tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64571998275303687462024-03-12T15:44:24.029-07:00TOMunroTOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-30887892107310613812018-07-05T13:28:00.002-07:002018-07-05T13:28:44.810-07:00The Most Achingly Beautiful Book I've Ever Read (Probably)I picked up American Girl by Baird Wells (writing as Iowa Riley) in response to a social media post. I'd no idea really what to expect except that I'd read a couple of Baird's blogposts and been amusingly impressed by one and deeply moved by the other.<br />
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I have always loved trying to spot connections and influences that shape people's writing. Looking back now at those blog posts I see resonances then.<br />
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The first post was advice to men about talking to women at conventions. More specifically a ballsy blast of the trumpet of reproach in response to some male authors who think conventions are a phone free tindrfest - fingers raised to swipe left or right at every female face they see.<a href="https://bairdwellsprobably.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/how-to-talk-to-women-at-cons-probably/" target="_blank">"how-to-talk-to-women-at-cons-probably"</a><br />
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The second post was a poignant reflection on friendship in the direst of adversity and what one can or should do with the time we have together.<a href="https://bairdwellsprobably.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/the-time-we-are-given/" target="_blank">"the-time-we-are-given"</a><br />
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Both those themes swirled soulfully together in this soft whirlpool of a story about a writer, Kate Archer, her career and her relationships. There is a point where one character claims in exasperation that the protagonist latest book is about him and Kate replies with the line and the thought<br />
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<i>"...it's not." No more than the soil is about the colour of a rose.</i><br />
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It's an astute (almost meta) comment on the struggles of writing in a book of and about writing and writers.<br />
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Life experiences - for good or ill - may be the fertile ground that fuels authorial imagination. But, despite that indefinable link between fact and fiction, the story that emerges is a different thing. It is at its best - as in the American Girl - a beautiful and fragile thing way beyond any earthy origins in the soil of Riley/Wells' experiences.<br />
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This intimate first person point of view story follows Kate Archer through two different timelines. The present story begins in Portugal, the past story a year or so earlier, the one building to a point of earth moving crisis, the other reeling in the recurring aftershocks.<br />
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Braided through both past and present stories are the would-be lover Rob and the friend Natalie. The one is an author, gifted but insecure, craving reassurance as much as companionship, the purveyor of hackneyed lines like the ones that Wells brilliantly punctured in her blog post<br />
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"<span style="background-color: #faf9f5; box-sizing: inherit; color: #473f47; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", Baskerville, "Book Antiqua", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; font-weight: 700;">No One Has </span><i style="background-color: #faf9f5; box-sizing: inherit; color: #473f47; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", Baskerville, "Book Antiqua", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px;"><span style="background: rgba(234, 233, 230, 0.5); box-sizing: inherit; color: #787065; font-size: 0.8em; font-style: normal; font-weight: 700; letter-spacing: 1px; padding: 2px 0px; text-transform: uppercase;">EVER</span></i><span style="background-color: #faf9f5; box-sizing: inherit; color: #473f47; font-family: "Libre Baskerville", Baskerville, "Book Antiqua", Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 17px; font-weight: 700;"> Told Me I Have Beautiful Prose Before"</span> <br />
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The other is that life long companion, the sister in all but name and blood, who has traded vulnerabilities, shared heartbreak and healed wounds since they were old enough to cross the street unaided.<br />
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In different ways these two key figures provide succour to Kate confined within an increasingly barren marriage more by habit and parental expectation than love or understanding.<br />
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This is a book about writers and writing, how the people and the craft interact and mingle. Wells/Riley smoothly captures the heady holiday atmosphere of writing conventions represented here by an invented London Litfest; The easy creeping intimacy of conversations conducted over social media - confidences shared, borders skirted - or crossed. The opportunity through the internet to foreshorten geography so that people can be tempted to stray across continents without ever leaving their own homes.<br />
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But this book is not about the means or mechanisms by which relationships can be threatened or formed - it is about what happens next. As the onion layers of husbands and lovers, parents and friends are peeled away Wells/Riley shows us painful credible truths about people and how they can hurt and ultimately how they can heal.<br />
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She does with prose that is beyond beautiful - at times exquisite. At every page turn with my kindle I found a fresh line to note and murmur acknowledgement at a idea so elegantly expressed.<br />
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<i>This from the man who ... negotiated his way back to beer a night like a dog creeping onto an off-limits sofa.</i><br />
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<i>"I am proud! but one of us has to come first, and I'm begging you to make the sacrifice." His eyes are wet and wide when he says this. He's not sorry for asking me to be less; he's sorry that I don't know I should be. </i><br />
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<i>...acquaintances peer to decipher our body language but know better than to ask. They feel it too, the contagious rush, the amphetamine momentum of two people falling into trouble. </i><br />
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<i>The red A-line makes a reappearance five years later. It's a bit more snug through the waist but nothing that has me reading Cosmo fitness articles.</i><br />
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There is so much about this book that appeals to me -<br />
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<ul>
<li>the fresh science similes with which Wells/Riley calls on Schrodinger, Hawking and the metamorphosis of caterpillar into butterfly</li>
<li>the world of writing and publishing evoked in all its paradoxes. At once mutually supportive yet fiercely competitive, confidently assertive yet cripplingly insecure.</li>
<li>the way Wells/Riley evoked Lisbon and Paris and London and the Azores as surely as if I lived there. </li>
<li>the passing nods to history and literature, Anne Boleyn cut short, the Wizard of Oz de-curtained, the Great Expectations Kate has of her rental accommodation</li>
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But it is the people, their flaws and foibles as colourful and fragile as butterflies that felt so real, that led me so ardently through their story and had me murmur oh my god, on more than one occasion. <br />
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TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-20071684886325680242017-11-05T07:39:00.003-08:002017-11-05T07:39:26.173-08:004th Time round and Still the Charm (I re-review Pretty Little Dead Girls).I've just finished re-reading Mercedes M Yardley's gentle masterpiece "Pretty Little Dead Girls" for the fourth time. The joy of a kindle is that I can mark up fresh notes to myself when different lines caught my eye, and also refresh my memory on old notes from previous readings. On page 220 I found myself adding to "<i>I cried at this bit</i>" with "<i>and again on reread 4 even though I knew it was coming somewhere</i>."<br />
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Just some of the freshly caught lines include<br />
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"her mind went cottony with despair and panic"<br />
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"the car was silent except for the rain and the gallantry of the windshield wipers"<br />
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"a grim smile crept onto his lips and held them hostage."<br />
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I have written about this book before (<a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/pretty-little-dead-girls-my-spoiler.html" target="_blank">here</a>,and <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/a-second-look-at-bryony-adams-pretty.html" target="_blank">here</a>). A book about a beautiful girl who is doomed by fate to be horribly murdered does not, at first hearing, sound like a barrel of laughs or joy. However, for all darkness at its core there is in it a joyful whimsical celebration of life. It is my absolute go-to re-read for the distraction of some uplifting escapism whenever the vagaries and demands of real working life weigh particularly heavily on me.<br />
