  The narrator, Will, describes a wounded comrade as an old man who should "spend the winters telling the grandkids lies about the El Murid, Civil and Great Eastern Wars". Who was El Murid? What were those wars? From that line it seemed Cook was presenting a fillip of a larger tale and I'm a sucker for that.

  With no other knowledge than that sentence I also believed Cook knew exactly, in detail, what those wars were.  The line wasn't simply a bit of chrome to flesh out a scene but a reference to great events of which "Filed Teeth" was some sort of addendum.

  I was also grabbed by Cook's complete avoidance of any sort of olde tymie dialogue. His characters speak in simple, contemporary English. When Lord Hammer's aide, Fetch addresses the soldiers, it starts like this:

"Hey!  Listen up!. Fetch yelled. "Hey!  I said knock off the tongue music. Got a little proclamation from the boss." "Here it comes.  All-time ass chewing for doing stupid," I said".  

Simple lines like that were revelation after Tolkien and, particularly, his copycats. Cook wasn't the first author to write fantasy like that, but his stories were the first place I sat up and took notice of it. Coupled with his grimier and more mundane approach to the genre it struck me as perfect.  

   By the end of "Filed Teeth", there's been dark and evil forests and a horde of barbarians. Powerful sorceries have been unleashed and mysteries' solutions revealed. Running through it all is a melancholia.  All the men are veterans of the wars mentioned above. Some suffered great losses among friends and family while others found what they believed in undermined and driven into the wilderness. Only later did I learn that's a constant tenor in Cook's stories as men rue the dark things they've done and devastation and betrayals they've witnessed or been subjected to.

  "Filed Teeth" sold me on Glen Cook. I was sold specifically on the need to find the Dread Empire books. I remembered that I'd seen all three rubberbanded together at the late Barrett Book Trader here on Staten Island and dismissed them because of the title deeming it a little cheesy. Now I had to have them. Fortunately, no one else had bought them and soon I was devouring A Shadow of All Night Falling, October's Baby and All Darkness Met.

  I haven't read all his books and still I've read thirty-one. To this day Glen Cook is one of only a few authors I try to buy in hardcover as soon as his books are released (the others are Tim Powers, James Blaylock and Terry Pratchett).

  People can argue about them in comparison to the his next series, The Black Company, all they want. The Dread Empire books are sloppier, less well written, and all manner of things lesser than the Black Company, but they still rock.  For me they hold a special place. The Dread Empire books were grittier and darker than the bulk of the fantasy I had read up to that point. Oh, Moorcock and Wagner got pretty cynical. With Moorcock, though, it often felt like an aesthetic pose. Wagner was probably the closest in sensibilities, but he was writing about an immortal superman. For all their epic adventures, the main characters in the Dread Empire series are mortal and usually driven by mortal desires and fears. Oh, and they are heroes who do noble things, but they have the feet of broken and impure clay.

  In his essay, "Shit Happens in the Creation of Story", in Jason Waltz's Writing Fantasy Heroes, Cook mentions a specific event from the Dread Empire books as an example of the power of story to overwhelm events and characters no matter what the author's intentions. That event, and if you've read them you know what I mean, is still a kick in the gut all these years later.

  Cook was one of the first writers I read for whom no character, no matter how cool or beloved, was sacred.  Anything could happen to anybody at anytime and it did. Unlike many of the dark stuff being written today, it never felt forced or gratuitous. Bad things didn't just happen to remind the reader the world's an unforgiving, pointless crap heap.  Events happened because they flowed naturally from the story.

  As a story, "Filed Teeth" is dynamite. The mystery of Lord Hammer and that of his destination are revealed slowly and skillfully. If you've read the Dread Empire series it's not much of a riddle, but as my introduction to Cook's world, I was as intrigued as the narrator. Set in a forbidding land beyond civilization. and crossed with evil magics, lost cities and the dragon to end all dragons, it's also a spectacularly exciting story for one so suffused with the feeling that legendary times coming to an end.

  Between the Dread Empire and the Black Company series, Glen Cook, I believe, is one of the earliest writers of military fantasy. I find his terse style and shorter books more enjoyable than the giant tomes larded with endless, trivial side plots, visited on us by lots of authors these days (I know, I ride this hobby horse a lot, but c'mon, admit it, too many books are just too long). I'm so grateful to my dad for buying Dragons of Light all those years ago and I'm incredibly grateful to Glen Cook for writing scads of tough, unsentimental fantasy books.

