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Author: Bill Ward

Howie Bentley Reviews The Drums of Chaos

Howie Bentley Reviews The Drums of Chaos

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the-drums-of-chaos-2The Drums Of Chaos
Richard L. Tierney
Mythos Books (440 pages, $45, Sept 2008)
Reviewed by Howie Bentley

Simon of Gitta, Richard L. Tierney’s famous escaped gladiator turned student of the occult, has returned to the Holy Land to take revenge on the Roman officials who killed his parents and sold him into slavery. The Drums of Chaos shows Simon at his most savage as he slays his foes and writes messages on the wall in their blood. Simon is a hell hound on his enemies’ trail, but his plans start being disrupted as apocalyptic supernatural events unfold and cross his path. It seems that there are a handful of different factions of sorcerers, all with their own agendas; not excluding Jesus Christ, the son of Yahweh Zava’ot (A.K.A. Yog-Sothoth).

Although this is a Sword & Sorcery novel in the grand Howardian tradition, it is just as much about the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as it is about Simon’s adventures in the Holy Land. Imagine the Christ Passion viewed through the eyes of H.P. Lovecraft and you start to get an idea where this is going. Some may scoff at this portrayal of biblical events but I think, looking at it objectively, you have to admit that Tierney’s account of the crucifixion is just as plausible as the stories you hear in church, and a hell of a lot more interesting – as I often found myself on the edge of my seat while reading Drums, as opposed to slumped down in my seat asleep. This might well be considered the most blasphemous yarn of the whole literary body termed “the Mythos,” and considering the nature of the field, that’s saying something.

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E.E. Knight Reviews Deader Still

E.E. Knight Reviews Deader Still

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deader-stillDeader Still
Anton Strout
Ace (303 pp, $7.99, March 2009)
Reviewed by E.E. Knight

Good news for fans of urban fantasy detective stories: Anton Strout hits one well into the bleachers with his sophomore publishing effort. Deader Still is the worthy follow on to last year’s Dead To Me. Strout is writing a first-person paranormal gumshoe saga about investigator Simon Canderous, a baseball bat-swinging sleuth. Simon works for the city government’s Department of Extraordinary Affairs, an underfunded law enforcement organization. Think Bill Murray’s college-basement departmental digs in Ghostbusters without the glamour. And the rest of officialdom feels much the same way about the Department as Murray’s outraged Dean. They’re on a shoestring budget for everything but paperwork.

Simon is a mix of beefy, quirky, and a little intense that makes me think of a young Jon Voight. He makes a nice pivot for the other characters in the series. There is more to Simon than his trusty baseball bat. He is a user of psychometry, able to get a read off an object and some idea of what was on the mind of the last person to handle it. This is fun for readers and impresses me as an author. One of the big problems with writing first person (or third person limited to a single character) is getting glimpses of other characters’ inner lives. Simon’s reading of objects nicely bridges the gap between points of view and the author in me finds the device brilliant. Ordinary readers will simply find it fun and interesting. I thought some of the best parts of the first book were Simon’s readings of objects, and that trend holds true for the sequel.

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Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Gamer Fantastic

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Gamer Fantastic

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gamer-fantasticGamer Fantastic
Edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Kerrie Hughes
DAW Books (309 pp, $7.99, July 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Gamer Fantastic contains thirteen stories about games and gamers, taken in unusual fantasy and science fiction directions. Seven concern classic roleplaying games, while five are about computer gaming. (The other story, “Mightier Than the Sword” by Jim C. Hines, is harder to classify, more about authors and conventions than about gaming itself. Despite this, it was one of my favorites.)

A couple of the stories have no real “fantastic” elements at all. For example, in “Roles We Play” by Jody Lynn Nye, we are exposed to a historical narrative about how roleplaying games could have been used to develop an effective form of psychotherapy. Though aspects of the story are surreal, the “fantasy” is more psychological than literal, and the parallels between fantasy gaming elements and psychological elements are precisely what lend the story believability.

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Sue Granquist Reviews Drood

Sue Granquist Reviews Drood

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drood-coverDrood
Dan Simmons
Little Brown (976 pages, $9.99, January 2011 mmp (originally February 2009))
Reviewed by Sue Granquist

In National Lampoon’s Vacation, a family goes on a cross-country road trip, enduring hardship and danger, seeing cheesy landmarks and ultimately arriving at an amusement park that was closed for construction. In other words, a long and harrowing journey with no pay off, but still a lot of fun to watch.