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It quite defies categorisation being unlike any other book I have ever read. The only novelette/novella that matches it for brilliantly written unique but lyrical strangeness is "<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Danse-Macabre-Laura-M-Hughes-ebook/dp/B016FRZ7KE" target="_blank">Danse Macabre</a>" by Laura M Hughes - which I have reviewed <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1703772231" target="_blank">here</a> on Goodreads (reviewed it twice in fact - another book I felt compelled to reread). <br />
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I can only hypothesise that having that M as an author's middle initial must have something to do with this particular gift.<br />
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.TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-10216457944724886132017-10-30T09:28:00.001-07:002017-10-31T05:35:51.956-07:00I don’t get out much, but when I do… I drink and I learn things<h2>
<br />Reflections on an October trip to Bristol and Bristolcon2017
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Counting back the fantasy related gatherings and events that
I have attended, it only just used up the fingers of one hand.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<ul>
<li>The Grim Gathering in London in August 2014,</li>
<li>The Grim Gathering in Bristol in April 2015,</li>
<li>Bristolcon in September 2015</li>
<li>Bristolcon in October 2016</li>
<li>Bristolcon in October 2017</li>
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However, like successive books in a much loved fantasy
series, these experiences seem to be getting progressively bigger <i>and</i> better. There is a vibrant and growing
online community of fantasy fans who are seizing the opportunity to meet in
person in convivial surroundings. Those who miss out one year enviously watch and
comment on events unfolding through social media with one hand, while booking tickets
for the next year’s event with the other. <o:p></o:p></div>
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There is nothing quite like meeting people in person for fleshing
out the typed comments and avatar images of social media with actual faces, anecdotes
and even accents. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The Bristolcon team did another excellent job of setting up
a cosy but intriguing one day convention.
I have not yet been to Worldcon, but I have gathered that it can be a
sprawl of size, variety and people in which individuals can get lost in a crowd
of mingled conference goers and general public. Bristolcon with its relatively
compact Hilton Doubletrees venue and adjacent generous hotel bar space, has instead
a wonderfully intimate atmosphere.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Over the course of three days and two nights I got to attend
panel discussions, a fringe event at Waterstones, try out local restaurants in
full fantasy geek/nerd company, spend a lot of time with some wonderfully entertaining
and generous people and even visit my local favourite author for tea! <o:p></o:p></div>
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So what are my key <i>takeaways</i> from Bristol (and by that I
mean learning points, not the many pizzas – great though they were - that
Kareem ordered from the long suffering local emporia)?<o:p></o:p></div>
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What have I learned from Bristolcon?</h3>
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<b>Reasons to be
cheerful about science, Sci-Fi and Fantasy?</b></h4>
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The panel about how the upcoming scientific and world
challenges and advances may influence fantasy/science fiction got quite bleak
quite quickly. The authors found lots of potential for post-apocalyptic realities on which
future writers could draw (scratching their books out on cave walls beneath the shadow of a nuclear winter.) GRMatthews' geography background dragged him into a perspective of pessimism with his glaciers always
seeming to be half full. However, between them the panel identified the
self-driving canoe as the <i>not-yet-invented-but soon-to-become-essential</i> item. You heard it here first, invest in those
startups now.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Info dumps may not be
all bad.</b></h4>
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The panel on info-dumps decided they had their place in
fantasy provided they were kept sufficiently compact and perfectly formed. Though
according to Peter Newman, authors may lavish their greatest subtle info-dumping
technique on the first book in a series and then becoming more functional at a
stage where the author feels secure in the loyalty of their readers. Perhaps this
is in the same way that people doll themselves up to the nines for a first
date, and yet relax into jeans and sweatpants a few dates down the line. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Bristolcon again welcomed many visitors from overseas, travelling distances great
and small. Dyrk, Petros, Marielle, Julia, Andreas, Sadir and
Rita may have experienced a certain bafflement at being thrown into the miniature portrait of cultural variety that is
the United Kingdom. Their experiences suggest that infodumps may not be just be a (hopefully
well-judged) staple of fantasy – but an essential tool in the survival kit for
real life tourists. A means to answer those essential questions; What is black
pudding? How can you wash your hands without a mixer tap? Which side of the car
should a passenger try and get into? and Why did 1.00 am happen twice on
Sunday morning? The panel's final advice
from Juliet McKenna was that writers should travel widely and – as they do so – “notice
what they notice” if they want to get know what a traveller in fantasy land might need to pick up on<br />
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<b>Not all partners have
the stamina for fantasy.</b></h4>
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One trend in Bristolcon seemed to be that a number of partners
who made it to the event last year, did not return for a second time. Andreas, Julia
Kitvaria-Sarene’s husband is an honourable exception. He not only returned for
a second year but heroically videoed some of the later bar shenanigans (past 5 in the
morning) for the benefit of (future generations’ entertainment/personal blackmail
purposes/the police investigation)*<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>*delete which ever
does not apply. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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One of my favourite films is “Truly, Madly, Deeply” starring
Juliet Stevenson as the desperately bereaved girlfriend who is benignly haunted
by Alan Rickman as the ghost of her dead boyfriend. The companionable haunting enables her to come to terms with grief, to
realise that the boyfriend has moved on and to do the same herself. But a key scene occurs when Rickman starts
bringing his fellow ghosts back to their house to have parties, watch films,
and generally hang out, while a bemused Stevenson exclaims from the bath “What, there are dead
people in my living room?” <o:p></o:p></div>
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In some ways that community of fantasy writers and readers reminds me of
Rickman and his new-found friends – which is not say that we are all dead – just
that there is a fellowship there that not all partners can understand, enjoy or
come to terms with. But they also serve who only stay at home and wait, so
those partners who let us all get away by ourselves deserve our thanks for their (slightly
mystified) indulgence.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<b>Other takeaways</b></h4>
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<ul>
<li>That Julia gives the best presents, although even booksellers
occasionally have to deal with assholes in their working life. It does sadden me
that anybody with enough regard for books to go into a bookshop in the first
place could be a git when they get there.</li>
<li>That Kareem’s anecdotes once heard can never be unheard and
sharing the experience doesn’t lessen the pain, no matter how often Graham
Austin-King tries it.</li>
<li>That Ed Macdonald has an alarmingly good theoretical grasp
of how to fend off knife attacks and Anna Stephens knows how to make the assailant
stab himself with his own knife. I have to say the technique worked perfectly when I used
it a dream on Saturday morning. Running away, however,
always seems the safest option, particularly if you are with a friend who
cannot run quite as fast as you.</li>
<li>That RB Watkinson won the prize (I think) for getting the most out of Bristolcon by virtue of having had the least total hours slept over the course of the weekend.</li>
<li>That Dominick Murray knows more about turtles than any man (or
woman) should.</li>
<li>That hotel night-managers are wonderfully patient and
understanding people.</li>
<li>That my efforts at self-promotion should probably have meant more than
mentioning to a couple of people in the bar that Lady of the Helm was free on Amazon
for the whole three days of Bristolcon related events.</li>
<li>That making your excellent and very reasonably priced editor
(albeit an increasingly busy editor) cry with your writing (or weep as she verbally
edited it for me) is not actually a bad thing. As Gandalf put it “I will not
say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.” Though at various points in the weekend we seemed to be seeing more @halfcutharp than @halfstrungharp. </li>
<li>That I am very grateful to Mark Lawrence for his blog posts about
Bristolcon past, for the competitions based on his writing and his sponsorship of SPFBO.
