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Self-published Book Review: The Nameless Dwarf by D. P. Prior

Self-published Book Review: The Nameless Dwarf by D. P. Prior

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Nameless_chroniclesI have a soft spot for dwarves. I consider elves over-used Mary Sues and I could go another decade or two without reading another story about fairies, but give me short smiths with beards and axes who drink too much and I’ll keep reading. Which brings us to this month’s self-published book: The Nameless Dwarf: The Complete Chronicles. This wasn’t a book that the author submitted to me by my normal process: I’ll get back to those next month. This time, I actually bought the book from Amazon for actual money, because hey, it was about a dwarf.

Nameless (and yes, everybody calls him Nameless) has a bit of a history. Much of it is chronicled in earlier books, only a couple of which seem to be available from Amazon. Because of this, I decided to take a chance on The Nameless Dwarf without reading about Nameless’s previous adventures. The problem is that the backstory is a bit much to take in all at the beginning. The long and short of it is that Nameless came in possession of a cursed axe. Despite this, he engaged in a number of adventures with the well-known hero Shader, but later, the axe overcame him and caused him to do all sorts of unsavory things, including butchering a lot of his fellow dwarves and becoming a tyrannical dictator and driving them to war, until at last his people fled. When Nameless was finally freed of the cursed axe, he decided that he needed to seek his people out, not to ask forgiveness, which was impossible, but to tell them they could go home, before their exile in the nightmare lands of Qlippoth destroy them utterly. And that’s where the novel begins. I can’t help feeling that the backstory would have had more power if I had been able to read the earlier books and there were plenty of references to people and events from the previous stories that I would have liked to know more about. But even so, there was enough explained at the beginning that I wasn’t entirely lost.

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The Great Captains by Henry Treece

The Great Captains by Henry Treece

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They were great men, yet to see them only as men, stripped of their doom-driven greatness, is to represent them on too trivial a scale. To draw them as massive heroes only would be to recreate them as inhuman cyphers.

from the preface to The Great Captains

The Great Captains (1956) is Henry Treece’s brutal and gripping version of the King Arthur story. Treece has pruned away the romantic embellishments that have obscured the old legend and returned it to the historic time and place in which it might really have happened. Excalibur isn’t buried in an anvil, but a tree stump, and Camelot isn’t a fairy tale castle, but a restored Roman town. Instead of an anachronistic quasi-medieval setting, the story unfolds during the bloody chaos of the waning days of Roman Britain decades after the last legionaries sailed for Gaul.

Britain’s darkest hours came in the Fifth Century AD, when waves of Germanic invaders swept across the English Channel. Stripped of all Roman soldiers in 407 AD, the people of Britain were forced to fend for themselves. In the end, they failed. None of the 1,000 or more prosperous Roman-style villas survived the Saxon onslaught. London, once rich and home to 60,000 people, was abandoned. Starvation and violence covered the land. Yet there were moments of hope.

In the middle of the Fifth Century AD, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a soldier of noble Roman ancestry, rallied the people and raised an army. For years, he fought off the invaders. His success spurred on the British and a generation after his death, the Saxons were routed at the Battle of Badon, securing another generation of peace for the land. According to the Historia Brittonum, written around 828 AD,

The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon in which there fell in one day 960 men from one charge by Arthur; and no one struck them down except Arthur himself.

This is the first historical mention of Arthur. The Historia goes on to document twelve great battles waged by Arthur, dux bellorum (war leader), against the Saxons and their allies. From this, all the great legends of Arthur Pendragon, Once and Future King, arise. And though many historians today have come to doubt he existed, Arthur lives on as the chivalric hero who leads the righteous against a seemingly overwhelming enemy.

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In the Mouth of Madness on Blu-ray and Other Reasons to Go Stark Raving Mad

In the Mouth of Madness on Blu-ray and Other Reasons to Go Stark Raving Mad

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In the Mouth of Madness Blu-ray cover“Believe me, the sooner we’re off the planet, the better.”
— John Trent (Sam Neill) in In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter is a master filmmaker, one of the most influential genre directors to emerge from the cloudburst of creativity of the 1970s. You’d be hard-pressed to find a science-fiction or horror fan who doesn’t have one of Carpenter’s movies in his or her list of Top [Fill in Number] Films list.