Sort of how I feel about Dan Simmons’ latest suspense thriller, Drood. Weighing in at a hefty 784 pages in hardback (976 in mass market paperback!), I was somewhat reluctant to devote the time to this behemoth of a novel. However, enticed by the premise and my somewhat love / hate relationship with Simmons, I picked up a copy and got help from a stock guy with carrying it to the car. And I must say, the premise is genius.

The last, and unfinished work of Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was published in 1870 and became famous in its time, largely for being a mystery with no ending. The serialized work was intended to unfold over twelve installments, however Dickens died after completing only six. Now before you go having high-school-literature-class flash backs, hear me out. You don’t have to be at all familiar with The Mystery of Edwin Drood in order to read Simmons’ book; I sure wasn’t, though I did look into it out of curiosity.

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Rich Horton Reviews Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way

Rich Horton Reviews Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way

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World Fantasy Award Nominee

Blood of Ambrose
James Enge
Pyr (416 pp, $15.98, April 2009)

This Crooked Way
James Enge
Pyr (414 pp, $16.00, October 2009)
Reviewed by Rich Horton

A few years ago Black Gate featured the first published story from James Enge, “Turn Up This Crooked Way” (in BG 8). I admit I regard first stories with skepticism – but despite limited expectations I was entirely delighted, and at the end of the year it made my “Virtual Best of the Year” list. Enge continued to place stories in the pages of Black Gate, all featuring the main character from “Turn Up This Crooked Way,” a rather dour magician named Morlock Ambrosius. Morlock’s reputation is bad, but, perhaps predictably, he is actually on the side of good. There were some hints of a tortured history for him in those initial stories, but little real details about his past.

Now we have two novels from Enge, each also about Morlock. The first, Blood of Ambrose, is more conventionally a novel – though quite episodic in structure – and while Morlock is a major character, he shares the stage with another protagonist. But we are vouchsafed some revelations about Morlock’s back story. As for the second book, This Crooked Way, it is straightforwardly a fix-up of several of the Black Gate stories, as well as some new episodes and linking material. For all that, it does feature an overarching narrative arc, so it ends up working effectively enough as a novel.

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A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

A Review of Warhammer: Curse of the Necrarch

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curse-necrarchCurse of the Necrarch
Steven Savile
BL Publishing (410 pages, $7.99, 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of Warhammer Fantasy borrows heavily from many sources, everything from Tolkienesque dwarves and Da Vinci-inspired machines, to Moorcockian chaos creatures, a Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire, and monsters straight out of Dungeons & Dragons. But, maybe because it’s been around for so long or because it’s been so successfully added to over the years, the Warhammer world blends all these outwardly derivative elements into a setting that works very well — both as the backdrop for their fantasy game and as a surprisingly rich source of sword & sorcery and heroic adventure style dark fantasy fiction.

Steven Savile is one of the most skilled writers working in the Warhammer stables, and showcases his abilities nicely. Savile is primarily a horror writer, and his Warhammer fiction is imbued with a healthy dose of the morbid and the dreadful without ever forsaking the golden rule of Warhammer fiction – namely, putting the action first. Curse of the Necrarch is a standalone novel, but it matches nicely with Savile’s other Warhammer books in that its all about vampires and their undead minions.

But these vampires are not Bela Lugosi in a tuxedo, nor are they the sexy-chic goths of today’s urban fantasy. Instead they are withered, rotting, monstrous things, more akin to Murnau’s Nosferatu than Rice’s Lestat. Curse of the Necrarch opens with a confrontation with one such powerful Necrarch vampire, as Felix Metzger, hereditary Lord of Kastell Metz, meets his doom while defending his lands from an invading force of undead.

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E.E. Knight Reviews Flesh and Fire

E.E. Knight Reviews Flesh and Fire

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fleshandfire-vineart-war-lauraannegilmanFlesh and Fire
Laura Anne Gilman
Simon & Schuster Adult (496 pp, $9.99, September 2010 (originally October 2009))
Reviewed by E.E. Knight

Laura Anne Gilman is a fantasy author I not only read, but teach. The reason is simple: when I’m giving a class in the writing of science fiction and fantasy, I rarely know what to say about magic. I point the students toward authors who handle it better than I ever could, and try to explain why I think it works for an audience in those books.