This has done so much to bring together people who would otherwise never even
have known each other existed, let alone been energised enough to descend on
Bristol to meet in person. I know Kareem Mahfouz because I saw a picture of his
chest hair shaved to spell out Prince of Fools at the same time that I had
mown the grass in my garden to spell out the same title. I know Laura M Hughes
because she entered a piece of entertaining flash fiction in a Thatthornguy
competition that Agnes Mezsaros kindly invited me to judge. I am sure many others have similar tales of
chance Lawrencian connections.</li>
<li>That Celyn Lawrence has the best cheeky smile and surely the
reddest hair in Bristol. (All the best fantasy heroines have red hair, or at
least so says the author of Lady of the Helm.) That Celyn means holly in welsh and is
pronounced ke-lin not kay-lin and definitely not seline. </li>
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TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-74624688422946529602017-07-21T14:57:00.000-07:002017-07-21T14:57:24.560-07:00A Marked Story - my review of "Ismark, the Marked boy" by JH Lillevik<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
I first met this story at an early stage in its development, when the author shared some initial thoughts and drafts with me and few other friends on social media. I find it an exciting and privileged position to be able to see how the story has developed from its early stages to this final published novel. </div>
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The story has many dark elements. We join Lillevik's eponymous hero Eirik the marked boy when he is a brutally mistreated slave in a mining community, part of the half conquered land of Ismark. From there Eirik's life takes a series of turns for the worse in a succession of trials that would test the fortitude of a saint. However, Eirik survives where others do not, and finds spiritual strength in the midst of debilitating physical weakness. Sustained by dream-like memories of friends, relatives and homes he has lost, he strives to adapt to the challenges and opportunities of rapidly changing circumstances. </div>
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At 271 pages, the book is relative short for a fantasy epic and this allows it to start at a reasonable pace and accelerate rapidly as it approaches its shattering conclusion. I can see where some of the authorial excursions on those initial drafts have been trimmed back to allow us to get to grips more quickly with Eirik's journey - both in geographical and developmental terms.</div>
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The world building is intriguing. Various nations struggle against the might of the Sorian Empire, in its determination to subjugate the rest of the world through military or economic might. The Sorian's reminded me of many historical and fictional archetypes, most notably Rome, or ancient China. However, one particularly memorable character put me in mind of none other than Jabba the Hut from Star Wars. </div>
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The Sorians built their empire by stealing cities from a sophisticated dwarven civilisation and Lillevik leaves a few loose threads hanging, temptingly - to assure us that dwarves have a bigger part to play in Eirik's story than the magnificence of their architecture.</div>
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There are other characters too, besides Eirik and his immediate Ismarkian associates, that the reader will look forward to hearing more from: Master Cal - the inept Sorian merchant; Rhun - the Wrenian spy and his charming companion Amalie; Kef - the Sorian with friends in high places and swords with sharp edges.</div>
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Lillevik's writing is a little raw in places, and there is the occasional misplaced word or typo which a skilled editor's eye might have tidied up. However, the story has at its heart the endurance and triumph of the human spirit. There were times, when I felt we were being told rather than shown the characters' experience of and reaction to adversity, but Lillevik's eagerness, in this his debut novel, is understandably to convey the shape and urgency of his story.</div>
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As E.M.Forster said nearly a century ago in Aspects of the Novel "The story... can only have one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next." Lillevik's story - with its nicely judged denoument - succeeded in that, </div>
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-32933871695064507342017-07-08T09:11:00.000-07:002017-07-08T09:11:16.056-07:00A Story with Heart, - my spoiler free review of "Court of Lions" by Jane JohnsonDecades ago I studied History at A'level - including a paper in European History from about 1480 to 1680. My revision strategy consisted of stringing together every incident of European History and making them but branches from a single stem of "Why did Spain decline in the 1600s?" It was a sure bet as this precise essay question had come up on every exam paper since before even my History teacher had been born.<br />
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That long ago study came back to me as I read Jane Johnson's glorious twin tale. In essence it is two stories separated by half a millenium, but conjoined in Geography. Johnson follows two parallel threads - a double helix if you will, not so much intertwined as touching gently on each other - with points of connection as light yet poignant as a lover's kiss. This is a story of duality - at once a present day mystery taut with tension and conflict and yet also a piece of historical fiction vividly bringing a lost world to life, <br />
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In the present day we follow Kate, a woman with a bruising past taking a far from secure refuge in the back streets of Granada. In the past we ride with the strangely named Blessings - companion to the boy prophesied to be the last Sultan of Granada. <br />
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My school boy study of Spain began with the reigns of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, As formidable a pair of monarchs as Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine - though the legacy of the Spanish Catholic Monarchs has endured better than Henry II's Angevin Empire. Blessings' account has the same starting point as my A'level European History, but sheds an alternative light on the deceptive (arguably duplicitous) simplicity of Ferdinand and Isabella's crusade against the moors.<br />
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Tolerance is another theme that seems to run through the book, in both the sense of being accepting of difference, and also in the sense of to tolerate or put up with something. Kate is a woman who has tolerated too much. The worm has not so much turned as run and - in Kate's case - run to a place that was once celebrated for its tolerance, indeed its celebration of diversity.<br />
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Today we live in interesting times, and Johnson's book reflects that. Fear, prejudice and zealotry simmer below the surface of any civilisation and the parallels between the past and the present are easy to draw.<br />
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However, neither in Kate's tale nor Blessings' does Johnson fall into the trap of casting either side as wholy saints or sinners. The moors of Granada have their bloody villains, as crimsoned as any grimdark anti-hero. The christians of Castile and Aragon have their honourable champions alongside their venal sovereigns. But the conquest of Granada still ranks alongside that of the American midwest, or aborginal Australia, as an episode of human history littered with dishonour and broken treaties. Once again history greatest gift to the winners has been to allow their perspective on events to be the one best preserved for posterity - and Johnson's novel offers a different slant on that history.<br />
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Blessings stands watching from the margins of history, harbouring secrets great and small, trading in them yet driven always by a purity of love to which all other considerations are ultimately subordinate. His voice is convincing, his tale compelling - told in Johnson's effortless liquid prose. <br />
