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The Desert of Souls, a Review

The Desert of Souls, a Review

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the-desert-of-souls

“We should talk more, you and I,” he said, “about storytelling.”

–Howard Andrew Jones, The Desert of Souls

The Desert of Souls is the debut novel of Black Gate magazine managing editor Howard Andrew Jones. About ¼ of the way into it, I thought aloud: You’ve got to be kidding me. A debut novel? Jones’ Arabian Nights-style adventure has the polish of a cut diamond, and the finish of a veteran author.

The Desert of Souls is a proper fantasy, albeit placed in a historical setting, so there’s magic, undead monsters, god-like snakes, and more. I haven’t encountered a djinn on the printed page since my old AD&D days, and was pleasantly flooded with memories of Oasis of the White Palm as I read. The Desert of Souls features two heroes, Dabir and Asim, who spend large part of the book in near-death situations in pursuit of the wizard Fifouz, who plots to visit an ancient curse on a modern city.

Jones has an excellent sense of pace and an affinity for a tale properly told. Not rushed, but told as a story should be told, as though novelist and the reader were drawn up around a campfire with the whole night ahead for stories. A lot happens in The Desert of Souls but it’s not told breathlessly; the pace is languid at times, quick at others in Asim’s first person narrative. It’s also unabashedly optimistic, a welcome relief in these often dark times of current fantasy offerings.

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Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Excalibur on Blu-ray

Celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Excalibur on Blu-ray

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excalibur-blu-ray-cover1Excalibur (1981)
Directed by John Boorman. Starring Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Nicholas Clay, Cherie Lunghi, Paul Geoffrey, Patrick Stewart, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne.

One land! One king! 1080 lines of resolution!

Did you know that there is a re-make of Excalibur is in pre-production? Apparently, the lawyers at Legendary Pictures have forgotten that Le Morte d’Arthur and its associated characters are in the public domain and have been since the bleeding Dark Ages. No more about the re-make (for now).

The original, Once and Future Excalibur, is a crowning piece of high fantasy from the 1980s. It is also my favorite film version of the Arthurian legends. (Apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Most movies about King Arthur, especially those before Excalibur upped the ante, are tatty costume dramas lacking magic, either cinematic or literal, and which feel like they were adapted from children’s editions of the story. (Apologies to Howard Pyle.) None of these movies connect to the sensations that the original telling of the legends, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, to Chrétein de Troyes, to Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, create in me when I read them. A sense of dark mysticism pervades through the oldest versions of King Arthur’s myth: a mixture of paganism and early Christianity, a connection to Faerie, the eternal struggle between chaos and civilization. Excalibur, ignoring attempts to either look “realistic” or to resemble the generic expectation of a Hollywood costume drama, drives into the spiritual heart of King Arthur and emerges with something fantastic and often breathtaking.

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Chris Braak Reviews Princep’s Fury (Codex Alera #5)

Chris Braak Reviews Princep’s Fury (Codex Alera #5)

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princeps-furyPrinceps’ Fury
Jim Butcher
Ace (740 pp, $9.99, November 2008 – November 2009 paperback edition)
Reviewed by Chris Braak

In 2004, Jim Butcher, author of the wildly successful Dresden Files, dropped a new epic fantasy series into the market. The Codex Alera series, which began with The Furies of Calderon, was a fascinating mash-up of imperial Roman culture, elementalist magic, monsters and politics. Princeps’ Fury is the fifth and newest volume in that series.

The book is written with Butcher’s characteristic wit and dynamite pacing. The main characters — Tavi and his friend Max, in particular — are almost invariably entertaining just to read. There is no shortage of tense moments, thrumming tension, and fierce joy when the heroes manage to outsmart or outmaneuver the seemingly-invincible villains. In Princeps’ Fury, Tavi — now the eponymous Princeps of the empire of Alera — fulfills his promise to return the lycanthropic Canim soldiers that his legions negotiated peace with in the previous novel to their homes on the other side of the sea. Once there, he discovers the Canim empire nearly annihilated by the Vord, a race of hive-minded insects that have been threatening Alera throughout the series.