But Carpenter’s popularity has created the illusion that his films achieved greater financial success when first released than they did. The unfortunate truth is Carpenter has had only a few outright hits: Escape from New York, Assault on Precinct 13, and Halloween are the most notable. Halloween throws off the curve: Carpenter’s third feature, it grossed $65 million during its initial domestic run against a budget of $325,000 — and it continues to generate revenue to this day. Halloween also influenced genre movies immediately, igniting the massive “slasher boom.”

But many of Carpenter’s finest and most beloved movies did middling-to-flop business when they premiered. The Thing, rightfully considered his masterpiece, was a financial disappointment for Universal in the summer of 1982. Big Trouble in Little China was an outright box-office disaster. And through the ‘90s, Carpenter could not catch a break with anything. After 2001’s Ghosts of Mars did a spectacular belly flop (a worldwide — yes, worldwide — gross of $14 million against a $28 million budget), Carpenter went into semi-retirement to play video games and watch the Lakers. He has only returned to directing for two episodes of Masters of Horror on Showtime and the barely released and very uninteresting feature The Ward in 2011.

However, the march of appreciation for his movies in their post-premiere years continues. I believe we can now safely deposit one of his 1990s movies in the vault of John Carpenter Classics: In the Mouth of Madness, which debuted on Blu-ray last week. [Update 2018: Now we have a special edition Blu-ray from Shout! Factory.] Carpenter fans have often dubbed it the director’s last great movie, and although I hope that’s incorrect and he still has a surprise waiting for us, the title seems apt. I certainly haven’t seen anything Carpenter has done since that remotely approaches it in quality.

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Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

Adventure On Film: Planet Of the Apes

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original.0I missed nearly all the seminal pop culture of my youth. When in eighth grade Andy H. asked me which I liked better, AC/DC or Pink Floyd, I honestly couldn’t answer the question. I was also much too tongue-tied to ask Andy if he’d ever heard of Doctor Who, which I’m quite sure he had not.

Anyway. One of the major events that I missed was Planet Of the Apes. True, Planet is from 1968, and I was only born in ’67, but even so, kids at my school through at least my sixth grade year sported Planet Of the Apes lunch boxes, thermoses, backpacks, and t-shirts. Planet Of the Apes (whatever it was) was cool.

My hipper-than-I friends informed me that Planet regularly played in re-runs on TV, and of course there was the short-lived spin-off series made specifically for the telly (1974). How was it that I had missed all this? Simple: I was building dams in the tributary streams of the Olentangy River, using whatever was handy: stone knives and bearskins, that sort of thing. I knew better than to explain.

Now that I’m older than Methuselah, or at least rapidly catching him up, I figured it’s time to see precisely what I’d missed.

And you know what?

If it weren’t for the execrable presence of Charlton Heston, it’s not half bad.

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Goblins, Demons, Zombies and Fights Aplenty: A Review of The Blue Blazes

Goblins, Demons, Zombies and Fights Aplenty: A Review of The Blue Blazes

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The Blue Blazes-smallIn this quickly changing Internet-obsessed publishing market, Chuck Wendig has shown himself to be a successful and versatile writer as a game designer, a screenwriter, and as a novelist as well. He is also known for some helpful books on how to be a better writer. The man also knows what makes a good author website!

Besides his many authorial talents, I first heard about Wendig from buzz concerning his Miriam Black series and their cool covers from Angry Robot. Unfortunately, I haven’t read any of those yet. You know how it is with that “to read” pile or compiled list at Goodreads.com.

But then I saw the following blurb from Adam Christopher concerning a new upcoming book from Wendig:

The Blue Blazes is exactly my kind of supernatural mob crime novel: dark and visceral, with an everyman hero to root for and Lovecraftian god-horror to keep you awake at night… this is the good stuff, right here.

Noir-ishness and Lovecratian horror? Sold! I immediately bought my first Wendig novel and began to devour The Blue Blazes upon receiving.

This book centers upon the character Mookie Pearl, a big-fisted lug who works for a crime syndicate in modern day (or possibly near future) New York City. Mookie is not a regular wiseguy though. He mainly works in the Underworld — no, not the usual euphemism for organized crime. Mookie works in the Underworld: a place crawling with the undead and monsters, some of which have come in contact with the regular world, though often staying down in the tunnels and caves below New York.