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Kate in her journey meets similar prejudiced zealotry as she struggles to emerge from a shell into which great trauma had driven her. Yet she is endlessly drawn to the Alhambra the Moorish palace around which both Blessings' and her own story revolve. <br />
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The writing is at its most convincing when describing the people, the culture, the food even of those whose lives straddled and still straddle the Straits of Gibraltar. The author's fondness - passion even - for the places, the period and the people add well defined flesh to the bare bones of the story.<br />
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Kate's past trials - while truly dreadful - do not have quite the depth of flavour that we get when the story stalks the streets of Granada. We are necessarily removed from the events in England - which are described either as past occurrences or through panicked telephone conversations. In such circumstances it is difficult to deliver the tension of a full blooded thriller. Nonetheless, Kate's story provides an engaging counterpoint to Blessings' and brings something of that lost age into the present.<br />
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A book's power is best felt in what the reader does when it is finished. Does the story's grip persist beyond the last page? In the case of The Court of Lions, I scoured through the author's notes before throwing myself at Google to research for myself the captivating events Johnson had described. <br />
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As to my long History A'level - gentle reader. Well that year for the first time in centuries the History paper did not have a "Why did Spain Decline?" question, instead there was a different question. "How did Portugal break free from the Spanish Yoke?" So I wrote <i>"Portugal broke free of the Spanish yoke because Spain declined."</i> - and then wrote my planned essay. <br />
TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-64221386982487881322017-06-04T14:18:00.002-07:002017-06-05T10:52:56.783-07:00The Grey Bastards, by Jonathan French. A spoiler reviewI try to observe a rule not to read other people's reviews of something that I've read until after I have written my own, lest their opinions should colour mine. So I am writing this review of The Grey Bastards in some haste so I can freely indulge my curiosity about what other friends and reviewers have thought of this brilliant and fascinating tale.<br />
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Of the last twenty books I have read, The Grey Bastards will be the fourth that I have been introduced to via Mark Lawrence's Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog Off. This is, I think a testament to the competition's success in lifting some very good books above the noise signal and anti-selfpublishing snobbery that has hidden some remarkable talents from a wider audience.<br />
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The Grey Bastards came first in the 2016-17 contest and is an extremely well polished book - even if its protagonists are as rough as sandpaper toilet tissue. The story's feet appear planted in the Dungeons and Dragons milieu of my youth - huge birds called rokh and amorphous digesting blobs called black sludges could have sat quite happily between the pages of the Monster Manual. The Grey Bastards are themselves a troop (or rather a hoof) of hog riding half-orc cavalry who we see and bond with through our point of view protagonist - Jackal. Jackal himself, is young, ambitious and - if not exactly handsome - at least less intrinsically ugly than others of his kin.<br />
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Make no mistake, this is a brilliant book, that challenges the reviewer only in knowing where to begin tackling the task of describing it, much as one might wonder how to bring down Jackal's brother in arms the mountainous and formidable thrice blood - Oats. <br />
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Thrice bloods are one of French's many linguistic, cultural or even biological developments that add a deep and rich additional dimension to what - in other hands - might have been a mere parade through a flat role playing campaign. The half-orcs are all bastards, beget by orcish rapes - fierce and formidable fighters the various hoofs have become part of the Empire's defense against orcish incursions. Thrice bloods are the most formidable half-orcs, born of a half-orc mother and an orc father. The half orc hoofs - and other re-purposed denizens of familiar myth - each patrol their own parcel (or lot) of the near lawless borderlands between the orcs and the empire. The lots are a barren dangerous place - home only to those who have no other place to turn to - a wild land that makes the wild west look like a kindergarten's playground - where the only safety is in the mutual loyalty and reliance of belonging to a group.<br />
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I daren't say too much more of the plot - this is a book to discover for yourselves.<br />
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It is perhaps fair to warn you that - from the very outset - the tone and language of our half-orc hero and his friends is beyond bawdy, beyond coarse and yet all the more believable for it. These are the roughest of rough soldiers bound by the close knit camaraderie and carnal preoccupations of many a troop of specialist mercenaries operating under near constant duress. I have seen the like of their crude language previously only in Jeff Salyards' coarse-tongued Syldoon soldiers who rode through the Bloodsounder's arc trilogy. However, the fluent variety of the Grey Bastard's cursing might raise a blush even in Lieutenant Muldoos.<br />
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However, the story is no testosterone driven male monopoly. The female characters - Fetching (the half-orc warrior), Beryl (sometime nursemaid, sometime director of the half-orc orphanage), Delia (the whore who dares) amongst several others are all given agency and screen-time aplenty and you come to love and fear for them as much - if not more so - than for Jackal himself.<br />
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French's half-orcs are eloquently, entertainingly, crudely, witty, but his writing is also skillfully evocative in its descriptions. Some of the lines that caught my eye include<br />
"... there was a threat buried in the thick folds of politeness."<br />
"The morning sky was newborn, still jaundiced before a proper sunrise."<br />
"... the wet defeat in her eyes betrayed she did not know how to proceed." <br />
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The action scenes are gripping, the technicalities of hog cavalry warfare absorbing, the pacing brilliant. I consumed the last 43% of this book in a single evening - breathlessly borne along through a sequence of ascending climaxes (of the plot variety). The various threads of the story wound round and through each other to an ending that was so beautifully perfectly fitting that I put down the kindle with a sense of utter satisfaction.<br />
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This is a tale of the fellowship, of the loyalty that each individual must bear to the greater whole - and in the final analysis due recognition must be and is paid to the one willing to sacrifice everything for the others, TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-23796249216637413732017-06-04T08:04:00.003-07:002017-06-04T08:04:53.083-07:00Nothing is Ever Simple - Corin Hayes book two by G.R.MatthewsThis is the second book in G.R.Matthews' series of underwater dystopian sci-fi series. It sees our hero on a mission to a different underwater city - one that is neither silent nor homely. The nature of Corin's work, his past, his setting, and his personality - make for a man born and borne by solitude. In consequence we spend a lot of time in Corin's head seeing the world through the grim and slightly distorting lens of his experience.<br />
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Corin's is an engaging voice - world-weary but still wise-cracking, with some quotes sharp enough to cut. For example, "We hold onto our past, sometimes with fingers dug so deep into its flesh that we are part of it."<br />
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Book 2 carries us in a different direction, both geographically and narratively, from Book 1. The threads of personal tragedy and deferred vengeance are left dangling as fresh challenges and swift undercurrents sweep Corin into new and deep dangers,<br />
