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Book Pairings: Sorcerer to the Crown and My Beautiful Enemy

Book Pairings: Sorcerer to the Crown and My Beautiful Enemy

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BGsorcerer-to-the-crownYou know, way back when, I had such MASTERFUL IDEAS for this ongoing Book Pairings blog. I had A List. It was great.

Unfortunately, I texted it to John O’Neill Once Upon a Hallowed Age, and then promptly forgot all about it. Sneaking back up to the idea now, I realize that I read all those books Oh So Very Long Ago, and I’d have to read them all over again in order to do the pairings properly.

Not that it would be a bad thing…

BGQueenVictoriaI’d gotten off to a pretty good start with my first book pairing, which compared Ancillary Justice and Cordelia’s Honor, and my second, when I stood an anthology called Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells side by side with Sharon Shinn’s Royal Airs.

They were BRILLIANT! And long. And then I sort of… pooped out.

I dunno. I got busy. New job. Crowdfunded for/put together a couple of EPs. Short story collection came out. Where did 2015 GO anyway?

But recently, I read this BEAUTIFUL book– and it reminded me of this OTHER great book, and I just had to write about them.

You know they’re good when you HAVE to write about ’em, right?

Okay! Okay! Since all y’all at Black Gate love your Sword and Sorcery, OH HEAVENS TO MURGATROID, have I got a pairing for you!

One of each. One Sword. One Sorcery. Full of WOMEN! And WIT! And SUBVERSIVE WORLD VIEWS! And, oh, yes — LE ROMANCE, MES PETITES!!!

Sorcerer to the Crown, by Zen Cho. And My Beautiful Enemy, by Sherry Thomas.

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The Series Series: Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

The Series Series: Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston

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The Shards of Heaven-small[This review may contain trace amounts of David Bowie.]

The jacket copy for Michael Livingtson’s Shards of Heaven sounded promising. I asked for the ARC immediately, and bounced with joy when I found it in my mailbox. Alas, the press release tucked into the book described it as Dan Brown meets Indiana Jones.

Who am I to say Dan Brown is unreadable? Clearly millions of people find him otherwise. To me, though, Brown’s sentences and paragraphs are so relentlessly clunky, ugly, and boring, I am unable to care what happens to any of Brown’s characters. My one attempt to read The Da Vinci Code found me fighting the urge to throw the book across the room, several times on every page.

So the press release made me fear for the well-being of Michael Livingston’s novel. I also feared for my own domestic tranquility: Now that I have children, my household’s penalty for throwing books is a five-minute time-out.

Which was I to believe? The blockbuster-bluster elevator pitch, or the cover copy?

[A]s civil war rages from Rome to Alexandria, and vast armies and navies battle for supremacy, a secret conflict may truly shape the course of history: two sons of Caesar have set out on a ruthless quest to find and control the Shards of Heaven, legendary artifacts said to possess the very power of the gods — or of the one God. Caught up in these cataclysmic events, and the hunt for the Shards, are a pair of exiled Roman legionnaires, a Greek librarian of uncertain loyalties, assassins, spies, slaves . . . and the ten-year-old daughter of Cleopatra herself.

Shards of Heaven has so many of the things Black Gate readers love — epic sweep, battle and brawl, ancient secrets, women one underestimates at one’s peril, and world-shaking magic. Michael Livingston has some nice writing chops. The secret history clearly has a mountain of real historical research to give it depth. How can such a book go wrong?

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When Morocco Really Was Adventurous: Reading Lords of the Atlas

When Morocco Really Was Adventurous: Reading Lords of the Atlas

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9780330024365-uk-300For people who have never been there, Morocco conjures up images of decadent ports, imposing casbahs, mysterious medinas, and mountains filled with bandits. It’s a mystique the tour companies like to perpetuate for this modern and rapidly changing country.

I feel like a bit of a cheat tagging my series of Morocco posts as “adventure travel,” but I’m a blogger and that tag brings in the hits. While Morocco is safe and easy to travel in, it wasn’t so long ago that the mystique was the reality. A classic study of this freebooting era is Gavin Maxwell’s Lords of the Atlas.

Researched in the 1950s, it looks at the twilight era of the old Morocco. The book opens with a slave unlocking the gate to an aging, all-but-abandoned Casbah in the remote Atlas Mountains. This man was one of the last retainers of the Glaoui family, which for two generations grew an empire in Morocco’s rugged mountains, became pashas of important cities, and even played kingmaker.

