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Last Night I Finished This Crooked Way

Last Night I Finished This Crooked Way

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thiscrookedway
Last night I finished This Crooked Way, by James Enge.

I was on the train, halfway home. There is very little more irritating than finishing a book when you’re just halfway to your destination. Luckily, I had George R.R. Martin’s Fevre Dream in my backpack, the first two chapters of which were quite good, so I didn’t suffer long. And anyway, good as it was, I kept being drawn back to thoughts of This Crooked Way, connecting dots, remembering the heights, the depths, the scaffolding of each story, and how it made me laugh – out loud – so often that I surprised myself.

There are some books that make me read them aloud – mostly their dialogue, but also certain killer phrases or descriptions. It’s my actor’s training, I suppose. Plays are not meant to be read on the page; you have to voice them lest they lose vibrancy and dimension. Some books, my favorite kind of books, leap into my throat and start declaiming themselves. And it doesn’t matter if I’m on a public train, or tromping to work in the snow with my fingers freezing, because I’ve left off my gloves, because it’s hard to turn pages with gloves on – none of that matters, because the words are just that important.

And This Crooked Way is like that.

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Ken Rand’s Pax Dakota

Ken Rand’s Pax Dakota

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pax-dakota-ken-randPax Dakota
Ken Rand
Five Star (265 pp, $25.95, May 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

In 1899 the United States shares an uneasy peace with its western neighbor, the Dakota, a confederated nation of Native American peoples that had joined forces to defeat the US in a war almost three decades earlier. The Pax Dakota, the peace that governs these two competing powers, is ever in danger of breaking as racism, ambition, and old animosities on both sides threaten to plunge the US and Dakota nations back into a bloody war. Into this mix steps the Old Enemy, a malignant spirit that seeks enough souls to power its return trip back to heaven — back to the side of Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit that had exiled the Old Enemy to the Earth in the time of the First People.

In Pax Dakota Ken Rand gives us an immediately compelling alternate historical setting seasoned with a Native American flavor that gives it an exotic, unexpected quality. But primarily this is an action story, a Weird Western with horrific elements that quickly ratchets up the action and never lets up until the final scene.

The book opens with the death of Iron Shield in 1883, great war leader of the Dakota and architect of their new nation. Upon his death an entity known as the Watcher is released to find a new host — the benevolent Watcher is a guardian spirit of humanity, a being that imprinted Iron Shield with the idea for the Pax Dakota while still just a boy. The Watcher’s plan had always been to contain the prison housing the Old Enemy within Dakota territory so that the Dakota could maintain a vigil there. However, the prison of the Old Enemy, a region know as Devil’s Clay, remains in US territory after the peace, and the Watcher must quickly launch a plan that will bring about the final confrontation with the Old Enemy.

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Pastisches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Unconquered

Pastisches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Unconquered

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conan-the-unconqueredConan the Unconquered
Robert Jordan (Tor, 1983)

Moving on with my Conan/Robert Jordan double-feature. . . .

With Conan the Unconquered, Robert Jordan’s third book in the series, the author seems settled with his style of writing the Hyborian Age. Some of the flaws in Conan the Defender are subdued, although the story is the average “meat ‘n’ potatoes” Conan pastiche material. The book has a feeling of comfort food: neither challenging nor surprising, but providing decent sword-and-sorcery entertainment.

The plot of Conan the Unconquered follows the Middle Eastern fantasy playbook, set around the Vilayet Sea in the Kingdom of Turan, with an excursion across the waters to Hyrkanian lands. Conan is not yet in his twenties, and has arrived in the Turanian city of Aghrapur. A compatriot from his thieving days, Emilio from Corinth, approaches Conan with the offer to join in stealing a necklace from a compound outside the city. The compound belongs to the Cult of Doom, whose members may be responsible for many assassinations occurring in the city. (The Cult of Doom sounds as if Jordan is swiping from the recent movie Conan the Barbarian.) Emilio’s lover, Davinia, is the one who wants the necklace stolen. Conan no longer wants to dabble in thievery, but after the astrologer Sharak casts a chart for the barbarian, he changes his mind and seeks out Emilio from the stewpots of Aghrapur.

As usual with pastiches, Conan has slender reason to stay in the story; the device of Sharak’s chart is a flimsy one (and Sharak as a plot device hangs around far longer than he’s needed) to keep Conan interested in the Cult of Doom and its necromancer leader Jhandar. Jordan manages to coax Conan into the story faster than in Conan the Defender with some sleight-of-hand that makes both Conan and Jhandar believe the other must die for them to live. Conan allies with a vengeance-minded Turanian sergeant, a group of Hyrkanians chasing after Jhandar for the desolation he brought to their land, and the beautiful Yasbet who keeps her parentage a secret.