Though Mookie is built like a tank, he also has access to a special underworld drug called “blue blazes” — a blue powder that, when rubbed on one’s temples, turns you into something of a superhuman. Given Mookie’s build, it seems to turn him into a non-green version of The Incredible Hulk.

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Where Did Fantasy Come From? A Review of Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by L. Sprague de Camp

Where Did Fantasy Come From? A Review of Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by L. Sprague de Camp

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Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers The Makers of Heroic Fantasy-smallI love fantasy literature. And I’m greatly interested in its history as well. Where did fantasy come from? Is Tolkien solely to blame? How does King Arthur and his round table knights enter in? What about this business with elves and dwarves? Am I the only one who thinks about where this stuff came from?

As far as I can tell, there are very few fantasy histories out there and not much more than cursory stabs at explaining how we have the fantasy literature that we do. (For a couple of very good ones though, see the introductions to David G. Hartwell and Jacob Weisman’s The Sword and Sorcery Anthology and Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders’s Swords and Dark Magic.) So, when I recently stumbled across a whole book devoted to the history of fantasy, I grabbed it!

The book in question is Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by (now deceased) L. Sprague de Camp, originally published by Arkham House Publishers in 1976. Even if you haven’t been an SF&F (science fiction and fantasy) fan very long, you’ve undoubtedly come across de Camp’s name.

De Camp was one of the most prolific SF&F writers of the twentieth century. He wrote both fantasy and science fiction, as well as non-fiction. I first came across de Camp through my interest in Lovecraft. He seems to have been the first person to have written a biography of H. P. Lovecraft — one that unfortunately has not aged well. But it’s clear that de Camp was very interested in the history of SF&F and particularly fantasy.

I’m not enough of an historian to be able to criticize Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers on a scholarly level; but as far as being engaging and informative, de Camp’s book is superb.  I found it to be incredibly engrossing — one of those books that are hard to put down.

Lin Carter — another prolific twentieth century SF&F writer — gives a fairly long and informative introduction. It simply whets your appetite for what is to follow.

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The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven

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The Magic Goes Away-small

A swordsman battled a sorcerer once upon a time. In that age such battles were frequent. A natural antipathy exists between swordsmen and sorcerers, as between cats and small birds, or between rats and men. Usually the swordsman lost, and humanity’s average intelligence rose some trifling fraction. Sometimes the swordsman won, and again the species was improved; for a sorcerer who cannot kill one miserable swordsman is a poor excuse for a sorcerer.

So begins “Not Long Before the End” (1969), the first story in Larry Niven’s The Magic Goes Away series. His approach to swords & sorcery is the same as the one he brought to the hard science fiction he’s best known for: extravagant and colorful yet built on a framework of logic.

As you might infer from the tone of the quote, he also has a bias against the warrior hero typical of the genre and in favor of the sorcerer. In the short story above, its sequel “What Good Is a Glass Dagger?”, and the short novel The Magic Goes Away, he chronicled the adventures of a sorcerer called Warlock in a pre-historic Earth located somewhere to the right of Robert E. Howard’s Hyboria.

Niven’s starting point was to theorize how magic might work in a rational way. In his model, sorcery is powered by mana, a finite source. Instead of telling stories of the glory days when wizards built flying castles, and dragons and gods walked the earth, these tales are set in the magical world’s fading days. It’s a clever setup and one that drew me in enough to read the whole trilogy this past week.

“Not Long Before the End” is an inversion of the too-common S&S story of barbarian swordsman rescues girl from wicked sorcerer. Here Warlock discovers the nature of mana and realizes it’s running out.

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When Niels Bohr Met St. Thomas Aquinas: Prince of Darkness on Blu-ray

When Niels Bohr Met St. Thomas Aquinas: Prince of Darkness on Blu-ray

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Prince of Darkness Blu-ray coverPrince of Darkness (1987)
Written and Directed by John Carpenter. Starring Donald Pleasance, Victor Wong, Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount, Dennis Dun, Alice Cooper.

