In 500 words or Less … The Wurms of Blearmouth by Steven Erikson
When someone asks my favorite fantasy series, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen is usually one that I mention. It’s one of those sprawling epics with great characters and a complex, vibrant world that sucked me in and inspired me to write fantasy of my own.
After the series ended, I grabbed the next Erikson book I could find — The First Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach — and was delighted. I read the next in that series, Crack’d Pot Trail … and put it down after a couple chapters.
Erikson’s most recent work is a series of prequels (which I avoid) and his other recent books haven’t interested me, so when I found another Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novella, The Wurms of Blearmouth, I almost didn’t pick it up.
Overall, though, this latest tale was satisfying. The theme in the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach stories seems to be that everyone is a terrible person, but the residents of Spendrugle take things to a new level of depravity. I balked a little at first with the female characters specifically, who are stupid or vile or both — but then I realized that you can describe every character from Wurms that way, and so I got over it (mostly). In this case, Erikson is very “equal opportunity” when it comes to negative characteristics, so don’t be turned off by what’s depicted in the opening chapters (you probably will be anyway).
The real point to these stories, after all, is to follow famed necromancers Bauchelain and Korbal Broach and their manservant, Emancipor, from screwed-up situation to screwed-up situation; they’re the real draw for me, and Erikson consistently entertains me with the way that they go about doing evil work without seeming to care about the consequences.
Impossible to predict some things. Notably: you can’t know how you’ll react to a work of art until you’ve experienced it. Looking at the movies Fantasia offered on Sunday night, July 24, I thought I’d try If Cats Disappeared from the World (Sekai kara neko ga kietanara), which promised a tale about a terminally ill man who makes a surreal Faustian bargain. After that, I decided I should watch Superpowerless, as it was a genre piece about an aging superhero who’d lost his powers. In truth, I had my doubts about both movies; Cats looked it might suffer from excess of romanticism and forced whimsy, while Superpowerless seemed like some kind of mumblecore satire treading ground comics had worked over decades past. In the event, I was wrong to doubt. If Cats Disappeared from the World would be likely the best movie I saw at Fantasia, and probably my favourite. Superpowerless, meanwhile, turned out to be the festival’s most pleasant surprise, the film which most greatly exceeded all my expectations. 
I’d marked four screenings on the Fantasia schedule to attend on Sunday, July 24. The first two were both at the small De Sève Theatre: a presentation of the 1983 Shaw Brothers film Holy Flame of the Martial World (Wu lin sheng huo jin), followed by a short film showcase. The showcase, Fragments of Asia 2016, promised half-a-dozen pieces from across Asia, both animated and live-action. Afterward I’d have time for food, and then two more movies would follow. Before all that, though, came one of the films I’d immediately highlighted when I first saw what was playing at this year’s Fantasia.