Maybe I’m just reading the wrong fantasists, but I find only a few authors whose use of magic interests and pleases me. One of those is Gilman. In her urban fantasy Retrievers series, her heroine used something called “Current” – more or less the ability to manipulate electricity to get it to win items and influence people. But it was a quirky power and her heroine could accidentally get into difficulty if she wasn’t very careful with how she used it (blowing out airport x-ray scanners and such). Creative, intriguing, and just plausible enough for me to suspend disbelief, something that rarely happens when the hero just fires off a few latinesque magic words and points his finger.

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A Review of Warhammer: Knight of the Realm

A Review of Warhammer: Knight of the Realm

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knight-of-the-realm-reynoldsKnight of the Realm
Anthony Reynolds
BL Publishing (410 pp, $7.99, 2009)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

A sequel to last year’s Knight Errant, Anthony Reynolds’ Knight of the Realm continues the story of the young Bretonnian knight Calard and his adventures in the grim world of Warhammer. If you are not familiar with the Warhammer setting – a world based on a very popular gaming franchise from Games Workshop – it is essentially a mash-up of very familiar fantasy elements such as orcs, elves, and dwarves with a decidedly dark edge. It is a bleak, violent place, a place always in the midst of war and in danger of being overrun by the insane worshippers of Chaos.

Chaos has proven to be this series’ primary antagonist, as Calard and his half-brother, Bertelis, earned their knightly spurs in the first book fighting against tides of goat-headed beastmen. In Knight of the Realm, an army of Chaos-worshipping Norscans – think seven-foot-tall black magic Vikings – are raiding the length and breadth of Bretonnia and the combined armies of the land must ride out to defeat them. Bretonnia is a region modeled on an idealized medieval France replete with chivalry, knightly contests, and a rigid feudal hierarchy, but infused with a strong Arthurian flavor in the form of a cult of the Lady of the Lake and saint-like Grail knights.

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Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Intelligent Design

Andrew Zimmerman Jones Reviews Intelligent Design

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intellignet-designIntelligent Design
Edited by Denise Little
DAW books (307 pp, $7.99, September 2009)
Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Intelligent Design collects eleven stories focused on the theme of the creation of life. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, but I was impressed by the stories presented. This is a thinking person’s collection, an idea-driven romp through one of the most contentious topics in modern society.

One of my favorites was the final story, Laura Resnick’s engaging creation retelling “Project: Creation,” which actually made me laugh out loud. It reminded me of a mix between the Book of Genesis and The Office. What impressed me most was that it seemed like it could be read and appreciated by people on both sides of the debate. It leaves the basic tenets of creationism and religion intact, while providing a context where those who are less mystical can still appreciate the story. Each side could think, if only for a moment, “Yeah, maybe it could have sort of happened like that,” and at least see a glimpse of the other side’s point of view.

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A Review of The Sorcerer’s Plague

A Review of The Sorcerer’s Plague

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the-sorcerers-plague-coeThe Sorcerers’ Plague
David B. Coe
Tor (496 pages, $7.99, February 2009 (originally December 2007))
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The Sorcerer’s Plague from David B. Coe is the first book in a planned trilogy entitled The Blood of the Southlands, which takes place in a different section of a world already established in Coe’s previous series, The Winds of the Forelands. While some characters and basic information is carried over from Coe’s previous series, familiarity with these elements is not necessary to the enjoyment of The Sorcerer’s Plague.

The Southlands are divided along racial and clan lines, and much of the back-story of this book goes into describing the various divisions and antagonisms between its competing peoples. No love is lost between the Qirsi, white-haired and pale-eyed sorcerers, and the Eandi, dark-haired people incapable of magic. Between these two racial groups are the Mettai and the Y’Qatt, people that inhabit the Companion Lakes Region in which most of the book’s action takes place. These two groups blur the distinction between the races as the Y’Qatt are Qirsi who refuse, for religious reasons, to use any magic, and the Mettai are Eandi who are actually powerful magicians — only the Mettai use earth and blood magic rather than the Qirsi’s channeling of their life essence for purposes of sorcery. The competing abilities and philosophies of these groups are fertile ground for the plot.

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