“Are you asking me about the backstory of the movie? I have no idea.”
— John Carpenter on the commentary track for Prince of Darkness

This week, with the release of In the Mouth of Madness, all of director John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” movies will have reached Blu-ray. The Thing came out a few years ago (from Universal Home Video, doing a better-than-average job), and at the end of September, right in time for the crisp joys of October, Shout! Factory released 1987’s Prince of Darkness — one of Carpenter’s most underrated films.

(His most underrated film? In the Mouth of Madness. More on that in a week or so.)

The apocalypse trilogy films have no connection to each other aside from Carpenter’s interest in events that could bring about the end of the world, a hangover from his childhood fascination with the wild n’ wooly contents of the biblical Book of Revelation. The Thing threatened the globe with a shape-changing alien nasty capable a rapidly assimilating the human race. In the Mouth of Madness brought the Great Old Ones back in full Lovecraftian form, but also undermined all of reality through the power of fiction.

In Prince of Darkness, it would seem that Old Scratch himself is the force preparing to annihilate humanity. After all, what else to make of the title? But Prince of Darkness ends up confronting Earth with a destroyer as much imbedded in science fiction as The Thing. Carpenter combines Catholic-themed religious horror with, of all things, quantum mechanics. The resulting film frequently makes little sense — even John Carpenter acknowledges that — but when viewed as a deep well of bizarre ideas and unnerving atmosphere, it stands as one of the most creative horror films of its decade. I now rank it among Carpenter’s best movies, although it took me a few years to grasp its achievements and shrug off its faults.

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John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

John Bellairs, Fred Saberhagen and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The House With a Clock in its Walls-smallI know John Bellairs mostly as the author of a host of YA fantasy mysteries — rather dark fantasy mysteries, actually, with a twinge of horror. The first one I purchased was The House With a Clock in its Walls, back when my kids were very young, but I imagined they’d thank me as they grew older and started devouring the fantasy library I’d diligently built for them.

Never happened. Instead, they did the exact same thing I did at their age: found their own books and steadfastly ignored the stuff their boring parents kept recommending.

They read Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series, and Suzanne Collins’s Gregor books, John A. Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice, and Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. I ended up with stacks of unread John Bellairs titles like The Eyes of the Killer Robot and The Spell of the Sorcerer’s Skull. At least they looked good on the shelves.

John Bellairs also wrote at least one adult fantasy, The Face in the Frost. And that was apparently enough to win him a space in Gary Gygax’s Appendix N in the back of the Dungeon Masters Guide, which is why we’re talking about him today.

Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan are examining one Appendix N writer per week at Tor.com, in their Advanced Readings in D&D series. They’ve done 15 installments so far, and for number 16 Tim turns to John Bellairs.

But first, he briefly returns to subject #15, Lin Carter, to say a few words about his exceptional treatise on adult fantasy, Imaginary Worlds.

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The Cleric and the Crucifix

The Cleric and the Crucifix

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vanhelsing

“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”

There was something diabolically sweet in her tones — something of the tingling of glass when struck — which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face, full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.

So does Dr. John Seward describe the encounter between Abraham Van Helsing and newly-risen Lucy Westenra in Chapter 16 of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’m not knowledgeable enough in literary vampire lore to be able to say with any certainty that the 1897 novel is the first time we see a bloodsucker recoil from a crucifix, but, even if it’s not, I have little doubt that it was probably the most widely-read and influential example of it. Not only has the novel itself sold untold copies in the English-speaking world alone, but motion picture adaptations, starting with F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized 1922 film, Nosferatu, have added much to the popular conception of “the undead” (to borrow Stoker’s own coinage) – and how to combat them.

In the world of gaming, it’s well-known that the medieval miniatures rules, Chainmail, written by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, was the immediate predecessor to Dungeons & Dragons, especially its “Fantasy Supplement,” which introduces the option of including magic and monsters so as to “refight the epic struggles related by J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, and other fantasy writers.” Even a cursory examination of Chainmail reveals that there’s nary a mention of religion in its pages, including in the Fantasy Supplement. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, since the priest isn’t a distinct literary archetype in the pulp fantasy literature that inspired Gygax (as revealed in innumerable posts about his Appendix N bibliography on this site and elsewhere). Consequently, Chainmail includes only “heroes” and “wizards” as individual units.

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