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Dark Humor and False Floors: A Review of Runebound

Dark Humor and False Floors: A Review of Runebound

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Runebound-smallA couple of years ago I was really jonesing for some good old-fashioned tabletop fantasy role playing, but I was without a group and didn’t have the time to run a solo game for my wife. Then, like a beam from heaven, we received Runebound 2nd Edition for Christmas 2009. For the next few months, pretty much any time we had a couple hours of free time, my wife would ask, “Runebound?”

Oh, yeah.

Runebound is a board game of fantasy adventure. Each player takes on the role of one from a dozen (mostly unsavory) heroes, travels the map, faces challenges of ever-increasing difficulty, gains skill and treasure, and visits cities to heal, buy items and hire allies. The goal is to be the hero who defeats the great dragon Lord Margath before he can once again rise to power. (And if he can’t be found, snuffing three other dragons will do.)

The game board is a map that would catch Bilbo’s interest, with regional names (Howling Giant Hills, Moonglow Marsh) scattered liberally about that have zero effect on game play. Each hex has one of five terrain types. To move you roll five (when healthy) movement dice. A movement die is six-sided, with each face containing two or three terrain symbols. Spending a die with the appropriate terrain symbol showing allows you to move into a hex of that type. The odds of rolling each type vary, and on many turns a player is left weighing where she eventually wants to go against where she can get right now.

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Robert Rowe Reviews the Judge Dredd RPG

Robert Rowe Reviews the Judge Dredd RPG

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Mock.indd

In this gaming review from Black Gate 14, Robert Rowe explores the world of Mega-city, the home of “the law,” Judge Dredd. I admit that I personally have never read the comic and am one of those sorry souls who only know of Judge Dredd through the Stallone film, but this review makes me want to explore the world in a bit more depth.

Judge Dredd

Lawrence Whitaker
Mongoose Publishing (268 pages, $49.95, 2009)
Reviewed by Robert Rowe

Judge Dredd is an iconic comic book character – a marvelous piece of fascist certainty in the absurdly dystopic future of Mega-City One. This new book from Mongoose Publishing is the third attempt to recreate Dredd’s world for role-players. The first was a stand-alone game, the second an RPG based on the d20 system, and this installment is a meaty tome based on the Traveller rules. Take note: you will need the Traveller Core Rulebook to play this version of Judge Dredd. As such, this game will benefit and/or suffer from the strengths and shortcomings of Traveller according to your own personal feelings about that system.

Onto the book itself. The production values are outstanding, treating the reader to full-color artwork from the inside cover’s world map of 2131 to the panorama of Mega-city one sprawled across the last page and back cover. The layout is clear and clean and after a very brief introduction jumps right into Judge creation.

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Desert of Souls: A Review

Desert of Souls: A Review

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bgdesertDesert of Souls, by Howard Andrew Jones.
Thomas Dunne Books (320 pages, $24.99, February 15, 2011)

As I write this, I’m listening to Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon, because sometimes Yo-Yo Ma’s cello just does things to a girl, you know? Anyway, it seems appropriate, so I thought I’d share.

First of all: Spoiler Alert. Probably minor ones, but you never can tell with me, so if you don’t want to know a few plot points, some specifics of the characters, interesting quotes and structural ramblings, please do not read further.

Second of all: I met the author once four years ago and have corresponded with him a few times, so there’s that. I am not an unbiased reader. But this is a blogicle for Black Gate Magazine, after all, and as we’re having a month-long celebration of Howard Andrew Jones over here, I don’t really think anyone expects me to be neutral!

…Hurray!

Third of all: I confess that I’d never read a Dabir and Asim story – in Black Gate or elsewhere – before this debut novel, so I came to it with no thought more profound than, “What pretty colors the cover has!” and “ Oh, great, now I want a scimitar too!”

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Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.16 “And Then There Were None”

Supernatural Spotlight – Episode 6.16 “And Then There Were None”

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SUPERNATURAL

This week starts out with a cute girl being picked up by a trucker, attempting to seduce him. But, fortunately, he loves Jesus and tries to save her, telling her that the void inside is searching for him. She laughs, talking about how God created him and abandoned him. Then she whispers a secret into his ear …

and he goes home and smashes in his family’s heads with a hammer.

Sam, Dean, and Bobby are on the case. Turns out there have been a series of hunters running into massive monster populations, with many hunter deaths. Dean observes that it’s a “straight kickline down I-80…. Looks to me like it’s a Sherman march monster mash.” The march seems to be heading straight to the town where a man bashed his family’s head in with a hammer.