Maxwell has an eye for lurid detail, especially beheadings. You can feel the writer’s enthusiasm when he speaks of how, just a little over a century ago, the city gates of Morocco would be festooned with the heads of criminals and traitors. The heads had been preserved in salt, a job reserved for the Jews. The Jewish quarter even earned the name mellah, Arabic for “salt.” Even well salted, the heads would eventually rot and fall down into the crowd below, once almost hitting a delegation from England.

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Mutants, Burger Creatures, and Genetically Engineered Sharks: Orbit 12, edited by Damon Knight

Mutants, Burger Creatures, and Genetically Engineered Sharks: Orbit 12, edited by Damon Knight

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Orbit 12-smallOrbit 12
Edited by Damon Knight
Berkley Medallion (240 pages, $0.95, March 1974)
Cover by Paul Lehr

If I’ve got my story straight, there were 21 volumes of Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series in all — and The Best of Orbit. The first of these saw the light of day in 1966.

Obviously, that puts this volume somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as the chronology goes. Reviewing is a subjective thing and we all like what like, but I’ve got to say that I wasn’t very impressed. I’ll start with a look at the two stories I liked, and move on to the many more that I liked less.

PICKS

“What’s the Matter with Herbie?,” by Mel Gilden

Nine stories into this volume and this is the first story that appealed to me. It’s a tale of two very alien aliens in a universe where strange aliens seem to be the norm. There’s not much to the plot but Gilden’s imaginative take and whimsical touch made it worth reading.

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The Ordinary World is a Myth: Marc Levinson’s The Box

The Ordinary World is a Myth: Marc Levinson’s The Box

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The Box Marc Levinson-smallThe Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
Marc Levinson
Princeton University Press (400 pages, $20.95, January 27, 2008)

Just finished reading The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson.

Stifle that big **YAWN** for a minute. Especially as a science fiction writer, I love these histories of ordinary technologies, because they remind you that “ordinary” is itself a myth. Some revolutions come with explosions and special effects and some sneak up on you, but they both change the world.

As Levinson himself says in the book’s introduction, shipping containers are just big aluminum shoeboxes, less esthetically interesting than a can of beans, but their effects were just as revolutionary as the microchip and the Internet, and they were probably more important in building the globalized economy we live in today.

Before containers, loading a single ship with cargo was backbreaking, labor-intensive sweatwork that could take multiple gangs of longshoremen a week or longer. Costs were high, efficiency was low, wages and working conditions were terrible, and corruption and theft were endemic. However, at the same time, traditional ports supported a culture of their own, with whole neighbourhoods, factories, and a complete way-of-life centered around them.

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Vintage Treasures: The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

Vintage Treasures: The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

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WalkingDrum
I read this book so you don’t have to.

I read this book so you don’t have to.

Perhaps this review will make you want to read it.

Perhaps you shouldn’t.

It’s complicated.

The Walking Drum is the only medieval adventure written by Louis L’Amour, the mindbogglingly prolific author of a zillion Westerns. That alone makes it a retro must-read. A medieval romp by a horse-opera yarn-spinner who had also been a professional boxer and merchant seaman. How can we resist?

In actuality, the book is… odd. It fulfills expectations, both positive and negative, exceeds them, falls well short of them, and — ultimately — could have done with an edit before being released into the wild.

Reading it has made rethink my choice of reading matter (and also my strategy as a writer, but that’s for another article). Let me start from the beginning

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December Short Story Roundup

December Short Story Roundup

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oie_1234817JcS2DZHcIt’s time for the last roundup of stories from 2015. The year went out in fine fashion. For the second time in only a few months Beneath Ceaseless Skies published a batch of good heroic fantasy. And while we’re in that interim between new issues of of both Heroic Fantasy Quarterly and Grimdark Magazine, genre stalwart Swords and Sorcery Magazine made its regular monthly appearance bearing a pair of new tales.

Before I get into the reviews, I thought I’d say a little about why I’ve made it a major part of my writing to review and publicize S&S short stories. While there have been good S&S novels (REH’s The Hour of the Dragon), okay ones (KEW’s Darkness Weaves), and bad ones (Lin Carter’s Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria), the beating heart of the genre has always been short stories. From that opening blast of thunder in REH’s “The Shadow Kingdom” — and through the decades in the works of authors as diverse as C.L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and Charles Saunders — it’s been in short stories that the genre’s been best displayed.

The hallmarks of swords & sorcery are adventure, dark fantasy, horror, and a narrow focus on only a few characters, bound together in a narrative that reads like a shot of mainlined adrenaline. In the very best stories — KEW’s “Reflections for the Winter of My Soul,” for example — they’re all present. Not that there can’t be structural complexity, finely detailed characters, or exquisitely tooled prose, but it must be exciting. Detours into side-plots, passages meticulously describing feasts, too many secondary and tertiary characters all put brakes on the action. Limited to fifteen or thirty pages, the focus is on the protagonist and his or her immediate situation.