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After the distinctive noir-ness of Corin's voice, the next feature of the book to catch the eye is the world building. In a population condemned to living at the bottom of its oceans, there will be many difficulties of economy, nutrition and society to address.<br />
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Long ago I watched a horror/sci-fi film about a team of divers investigating a Titanic like sunken liner decades after it foundered. They found against any expectation that there were survivors - that shocked moment when the diver's torch sweeps over a porthole and a live face peers back. They had fashioned some kind of existence within the sunken hull all led by an extremely resourceful purser. (Oh the joys of the internet - somebody else roused by the same curiosity of imperfect memory asked the same question and got an <a href="https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/46082/looking-for-a-tv-movie-about-a-ship-wrecked-far-underwater-where-people-were" target="_blank">answer</a> The film was led not by Vincent Price as I had thought but Christopher Lee and is titled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_Awaits" target="_blank">Goliath Awaits</a> )<br />
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Just as the sunken survivors of the Goliath had to be resourceful and inventive, so too Matthews lavishes care and thought on how some kind of normality might assert and define itself in such submerged circumstances as Corin's world faces. It makes for an engaging and thought provoking read.<br />
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The plot is at once simple and complex. There are bad guys who put Corin in danger and he has to work his way out of it. Their motivations and the routes to confound them prove somewhat tortuous. I read the Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep a long time ago and the plot to Nothing is Ever Simple has the same kind of organic style. The story appears to advance by the author throwing a series of curve balls at his protagonist and then following his reactions. In that sense, the plot feels more like the gym in which Matthews tests and develops his world building and the protagonist's persona, rather than the engine which drives the plot. Nonetheless it rattles along at a good pace.<br />
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I will again raise reservations about the freedom with which Corin uses blunt instruments. People are bludgeoned into lengthy periods of unconsciousness with the same abandon that I last saw in a Modesty Blaise book (and before that in early Enid Blyton's). <br />
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While my younger self accepted this, decades of watching the TV show Casualty have heightened my knowledge of subdural haematomas - while health and basic safety training taught me to treat any potential concussion with extreme caution. So my suspension of disbelief skated over some thin ice (in so far as a suspension can skate) when Corin bound up an unconscious villain and blithely waited hours for the fellow to make a natural and total recovery.<br />
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Those reservations aside, Corin continues to be an engaging and readable hero in a radically different but eminently sustainable setting. TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-54624054322414340252017-03-26T09:35:00.001-07:002017-03-26T09:35:11.731-07:00A Study in Whethering - Spoiler free review of "The Heart of Stone" By Ben GalleyI like ARCs Advanced Reader Copies - there is a delicious thrill in getting an early insight into books not yet available to the general public. So I was very grateful to receive an electronic ARC for "The Heart of Stone" by Ben Galley.<br />
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Galley is an experienced self-publisher, keen to share his experience with others and to address some of the problems and prejudices that self-published works still face compared to traditionally published. Certainly, as I look over my recent reads there is a growing overlap in quality where the best of self-published works would more than hold their own in comparison with their traditionally published contemporaries - and The Heart of Stone is well within that zone.<br />
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The Heart of Stone is a well polished piece with an intriguing central premise. Fantasy-Faction's short story competition this month has a similar theme - with its <a href="http://fantasy-faction.com/forum/(mar-2017)/(mar-2017)-through-the-beast's-eye-submission-thread/" target="_blank">"Through the Beast's Eye"</a> month where contributors tell the story from the monster's perspective.<br />
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Galley has placed Task - the four hundred year old stone golem - at the heart of his story. The last survivor of one of many near-indestructable monsters created by a long dead warlord, Task has been passed from master to master bound to their service and indeed to his own continued existence by the oldest of old magic. But Task was always a different golem - questioning from the moment of his creation. The story follows Task's growth, coming to terms with those centuries of uncertainty, while he slogs North as one side's secret weapon in a grubby civil war in a distant corner of the world.<br />
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We also follow other views than Task's in what is a multiple PoV tale. There is in effect a triple prologue (or prelude) where we meet not just Task but the two women with whom his fate and development will be totally entwined. The story is an easy read, that I consumed over a period of weeks of bedtime reading. However, having finished it I went back to re-read preludes 2 and 3, seeking to link the women's histories to how their parts played out in the extended denouement.<br />
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Galley's writing - full of deft touches - is one of the book's strengths. They are particularly good at capturing Task's ambivalent attitude towards humans - or skinbags - as he thinks of them and how that develops over the course of the book. Such as when Task reflects that "Watching men crumble under the weight of his gaze was on of his few indulgences." or "The less he touched them, the less he knew. Their ugly lives already seeped into his skin like ink through wet paper."<br />
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Then there is the rare moment of sympathy evinced for one of the story's main villains, "For once, Huff wished he could shimmy out from under his father's shadow. Dast was forever draping it over him." There is a pithy economy to Galley's descriptions for example "He was a knife of a man, all angles and crooked lines." There are other lines I noted, too many to mention here, but a joy awaiting other readers' discovery,<br />
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Galley's world building impressively conveys a sense of an alien place filled with flora and fauna very different to our own. There are firns (the beasts of burden) and fawls (small camp following animals) that hound and service the army's baggage train, but humans are still reassuringly human, and golems are human shaped. The magic system has nothing quite so prosaic as spells and wizards who cast them - no fireballs burst, no lightning bolts flash over the many battlefields in Tasks' campaign. But magic of a more insidious kind does pervade the story - the magic of minds and of control as Task rails against the chains that bind his will, and others struggle to hide their secrets from those who can surf the thoughts of their fellow men.<br />
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Task is rightly the most enthralling of Galley's characters, a complex beast struggling to be something more than a monster and maybe also something more than a man. Other characters capture the reader's attention too. I feared for one when an unexplained nosebleed had me thinking the plague that claimed her family must be poised to strike again. Fearing for a character is always a good indicator of the investment an author has generated from his reader. For other characters, the motivations appear somewhat cruder and simpler. Galley's minor players are driven by lusts for revenge, for glory or even a lust for lust. These drives consistently direct their actions, but lack some of the nuances that might otherwise flesh out the outright villainy of the likes of Huff - a general it is impossible to like.<br />
