Self-published Book Review: The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot by Reuben Dendinger
If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed. I won’t be posting a review in January, since I’ll be spending time with my family over Christmas, and not at all because I’ll be too busy playing Dragon Age: Inquisition.
I’ve been doing these reviews for the past two years, and this is the first time I’ve had a paperback to review. It’s been a while since I’ve read a paperback of any sort. I’ve grown used to e-books, so it was something of a novelty to read an actual physical copy of The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot by Reuben Dendinger.
The Rude Adventures of Trenchfoot is described by its author as quasi-satire. That may be underselling the satire somewhat. Whether it’s the horse that chews its way through miles of dirt, the three young men that overload a virility draining machine through the sheer power of their manliness, or the magical fusion of two half-dead people into one fully living and one fully dead person, this is not a book that takes itself too seriously. I may have classed it more as parody than satire, a mocking take on gritty sword and sorcery, with perhaps a bit more grit than you really want.
The hero, Trenchfoot, was born full-grown from the union of the night and the earth, with a destiny to travel from the south pole of his birthplace to the equator and decide the nature of the Cosmic Night. The Cosmic Day of the past 500,000 years is coming to an end, and order must give way to chaos, but whether that will be the (relatively) benign chaos of lunacy or the hellish chaos of nihilism has yet to be decided. That is Trenchfoot’s role.
He is joined on his adventures by his male lover the swordsman Cass, his female lover Hyppa, and the scholar and astronomer Thexeded, who foresees the impending collapse of order and civilization and is all for it. Also joining him is the dirt-eating and wine-drinking horse, Oar, born like Trenchfoot from the night and the earth—who’ve apparently had a lot of children, among them inanimate objects, prophecies, and animals, but no humans before Trenchfoot.