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Drinking in the Demonic Energy of Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

Drinking in the Demonic Energy of Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

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legend-of-sigurd-gudrunIf you like the sound and rhythm of words — and if you’re a hopeless J.R.R. Tolkien junkie — you’ll like The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun (2009, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Lacking either of these prerequisites, you probably won’t. And there’s not much more to say than that.

Casual Tolkien fans likely won’t buy The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, and even semi-serious fans who have tackled The Silmarillion may lack the appetite for it. It consists of two long poems, around which are sandwiched an exhaustive introduction and a pair of lengthy explications/footnotes, the latter written by Tolkien’s son Christopher. Added together, this additional material is longer than the poems themselves.

The real reward of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun is its wonderful language. The poems—“The Lay of the Volsungs” and “The Lay of Gudrun”—are composed in eight line alliterative stanzaic metre. Reading them makes me wish I knew the native Old Norse Tolkien of which Tolkien spoke so admiringly; the modern English is pretty darned powerful already.

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“Are You Not Still Entertained?”: Gladiator’s 10-Year Oscar Anniversary

“Are You Not Still Entertained?”: Gladiator’s 10-Year Oscar Anniversary

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gladiator-posterAs of Sunday evening, The King’s Speech is the newest Academy Award winner for Best Picture. I am sure a virulent backlash against the English period drama is already underway, but let the record show that I thoroughly enjoyed that movie. It is not my personal pick for the best film of 2010. I would have liked Black Swan, Inception, or True Grit to win, but such was not to be, and The King’s Speech as a winner doesn’t anger me.

However, I prophesy that The King’s Speech will go down in history as one of the Oscar winners with scant staying power. Remember Shakespeare in Love? Chances are you haven’t thought of it much at all. The same can be said for numerous winners since the awards started in 1929: movies that had their moment, and then faded back as the “losers” turned into perennials. No one has much interest in Cavalcade (winner for 1933, the year of King Kong and Duck Soup) or The Great Ziegfield (winner for 1936) today; 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth is the butt of jokes about “Worst Best Picture Ever”; and even the recent A Beautiful Mind has blipped off the pop-culture radar fast, while Crash’s win tends to get people upset.* I can even mount an argument that the massively popular win for Forrest Gump has been overshadowed in the ensuing years by the everlasting popularity of two of its competitors, The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.

But many Academy wins have lasted. It is amazing to realize that Casablanca was a surprise victory in 1943, upsetting favorite Watch on the Rhine. When was the last time you quoted or heard someone quote Watch on the Rhine? Other enduring winners include The Sound of Music, Gone with the Wind, Rocky, Platoon, and from the last twenty years The Silence of the Lambs (this year is its twentieth anniversary as a winner) and Unforgiven.

Which brings me to this year’s tenth-anniversary winner. Where does Ridley Scott’s Roman epic Gladiator stand today, a decade after it received five Oscars at the 73rd Annual Academy Awards?

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A Review of Neptune Crossing by Jeffrey A. Carver

A Review of Neptune Crossing by Jeffrey A. Carver

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neptuneNeptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles, Volume 1), by Jeffrey A. Carver
Tor (383 pages, hardcover, April 1994)

Neptune Crossing, by Jeffrey A. Carver, is the first of a series. As with some other books I’ve reviewed, it feels unfinished and awkward without its sequels. That’s not to say that it’s a bad book, or that you shouldn’t read this series, but you might want to pick up Strange Attractors at the same time and treat them as a set.

John Bandicut is a man with problems. He works for a mining company on Triton, the same mining company that caused him to lose his cybernetic implants, and he’s going insane from that loss. Also, an alien called a quarx has moved into his brain, declaring that he has to help it save the Earth — possibly doing quite a bit of the work himself, as the quarxx might die before the job gets done.

And it’s probably a suicide mission. And he can’t tell anyone. And he’s met a woman he likes.

Quite a lot of this book is about Bandicut struggling to cope with his situation, and sometimes failing. There’s sometimes a palpable sense of isolation and depression, which fits the subject matter; first and foremost, Bandicut has to wrestle cooperation out of his own mind.

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