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Galley set out to write a standalone fantasy novel - a rarity in these times of sprawling epics where even the humble trilogy can be looked upon as somewhat under-aspirational. To bring a single geographically localised tale to a satisfying close, Galley draws in the fate of other nations and indeed the rest of the world into the dying gasps of Hartland's self-destructive struggle. Like ships swirling around a maelstrom the outworkings of a civil war threaten to drag other countries down. However, that search to place Task's struggle in some wider world threatening context does stretch the plot. Hartland is gripped by a war between two sides, criss-crossed by factions of the unreliable, the untrustworthy and the frankly unlikeable.<br />
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However, Galley's tale is at its best in the moments when we follow the thoughts and words of its remarkable protagonist and whether or not he can throw off the chains of old magic as easily as he can shatter the chains of new iron.<br />
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TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-35726679499586473822017-02-15T08:25:00.000-08:002017-02-15T08:51:31.166-08:00Of Myth and Magic My spoiler-free review of Paternus by Dyrk Ashton <br />
I was talking to my second daughter (she's a quaternary scientist you know) about the fact that we are currently 10,000 years into an interglacial - a pause between ice ages - after the last 100,000 year ice age came to an end.<br />
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I had heard that apparently the flood story is not unique to judeo-christianity. While not going as far as an idea of Noah and his Ark, other faiths and peoples have similar accounts of a global flooding disaster. Arguably this common thread came from the melting of arctic ice sheets as far south as Ireland and consequent rises in sea-levels that submerged settlements ranging from Doggerland in the North Sea to the shores of a much reduced Black Sea. It would not then be so surprising that the flood myth passed into oral histories across the world.<br />
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In Paternus, Dyrk Ashton draws a similar thread of connectivity and common cause on which he strings the beads of every world myth I have ever heard of and roots them in a common foundation. The wide ranging source material is drawn together from places spread across the entire globe and times delving billions of years into the Earth's past to deliver a crescendo of a story condensed into a bare 24 hours of pretty constant action.<br />
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The many threads make for a complex tale. As with Keifer Sutherland's 24 TV show, the reader follows stories playing out in parallel in scattered locations. Layers of myth and faction unfold in terse action sequences delivered in the present tense through inevitably multiple points of view. The supreme deity within this diverse pantheon borrows shamelessly from Greek Zeus and Norse Odin's proclivities and weaknesses. Though borrows is perhaps an unfair term - embodies/personifies/unites might all do more justice to the fascinating "melange a beaucoup" that Ashton has created.<br />
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At times I thought Ashton must have augmented the well known but well disguised characters from myth with creations of his own invention, all spawned from the same central premise that explains and celebrates the diversity of ancient mythology. However, every time I tried googling one of Ashton's ancient truenames, the search threw up a genuine mythic anticedent. <br />
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There is a romantic core to the story - which is where it opens. A young couple dancing uncertainly around their strong but unexpressed mutual attraction. At those points the story felt a little bit clunky. But whatever thoughts the two might harbour for each other, they are soon swept aside by the tide of times as powerful opposing forces face off and suit up for the latest instalment in a long running and potentially world-ending conflict.<br />
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The action really hots up about a quarter of the way into the book and once it gets started it just doesn't seem to stop, as Ashton's battles rage from location to location like a James Bond movie.<br />
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All in all, an enjoyable, rip-roaring tour de force through every pantheon you could imagine.<br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-76113575556595068832017-01-05T15:50:00.000-08:002017-01-05T16:13:00.444-08:00Red Sister - this is what is inside it. (My spoiler free review)As a reviewer, Red Sister set me a challenge I have not had since "The Girl with All the Gifts." The conundrum of capturing how it made me feel and why, but without spoiling the experience for anyone who comes after me. (By the way - as far as The Girl With all the Gifts is concerned, just read it, don't watch the film - don't even watch the trailer - just read the book - and maybe my review <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-girl-with-all-gifts-spoiler-free.html" target="_blank">here</a>).<br />
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As Red Sister's April release date draws closer, there is a growing band of readers who have garnered an ARC by fair means or foul and are now pent up with a stifled desire to discuss, to analyse, to share those "Wow!" moments along with all the "Ooh"s and the "Aah"s and the "Ah ha!"s longing for the spring deluge of discussion as the rest of the fantasy community get their hands on it.<br />
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Several reviewers I have seen have simply described it as Mark Lawrence's best book yet. Given the quality of the preceding six volumes, such a verdict sounded suspiciously like hyperbole. Indeed that was my first thought, but after 552 pages of Nona's often bloody story, describing Red Sister merely as his best work seems too faint a praise. (And now you will suspect me of hyperbole!)<br />
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<h3>
The Writing</h3>
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Lawrence has always been a gifted writer, a deliverer of liquid prose that flows in sinuous forms from page of book to mind of reader. In some ways great writing is like great wicket-keeping (bear with me here - particularly American readers). <br />
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<i>[open obscure analogy]</i> In cricket the wicket-keeper is always on view waiting behind the stumps - potentially in action with every ball that is bowled. The best wicket-keepers are unshowy, unfussy - commentators would say that you don't notice their wicket-keeping until the game demands some moment of brilliance - a stunning catch, a sharp run out, a dazzling stumping and then you would see their class. <i>[/close obscure analogy]</i><br />
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In the same way great writing is economical, unfussy, unobtrusive. It cradles the reader like a comfortable hammock carrying you through the story. (Maybe I am over stretching my analogies or even my garden furniture). As a simple example, Lawrence does not step out of the stories to deliver descriptions - he doesn't pause to paint a portrait in words before we move on. He shows us people, their shape, their form through their actions and reaction.<br />
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And then there are the many sparks of brilliance, the quotes that resonate with a truth we always knew but had never recognised.<br />
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<i>"I have been too young to know, and I have been too old to care. It's in the oh so narrow slice between that memories are made."</i><br />
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<i>"Truth is an axe. Without judgement it's swung in great circles, wounding everybody."</i><br />
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And - perhaps my favourite, for its fourth wall breaking meta-ness<br />
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<i>"A book is as dangerous a journey as any you might make. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same as the person who opened the front."</i><br />