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A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game

A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game

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Cortex System Role Playing Game
By Jamie Chambers
Margaret Weis Productions ( 160 pp, $29.99, April 2009)

cortext-systemThere are a lot of things to commend this book to an experienced gamer. The rules are fairly simple yet cover a lot of ground. I like how the abilities are not really tied into specific stats that are sometimes hard to justify -­ this system is much more fluid. It also is not conducive to rules lawyering ­ and if there is one thing I hate, it is rules-lawyering, so this is a positive for me. I can see where the OCD crowd who wants a rule for everything could be irritated with it, but I game by the principle that story precedes rules, and this rule set is made for that mindset.

Basically, after two or three hours of reading, a game master will feel comfortable enough to run the system. Layout is simple but functional ­ black-and-white and an easy to read font. It’s fairly thin for being the core rules of a game system, but I liked that. It made the book less intimidating than a lot of other systems I have looked at.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Defender

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Defender

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conan-the-defenderConan the Defender
Robert Jordan (Tor, 1982)

I’ve had some requests on the site and in emails to my own blog from people who have enjoyed previous installments of “Pastiches ‘R’ Us” to look at Robert Jordan’s novels. I’m here to serve. This week and next I’ll feature two of the famous fantasy author’s Conan novels.

Robert Jordan, the pen name of James Oliver Rigney Jr., is the best-known of the stable of writer on Tor’s long-running and now defunct Conan pastiche series. After writing six consecutive books (and the novelization of Conan the Destroyer), Jordan turned into one of the most popular authors of epic fantasy with his “Wheel of Time” series. Unfortunately, Jordan’s career ended early with his death in 2007 from cardiac amyloidosis, only a month before his fifty-ninth birthday.

How does Jordan’s work on Conan stack up? He’s not consistently the strongest of the Tor group—I think John Maddox Roberts deserves that title—but when Jordan first started writing Conan, he created some fresh and energetic material. His first Conan novel, Conan the Invincible (also the first of the Tor series), is pulpily exciting and one of the few pastiches from the Tor books that I recommend to people who normally avoid non-Howard Conan.

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Short Fiction Review #22: Interfictions 2

Short Fiction Review #22: Interfictions 2

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51e9xmo1jbl_sl160_aa115_1What’s interesting about a collection of “interfictions,” aka “interstitial fictions,” is that this isn’t just another descriptor  (e.g., new wave fabulism, new weird, slipstream, paraspheres, fill-in-the-blank) made up by an editor or a marketing department or critic that subsequently becomes blogosphere fodder about how inaccurate and/or stupid it is. Rather, interfictions is the self-proclaimed terminology of an actual organization that sponsors not only this second volume of what presumably is an ongoing anthology series, but promotes all kinds of “interstitial” literary, musical, visual and performance arts.

So just what is an interfiction? Henry Jenkins’s introduction opens with the famous quote from Groucho Marx about not wanting to be a member of any club that would have him as a member. While it may be true that interfictions don’t fit neatly into traditional categories, there’s considerable irony, if not the essence of interstitiality, about the idea of an organization in which membership is earned by virtue of failing to belong anywhere else.

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on defining interfiction (if you’re interested, see my review of the first Interfictions for further deliberation), though it is interesting that the authors themselves, as well as co-editors, Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, aren’t always quite sure, other than to note what it isn’t.

Sherman, for example, says that one rule of thumb for considering what to accept for Interfictions 2 was that if a story more than likely could be something you’d see in a genre magazine, say, Fantasy and Science Fiction, then it probably wasn’t an interfiction (adhering to the “if it belongs to some other club, it can’t be in ours” rubric). It is particularly ironical, then, that Amazon has named  Interfictions 2 as one of the top ten science fiction and fantasy books of 2009!

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Steven Brust’s Jhegaala

Steven Brust’s Jhegaala

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jhegaala-brustJhegaala
Steven Brust
Tor (300 pages, $24.95, July 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

The world of epic fantasy has its Martins, Jordans, and Eriksons, writers at the helm of long-running series with massively convoluted plots and hundreds of characters — and, quite often, no end in sight. But when compared to Steven Brust’s Taltos novels, which debuted in 1983, these long-running epics are Johnny-come-latelys, part of a newer way of packaging fantasy fiction that began with Robert Jordan in the early nineties and shows no signs of abating. Jhegaala is the eleventh book chronicling the adventures of the clever and cynical rogue Vlad Taltos, a character whom Brust has been writing about for twenty-five years in a series that hearkens back to an earlier mode of serial fantasy, the episodic sword and sorcery tale.