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Goth Chick News Reviews: The Box Jumper by Stoker Award Winner Lisa Mannetti

Goth Chick News Reviews: The Box Jumper by Stoker Award Winner Lisa Mannetti

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The Box Jumper-small

‘Magic’ is the operative word for this moody novella. The magic of Harry Houdini serves as an overriding backdrop here, but another kind of magic permeates these pages — the magic of fine writing. Don’t expect the usual linear plot, because there is no direct narrative. Vivid dreams, surreal images, hypnotic memories, all serve to flesh out an unsettling tale that sweeps us into a new fictional dimension.
— William F. Nolan, author of Logan’s Run

If those words from one of my favorite authors weren’t reason enough for me to immediately seek out The Box Jumper, then the prospect of Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle together again in the golden age of 1920’s séances would certainly have done the trick.

I am surprised I didn’t hurt myself in the dash.

In her latest, engagingly disturbing novella, Bram Stoker Award Winner Lisa Mannetti transports us to the post-WW I-era where Spiritualism was one of the fastest growing religions, and tricksters knew no bounds when it came to roping in the willing, the gullible and the curious.

There Mannetti introduces us to Leona Derwatt, one of Houdini’s (fictional) mistresses who was also his assistant onstage and off. Houdini takes Leona into his confidence, teaching her the intricacies and secrets of his magic, and teams with her as they confront and expose the many fraudulent psychics and mediums of the time.

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Part Gothic, Part Sword and Sorcery, and Part Horror: Andrew P. Weston’s Hell Bound

Part Gothic, Part Sword and Sorcery, and Part Horror: Andrew P. Weston’s Hell Bound

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Hell Bound-smallHell Bound
By Andrew P. Weston
Perseid Press (464 pages, $23.85 paperback/$8.90 digital, November 5, 2015)
Cover art and design by Roy Mauritsen

Hell Bound is the latest novel by Andrew Paul Weston, best-selling author of The Guardian series, The Cambion Journals, and The IX, (which I reviewed for Black Gate here.) Hell Bound is also the latest novel in the Heroes in Hell shared-world universe, created by author/publisher Janet Morris.

The main character in Hell Bound is Daemon Grim, Satan’s bounty hunter, also known as the Reaper. Not only does he hunt down any damned soul in Hell who gets on the wrong side of His Satanic Majesty, he has the power to visit our world and harvest those who belong in Hell, souls Satan wants in Hell now. Grim can travel between Earth and Hell using a special sickle or scythe that can open portals between the two realms. This scythe also possesses a powerful weapon called God Grace’s, which gives Grim the ability to utterly destroy souls. Since there’s no death in Hell as we know it, (the Damned are already dead) there is instead Reassignment, a twisted version of resurrection handled by an unsavory character known only as the Undertaker. However, there is Oblivion — total obliteration into non-existence. Grim’s weapon gives him the power to send souls howling into eternal nothingness.

The plot concerns Grim’s mission to track down Doctor Thomas Neill Cream, the English physician who in real life was the brilliant and infamous Lambeth Poisoner. Cream has been stealing long-hidden relics and angelic weapons from the Time of the Sundering, when Satan and his followers were cast out of Heaven. All history and knowledge of the Sundering is banned in Hell, but Cream may have illegal access to Satan’s bureaucratic network.

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Haunted Bushes, Serial Killers, and Mysterious Strangers: Algernon Blackwood’s The Listener and Other Stories

Haunted Bushes, Serial Killers, and Mysterious Strangers: Algernon Blackwood’s The Listener and Other Stories

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The Listener and Other Stories-smallThe Listener and Other Stories
By Algernon Blackwood
1907/1917

The Listener and Other Stories was Blackwood’s second fiction collection. It was published a year after the first one, The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories. It contains “The Willows,” a novella that’s arguably one of his best known works and one whose reputation is well deserved. The rest of the collection doesn’t come off quite as well as the previous one but it has some good moments.

“The Listener”

An understated story, as with so much of Blackwood’s fiction. As the story progresses the narrator, who lives in a boarding house that isn’t exactly the Ritz, has various odd experiences and seems to be coming apart at the seams. Well done, but for some reason it didn’t really work for me.

“Max Hensig — Bacteriologist and Murderer”

No supernatural or weird content in this one but it’s not a bad effort. Max Hensig is a sort of prototype of the Hannibal Lecter type of serial killer, who happens to like poisoning people. Plays out as a cat and mouse game between the killer and a reporter.

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