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And that is the essence of a good story - it changes people both those who read and those they read about. Nona, her friends and her enemies are changed by the experience of Red Sister, and as a reader I was left buzzing with wonder and with questions.<br />
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<h3>
The Story</h3>
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Lawrence is a writer driven and inspired by quality writing. In one of his blogposts <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-girl-with-all-gifts-spoiler-free.html" target="_blank">here </a> he talked about types of readers from plotsters to beauticians, but the same kind of categorisation can be applied to writers. He is himself much more of a gardener/beautician than an architect/plotster. He can be just as surprised as his readers by what happens between the top of the page and the bottom. Swept along by great writing and mesmeric characters we shot together through the turbulent rapids of the Broken Empire.<br />
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By book five and The Liar's Key - even Lawrence was swept along so fast and so far by the flow of story that it took him some effort to wrestle that - his longest book to a conclusion. An experience that had him flirt with plotting and planning to make sure the Wheel of Osheim came closer to a normal (non-Rothussian) word budget.<br />
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Red Sister has that familiar Lawrencian hallmark of quality writing in abundance. But it has something else too which elevates Red Sister above the Broken Empire and the Red Queen's War.<br />
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In Red Sister, there is more evidence of thoughtful world building - of pre-plotting of - planned structure, of an elegant and detailed framework on which to hang the glorious writing. That is not say that Lawrence has suddenly been brain-swapped with Joe Abercrombie or Peter V Brett. For those two writing is only begun after a level of planning and note making that makes devising Operation Overlord look like a planning a trip to the corner shop. <br />
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Nona Grey's story still has the delightful verve of creativity - the sudden challenge to the reader's expectations. Those moments like watching a Michelin starred chef who suddenly throws in ingredients that surely cannot go with what is in the pan and yet they do, giving a taste sensation that is unexpectedly divine.<br />
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But I found more steel of structure running through Nona's story - in a way which heightened the tension and my attachment to the characters always promising an arc that stretched further back and further forward than the moment in which Nona lives.<br />
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<h4>
The Resonances</h4>
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The more I read (and I do not read as much as I would like) the more I find connections between the book infront of me and other books and films. Maybe I am glimpsing flashes of what inspired the author, or maybe it is an empty echo in the soundbox of my own imagination. <br />
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The Convent of Sweet Mercy - where Nona lives and trains for most of the book - put me in mind of the Debora Kerr film Black Narcissus and in particular the bell tolling scene at 2 minutes 11 seconds in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZRzcLK1Ar0." target="_blank">trailer here</a> While Kerr's nuns were hardly assassins, they were certainly a little crazy cooped up on a remote and inaccessible convent where as David Farrar's character asserts, "There's something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated."<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(image from theblacknarcissus.com)</td></tr>
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Celyn, Lawrence's youngest daughter, has a fondness for listening to audio books of Malory Towers; Red Sister inevitably has elements of a school story wound round its convent setting - albeit a school story of completely different context, quality and timbre to any I have read before.<br />
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There are classes and dormitories and petty jealousies seasoned with a spice of special powers. I have read other works that had a similar story spine - Rowling's Harry Potter, Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, and Canavan's The Magician's Guild. <br />
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There are children who are students and adults (nuns) who are teachers, each specialists in their own field. Red Sister even has The Poisoner - a mistress of potions, viewed with the same fearful suspicion in a similar subterranean den as a much lamented Professor Snape. At the more esoteric end of the spectrum, Mistress Path waxes cryptically lyrical in a way that would make Kvothe's Elodin seem a model of icy clarity.<br />
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But for all the siren call of those familiar elements, Red Sister strikes out in its own individual direction stalking through the reader's mind with captivating menace and fresh challenges.<br />
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Three of my daughters and my niece have all struggled through different ordeals of the Duke of Edinburgh experience - closely shadowed by the DoE leaders, as they<br />
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<ul>
<li>argued over who's stupid idea it was to try and cook pizza in a trangia and, </li>
<li>pitched tents at night in the desperate exhaustion of the totally lost only for the morning to reveal that they were in the field next to their target campsite. </li>
</ul>
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and in one extreme night hike </div>
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<li>found they had accidentally strayed into a notorious dogging area and had to quickly turn their head lamps off, and be very careful to keep them off - and definitely not to flash them on and off - as they struggled through the area. </li>
</ul>
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However, those challenges and horrors pale into insignificance when compared to the ordeal of Red Sister's "ranging" where a party of twelve years olds have to scavenge their way across hostile territory in dire weather, past a plethora of enemies with murderous (rather than merely sordid) night time intentions. The ranging draws the story threads together and weaves a magical climax which is somehow still totally topped by the book's final pages.<br />
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In those final pages, another connection flashed up in my mind - sort of reinforced by the US cover of Red Sister - that is to say a faint, almost wispy, but very particular parallel between Nona and JM Barrie's Peter Pan. But with that, as with all the other reverberating echoes of other stories, Lawrence's work mixes and moulds them and adds something all together darker, yet more inspiring to the mix. <br />
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<h4>
The Inspiration and the World Building</h4>
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The setting for Lawrence's Broken Empire arose from a single leap of imagination (aided by an internet mapping tool) - raise the world's sea levels by a few hundred metres and hey ho - instant campaign map. It makes the world interesting but comprehensible and one fan has even gone to the extent of mapping our world onto the Broken Empire and discovering - horror of horrors - Jorg is not just a Frenchman, but a Parisian,</div>
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The world of Abeth is a totally different concept, imagined in more detail. As G.R.Matthews would doubtless remind me, geography drives history. The flow of rivers and of trade, the barriers of sea and mountains have shaped not just countries but their people. In the same way, well thought out geography drives stories. The unique world of Red Sister, the origins of its people and the perils they face add great depth (if slightly less width!) to the story. The setting had me discussing glaciation with my second daughter (a quaternary scientist, you know) and sketching lunar orbits in my head as another slew of questions and connections went off like a sequence of firecrackers. I will not spoil it for the readers, but suffice to say, even the convent's plumbing system acquires a central role in the story. </div>