Which means, unlike with epic fantasy, a reader can pick up a book in the middle of Brust’s series and not have to worry about needing a wealth of prior plot and exposition to understand it. Jhegaala is perhaps an even better example of this than some of Brust’s prior books, as it takes place completely out-of-context chronologically and geographically with the rest of the series. Vlad, on the run from his own House and exiled from his home city of Adrilankha, travels to his ancestral homeland in the East. There, among his own kind in the town of Burz, he stumbles into the paranoid world of local powers, and begins to unravel a mystery that involves a pervasive guild, a coven of witches, and the ruler of the region himself.

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The Graphic Versions of “Pigeons fron Hell”

The Graphic Versions of “Pigeons fron Hell”

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Continuing my graphic novel coverage of earlier posts. . . .

Once upon a time, the Louisiana region known as Acadiana was home to many magnificent plantations . . . but time changed that.

In August, I wrote an article about Robert E. Howard’s southern horror tale, “Pigeons from Hell,” my personal favorite work from the seminal fantasy author. That post contains a full spoiler-filled discussion of the plot, so I won’t recap it here. Although “Pigeons from Hell” has nowhere near the fame of Howard’s sword-and-sorcery work, it has leaped into the comics medium not once but twice . . . and in two completely different ways. On one side is a straightforward rendition, capturing most of what makes the story so powerful. On the other side is a modernization and adaptation that tries new tricks with the same story structure.

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Batman/Doc Savage Special #1

Batman/Doc Savage Special #1

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batman-as-the-shadowI am going to semi-repeat myself in my next two Black Gate posts, going over graphic novel versions of material that I’ve discussed over the past few months.

First up, and the more immediately timely subject because it just hit the newsstands on November 11, is DC Comic’s Batman/Doc Savage Special #1, a one-shot designed to set up a new alternate universe called The First Wave. As I posted before, this is one of few mainstream superhero comic ideas that to really excite me over the past two years, since it would re-imagine the modern comic heroes into the world of 1930s pulp. No super-powers, no aliens, just guns and gadgets . . . plus the re-appearance onto the comics pages of the some of the classic figures of the pulps.

When I bought Batman/Doc Savage Special #1 at my local comic book store, it was the first time I had bought a “monthly” mag in a few years. Usually, I wait to purchase trade paperbacks, but this was a must-have. There was no way I could wait until this got collected with the issues of the upcoming regular First Wave series, which doesn’t start until March. And, unfortunately, Batman/Doc Savage Special was over all too quickly. Another reason I usually don’t buy monthlies and wait for the book publication.

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Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Hunter

Pastiches ‘R’ Us: Conan the Hunter

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conan-the-hunterConan the Hunter
Sean A. Moore (Tor, 1993)

You know I’m getting busy in other parts of my life when I pull out another Conan pastiche review for you here at Black Gate. (I store them up in a locked chest to be used in emergencies.) I’ve so far looked at a book each from John Maddox Roberts, Leonard Carpenter, and Steve Perry. So now it’s time for one from Sean A. Moore.

First, a prologue. (Almost all Conan pastiches have prologues, so why not start a review with one?) There is a moment in Conan the Hunter where a palace gardener beats our hero unconscious. Incredibly, the book is not as completely horrible as that absolutely ridiculous statement would make it sound. But it just has to be one of the most unbelievable moments I’ve read in any Conan story. Go ahead, read that statement again. By Crom, I dare you not to laugh.

Now that I’ve set the tone, it is time to dive into the meat of Conan the Hunter, or at least the gristle.

This is the first Conan novel from Sean A. Moore. Like John C. Hocking, Moore came late to Tor’s pastiche series, and went on to pen a two more before the line went on hiatus. Judging from this outing, Moore’s strengths lie in crafting a clever, dense plot with immense, epic scope, and populating it with an imaginative flood of action and monsters. This novel bursts at the seams with supernatural menaces and crimson battles: A leech beast in the sewers. Hordes of gargoyles. Repugnant, horror-laden traps everywhere. An invincible demon-sorceress trying to revive her race. A cramped duel to the death in the corridors of a palace. A henchman with a magnetic lodestone for a shield. Nifty stuff all around, candy for a heroic fantasy reader.

Yet for all this material, Conan the Hunter can make for miserably slow going. Moore demonstrates two tremendous flaws that impede the novel and make it only sporadically entertaining and otherwise a chore to read.

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