Black Gate

It’s hot, I just downloaded Lion (which is the only cool thing happening in these parts) and I’ve managed to avoid any car crashes. Unlike other folks here, since I don’t have much going on, here’s my review of Jo Walton’s Among Others.

Could do worse things than turn the AC up high and read this one.

Prelim: The Seventh Man is in the public domain and available for free from Project Gutenberg in a variety of e-book formats. If you want a hard copy, there is a paperback print-on-demand edition available from Phoenix Rider; I do not know what the text quality is on it, but it’s only $5.99. Bottom line: no excuse not to give the novel a try.

Last year, I posted three articles about Frederick Faust, a staggeringly prolific author of Western fiction and other genres for the pulp magazines. Writing under the pseudonym “Max Brand” and eighteen others pen names, Faust was a one-man writing army that dominated the Western fiction field from the end of World War I until his death as a journalist on the Italian front in World War II. Readers responded positively to the three articles, the first covering Brand’s general career, the next analyzing a collection of his early Western short fiction, and the third examining his rare foray into science fiction, The Smoking Land.

But the response that interested me the most was my own. Those are among my favorite posts I’ve put up on Black Gate in the three years I’ve held this Tuesday spot. It isn’t that I feel proud of the writing and research on them. It’s that they made me realize what an anchor Frederick Faust is in my own writing, and how much I learn from him every time I read one of his works. Reading Faust and researching his life and letters is like coming home to a place that I didn’t realize is “home” when I was away from it.

So I’ve returned to the topic, and I’ve brought one of Faust’s great novels with me, The Seventh Man (1921). So far, I’ve only examined the Western through his short stories, but Faust’s major impact on the genre is in his novels.

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Twelve
By Jasper Kent
Pyr (447 pages, $17.00, September 2010)

Twelve is set in Russia in the year 1812. While America was fighting a trans-Atlantic war against the British, Napoleon led a Grand Armee of 450,000 soldiers across the Niemen river into Russia. The outnumbered and undertrained Tsarist armies fought a series of retreating actions, and the French successfully occupied Moscow just as winter was setting in.

The novel is narrated by Aleksei Ivanovich Danilov, a soldier already weary from a lifetime of war and marked by the loss of two fingers in a Turkish dungeon. At the time of the French invasion he is assigned to a unit of three other soldiers tasked with undermining the French war effort via espionage and commando raids.

The opening line of chapter 1 introduces their strategy: “Dmitry Fetyukovich said he knew some people.” Dmitry knows, in fact, a group of mercenaries from the Danube river valley who fought with the Russians in an earlier conflict with the Turks. These mercenaries share a common interest with Aleksei and his comrades: They love nothing better than killing Frenchmen, and their efficacy is legendary.

As the mercenaries approach Moscow from the south, Aleksei hears of a series of unusual “plagues” breaking out in small towns along their route, giving him a faint feeling of unease. At last, late at night, twelve men arrive in Moscow under the leadership of a man who introduces himself as Zmyeevich — in Russian, “Son of the Serpent.”

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