Sword & Soul Amazon - Dossouye by Charles R. Saunders

 To date, I may have written more about Charles Saunder than any other writer on this blog.  Part of the reason is that he's  one of only a handful of authors from the swords & sorcery renaissance in the seventies still working the field AND he kicks massive backside.  The other is that I only discovered him late in the game. It's only thanks to the late and lamented Heroes of Dark Fantasy site created by Dale Rippke that I learned of Saunders and his hero Imaro.  

   To come across such an exciting S&S writer and character that I'd never even heard of seemed impossible.  Clearly, since I hadn't, it wasn't.  Within six months I'd tracked down the original Imaro books and was hooked.  Over time I got my hands on some of his stories published in various anthologies.  Not only was he writing S&S worthy of mentioning in the same breath as Conan, Fafhrd and Kane, Saunders was showing how to expand the field's horizons.

   Later I learned about the problems Saunders had suffered getting Imaro into print and keeping him there.  Just reading about his experiences is frustrating.  I was disappointed to learn he'd more or less left the genre and turned to journalism.  

   When Night Shade Books (let's all bow our heads in silence for a moment while keeping our fingers crossed) announced they were not only planning to reprint the original Imaro trilogy but brand new volumes as well I sent them my money as soon as they'd take it.  When the NSB stuff fell apart before the third book, "The Trail of Bohu", was reprinted due to low sales I was pissed off greatly.  I wanted to read new stories from Saunders and now it looked like there was to be nothing.  Personally, I would have just given up at that point.

   Fortunately, Charles Saunders was made of sterner stuff than I am.  He'd also returned to S&S just as the whole publishing business was changing.  Over the next few years he put "The Trail of Bohu" back in print and published its sequel, "The Naama War".  Since then there have been new shorts stories and a two-fisted pulp novel, "D'amballa" from a writer who'd been away for far too long.
   Saunders also resurrected and continued the adventures of a second original character, the ahosi Dossouye, a woman soldier in a royal army.  Back in 1979, he had created a sword & soul heroine to walk alongside Imaro (metaphorically, at least).  Dossouye's first story, "Agbewe's Sword", appeared in Jessica Amanda Salmonson's landscape altering "Amazons!".  She reappeared on the pages of several volumes of Marion Zimmer Bradley's "Sword and Sorceress".  Until a reprint of "Gimmile's Song" in the first "Dark Matter" anthology and a new story in the second, she'd been away from public view for nearly twenty years.

   In 2008 the fix-up "Dossouye" appeared.  It collected the original Dossouye stories and added a brand new one, "Obenga's Drum".  Its cover art by Mshindo I. Kuumba was a ferocious image of Saunder's heroine in mid attack.  Produced by the machinery of self-publishing house Lulu and Sword and Soul Media and filled with exciting stories, "Dossouye" was everything a sword & sorcery book should be.
   Dossouye is an ahosi, a female soldier in the army of Abomey.  The concept is taken from the ahosi warriors of the historical West African kingdom of Dahomey.
   At the book's outset, Abomey is preparing for an invasion by the warriors of Abanti and that kingdom's bukur, a terrible practitioner of evil magic.  Only possession of the legendary sword of Agebwe can prevent Abomey's fall.  Chosen in a dream, Dossouye is sent out of the kingdom to find and recover the sword.
   "Agbewe's Sword" is a mini-epic complete with a quest, betrayals, powerful magics and stunning fights and giant battles.  Dossouye appears as an almost meek servant of her king and emerges a powerful figure ready, even if reluctantly, to find a new path in an unknown world.
   In the end, jealousy brings disaster on Dossouye.  Tradition and fear of the prestige she wins in the war against Abanti force her to leave Abomey.  The exiled ahosi is drawn by circumstance into the great forest that covers much of interior of the great continent of Illodwe.
   The stories that follow are as small in scale as "Agbewe's Sword" is vast.  Instead of focusing on Dossouye's quest to recover a magic sword and defend her homeland, they're about her efforts to find her place in world where the traditions her identity was built on have been destroyed.
   In "Gimmile's Songs" and "Marwe's Forest" Dossouye finds and loses love.  In "Shimenge's Mask" and "Yahimba's Choice" the ahosi is forced to make decisions with possibly terrible results.  In the new and final story, "Obenga's Drum", she learns of and is tormented by the consequences of one those decisions.
   In "Marwe's Forest" and "Obenga's Drum" there are beautiful images of the great forest and its deepest, most hidden regions and inhabitants.  In "Obenga's Drum" the trees are "so tall that their foliage appeared only as a jade cloud".  It's a place teeming with life.  Troops of monkeys swing through the lower branches and high above, the great apes.  In the heart of the forest, man is noticeable only by his absence.
   In the first story, Dossouye meets an ancient, supernatural being and for a short time finds peace and love.  In the second tale, while traveling through the gigantic mtuni god-trees in the rain forest's heart she rescues and, in turn, is rescued by the diminutive Emibiti people.  Here too she finds a measure of peace, given it in return for her actions.
   Now, don't think what I'm describing are just hearts and sunshine tales.  These are still stories with plenty of action and excitement.  There are several types of demons, brutal bandits, shapechangers and dinosaurs.  Oh, and Dossouye rides a great war-bull named Gbo.
   Charles Saunders' isn't writing poetry, but stuff that's bold and vivid.  Whether he's presenting the clash of armies:

"Even as sheets of arrows flew overhead, the cavalry of both armies were the first forces to engage, crashing against each other like opposing ocean waves."

or a single warrior's engagement:

   "Dropping the war-bull's reins, she gripped the hilt of her sword in both hands.  Then, with all the strength coiled in her back and shoulders, she swung at the neck of the mokele-mbembe as though she were chopping a tree." 

he's sure to grab and hold you with his words.

   In several of the tales Saunder's creates some of Dossouye's adventures from real-world elements.  In "Yahimba's Choice", Dossouye confronts the practice of female genital mutilation.  She helps a young woman uncover the reasons behind its continued practice  and lay the groundwork for ending it.  "Obenga's Drum" the sorrowful and evil story of Ota Benga is used for that of the spirit-man, Obenga.

   "Dossouye" is not just a collection of adventure stories.  Saunder's is using Dossouye to explore how someone reacts when their fundamental beliefs are shown to have little reality.  When the fedi tree that Dossouye believes houses two of her three souls is felled, she believes she has lost the connection to her ancestors and deities and will become a zhumbi.  When that doesn't happen, she begins the journey that will take her into the great forest and lead her to search out a new version of herself.
   Time and again Dossouye meets others in places similar to her own.  Several of her encounters are with people bound by traditions that bind too tightly or are built on untruths.  Guided by her own sense of right and wrong and armed with bravery and a sharp sword, she steps forward to help them.  For nearly every adventurous event in these stories there's one about moral or emotional choices.
   Now as even cursory visitors to this blog must know, I'm a champion of the straight ahead S&S story.  Gimme a strong armed hero, a well hefted axe and a monster or two and I'm a pretty happy camper.  However, when done right, and Charles Saunders does that, there's a place for more ruminative stories.  He proves a genre's only as limiting as an author is limited.
   The most basic I like and recommend these stories is they're well told tales of adventure.  The fights are exciting, the world is colorful and well depicted and there's a nice dash of horror thrown in as well.  Charles Saunders knows how to hook you into the story and snap you back and forth like a great amusement park ride.
   The second, is that Dossouye's not just another sword-swinger.  Saunders has created an increasingly complex character who isn't just searching for the lost golden macguffin but for how to rebuild her soul.
   Finally, I love that he's continuing to create venues for his stories different from the more usual European or generic fantasy ones.  It's done without a whiff of exoticism.  I have to admit, part of me doesn't even care about the inclusiveness or boundary expanding components of Saunder's writing and all the other swords & soul authors.  I'm a little bit selfish and I just want stories that don't contain the same old overworked elements one more time.  That said, the other stuff is pretty cool too.
   Four years later a full length Dossouye novel appeared.  Titled "The Dancers of Mulukau", it looks to be a continuation, if not completion, of the exiled ahosi's search for herself.  I hope to get to it soon and report back when done.
   

He's a little bit 日本人 and a little bit nordisk: Gonji: Red Blade from the East: The Deathwind Trilogy, Book One by T.C. Rypel

   Because I can't focus these days and as a result I read more slowly than molasses dripping on a winter day, it's taken me a month to read Gonji: Red Blade from the East, the first volume in T.C. Rypel's Deathwind Trilogy.  That's my first disappointment concerning this book.  I mean, there I was back in January plowing through books to write about and then I downloaded this and BANG, I hit some sort of wall constructed of anti-reading matter.        

   Rypel's book stars a half Japanese half Scandinavian warrior, exiled from his home and searching Europe for somebody called the Deathwind.  There're skillfully described battles, monstrous monsters, strange, unearthly enemies with unknown agendas and political machinations.  There's no reason I shouldn't have blown through this book.  But nope, whatever held me back kept me at this book for a month.  Just thinking about that bums me out.  But I guess that's not Rypel's fault.

   My first "disappointment" with this book is that it alludes to scads of things about its antagonist Sabatake Gonji without answering them. I posted a question on Good Reads S&S group (worth checking out) and got a lengthy answer from the author himself.  Basically, T. C. Rypel developed a long back story for Gonji and decided to start the books where he becomes directly involved in a sorcerous war "involving an age-old tyranny ruling over mutltiple, concentric worlds",  Set against this background, Gonji is driven by the last words of his mentor, a Shinto priest, to search out the Deathwind in the distant west.  So, thanks for "making" us need to read the rest of the series just to know what's going on. ;)

   My second "disappointment" with Gonji is that it's a cliffhanger.  In the last pages Gonji's wangled his way into a meeting with the King Klann, seemingly the book's main villain.  Klann's remained off stage for the whole book, and the reader is as desirous of meeting him as Gonji.  Then, literally on the last page, it's revealed everyone has to wait for Book Two, "The Soul Within the Steel" (which still isn't available as an e-book).  Curse, you, Mr. Rypel, for grabbing and holding our attention enough to make us want, no, need, to buy the next book.

   I hope it's obvious that I liked this book.  While motivated by the charge of destiny to search out the mysterious Deathwind, Gonji is also moved by the simple need to eat.  Gonji's a strange mix of simple survivor and noble hero.  In the book's first section he falls in with a fairly unscrupulous mercenary company serving in King Klann's army.   Before he escapes their service he's constantly examining his options, the state of his honor and how far he's willing to go fighting alongside the mercenaries.  Eventually they cross a moral line Gonji finds impossible to countenance and he flees.  

   From there, several unpleasant encounters direct him toward the city of Vedun.  A dying monk asks him to deliver a message to someone named Simon Sardonis.  Later he is too late to save a young man from death but manage to kill his tormentors.  The body he feels obligated to return to its family turns out be that of the brother of one of Vedun's most important men.  

   Built high up in the Carpathian Mountains, Vedun has existed for some time going its own way.  Protected by geography and a local lord and his army, Vedun has avoided becoming enmeshed in the struggles of the powers that surround it.

   Gonji reaches Vedun just as the forces of King Klann have staged a coup de main and forced the city's surrender.  Gonji enters a city in chaos and sets about insinuating himself into the lives of several important people.  From there things begin coming together and Gonji looks like his long traveled road to the Deathwind might be come to an end.  

   There are great scenes of action in Red Blade from the East but they're not the focus of the book.  Much of the book revolves around Gonji struggling to forge a place for himself in Europe.  Half-caste and moulded by the honor traditions of Japan, he's rarely at ease.  Too often he's succumbed to compromises that would have required his suicide in the past.  He's constantly torn by events, a desire to survive and his search for his destiny alongside the Deathwind.  Gonji desires to be noble and heroic but events and a willingness to compromise have made it an ongoing struggle.  Rypel's created a character of admirable depth and introspection, things often lacking in S&S.

   Putting aside those accolades, the book is plenty exciting.  It commences with a duel with vampires and then moves to a fierce running battle against Imperial soldiers.  There's a rooftop duel against a flying beast and a display of Japanese martial arts.  Several small fights between Gonji and men he's angered punctuate various chapters.  All this is delivered concisely and in clear service of the greater story or to expose more of Gonji's character and never gratuitously.

   Gonji's story was first published in the eighties by Zebra.  Now Borgo's presented new, improved editions with much pulpier (and ones that don't look like sequels to Shogun).  I don't know when e-versions of the next volumes will be available but I hope it's soon.  For what's a relatively short book there's a whole lot going on and I don't want to struggle to remember what it was.

Andrew Offutt, RIP

   So, one of the giants of the seventies' S&S explosion died the other day at the age of 78.  I'm not sure exactly how to describe Andrew J. Offutt as a writer.  I guess what he was was a professional.  Offutt was clearly a workhorse who could crank stuff out.  Wikipedia lists 75 individual novels between 1969 and 1993.  I suspect there're more.  He worked in several genres, from S&S to porn (under at least six noms de bonk according to wikipedia) to sci-fi to historical adventure.  He was also a practiced pasticheur of REH.

   From this page's perspective his most important artistic achievements lay in his editorial skills.  The five Swords Against Darkness books remain unparalleled in presenting new authors and promoting S&S.  He was able to coax new S&S stories out of Manly Wade Wellman and brand new Witchworld tales from Andre Norton.  If you don't have them you need to get them.  These are definitely books that should be available at least as cheap e-books.
   According to the ISFDB, the last thing he wrote and published was a story for Rogue Blades' "Rage of the Behemoth" anthology (of which I still haven't got a copy).  If that's the case, it's fitting that the last published story of a man instrumental in building S&S was in exactly that field.