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With the two Broken Empire set trilogies, there were clear literary inspirations for the anti-hero characters of Jorg (Alex from Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange") and Jalan (Flashman as re-imagined by George MacDonald Fraser).<br />
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Nona's inspiration was a picture by Tomasz Jedruszek<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: "times new roman" , "times" , "freeserif" , serif; font-size: 19.8px;"> </span>and a suggestion from Lawrence's editor Jane Johnson that had his first book been "Princess of Thorns" rather than "Prince of Thorns", this picture might have been its cover.<br />
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His reply "I'm quite tempted to write that book now!" as he explored the concept <a href="http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/whats-in-name.html" target="_blank">here</a> was somewhat prescient. From the seed of that picture and comment grew this book and its enthralling heroine. The multi-faceted Nona is at times as dark an adversary as Jorg and at others as unreliable a narrator as Jalan. In combat she can be as terrifying as Jalan in his berseker fury, or as cold as Jorg in his calculations.<br />
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Nona is also undeniably a girl. However, Lawrence has often said that he sets out to write people not genders. Having written Red Sister about nuns in a convent teaching girls to fight, he asked a beta reader would the story have worked equally well if it had been about monks in a monastery teaching boys. And the answer came back yes - the genders were interchangeable. In a way I can see that too having read the story. However, part of that androgyneity maybe that at the age of ten or twelve - unswayed by adolescence - girls and boys are perhaps most nearly alike. But even then, there is one way in which I think Red Sister has - perhaps unwittingly - captured something more overtly female. <br />
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That is because, Red Sister is above all else a book about friendship. It begins and ends with friendships strained and sundered; shared and spared. And, though doubtless as much as half the population will call me wrong - there is a particular quality of steel and fire to female friendships that Red Sister portrays perfectly. <br />
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And as the dust settled on the final scene, I ran to message my reading partner across the water, to share our how? and why? and what next? questions. With one story closing, its protagonist stood in the shadow of a greater story still to come. My only remaining question is how the hell do I get my hands on an ARC of Grey Sister,<br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-31956273995499978482016-08-15T10:07:00.002-07:002016-08-15T10:11:06.687-07:00A roaring debut - "Valley of Embers" by Steven Kelliher<br />
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I love an Advanced Reader Copy - and so tore into this early release of Steven Kelliher's debut work - "Valley of Embers"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Kole Reyna is an Ember, he has realised the same latent
ability that his mother had – the power to endure, control and wield fire. It
makes him a formidable foe, a creature of aggression and attack. He is not the only Ember, there are others like
him (a few handfuls) in his town and through the Valley where his people the
Emberfolk live. To them the Embers are the knights in shining armour (or at
least armour incandescent with their own heat) who protect them from the Dark Kind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Kole has many friends and allies who stick with him or for
him through thick and (sometimes) decidedly thin. Kelliher captures the relationships
well such as when two of Kole’s supporters end a discussion that in some way
disappointed them both. “They parted in the soft gravel of the fishing village,
sharing nothing else but the bowed heads that come from long understanding and
slow regret.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">One impediment to the reader getting a grip on characters
are the occasions where Kelliher introduces a large number of characters in
fairly quick order – there are two or three council style meetings where that happens,
including the opening scene. In such a forum it is difficult for the author to
give each character a distinctive voice and that was a little off putting at
the start. Having finished the book – I
did go back and re-read the opening scene again and was naturally enough able
to invest far more understanding of place and person into what had been brief
initial glimpses of some of the key players in the story. I say some, for Kelliher directs a diverse
cast list, men and women taking up arms in whatever means they can. </span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The action scenes are frequent and vibrantly described –
including one extended siege to rival that of the Hornburg or Minas
Tirith. Of many minor and major
characters in orbit around Kole Reyna, Captain Talmir was one I found
particularly engaging. This may be partly
for his determination to be leader and protector of his people despite not
having the gift of being an Ember, but partly it was because seeing his town of
Hearth always through his eyes gave that element of the story a continuity of
perspective and coherence that was easier to read through.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The fights are a mix of conventional and fantastic, as magic
and steel seek to cut down creatures of mundane and infernal natures. Some enemies prove as irritatingly resilient
as the serial-killers from teen slasher movies (Michael Myers in Halloween for
example) which lends a tension to keep the reader always on the edge of their
seat. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Kelliher has crafted an imaginative magic system and – in Kole
- an intriguing hero, driven as much by a desire to focus the blurred recollections
of what happened to his mother as by the need to protect his people. The Valley of Embers and the land beyond it
is a complex world, with a history that twists and turns even as the reader
(and the protagonists) try to chase down what is going on. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I did not find too many of the feared info-dumps (the kind that often masquerade as
bardic retellings of past history) and that is a good thing. However, in a story that twists sinuously and
doubles back on itself as much as the passage of the river F’Rust in its subterranean
caverns, it took a little while for me to become familiar with some fundamentals
of the world Kelliher was describing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">An author knows their own world - all its heroes and its
denizens - in such intimate detail that sometimes they can forget that each
reader comes to it completely afresh knowing only as much as is presented on the
page. Morsels of information that the author strews in the reader’s path may each
gleam in their own perspective as brightly as the Arkenstone in a seam of coal,
yet – to the untuned eye of the reader – the information is subtle or
overshadowed by other events. All this is by way of saying that the story
confused me a little at times. I let myself be swept along, buffeted by
fragments of an epic backstory, swirling past outcrops of world building, and
trying to keep hold as the story rode the raging torrent of Kole’s quest for
answers and for a kind of resolution. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">About a quarter of the way in, the main story lines had
settled enough for me to get my bearings and to follow the entwined threads of the
story within which Kole fought to evade entanglement. Like a student in an
advanced maths class I was content to soak it all up – the transparent and the
cryptic – in the expectation that in time all would make sense. And on the whole it did, though I must admit
there is the point in the book where one character asks “Who was that, and what
was he on about?” and my kindle note simply says </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">amen to that question.</span></i><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">I suppose, in part to prove I was paying attention, I feel
obliged to share the understandings I have (hopefully correctly) gleaned about the
world of the Valley, the rest of the world and the World Apart. In so doing, ironically, I may find myself
writing exactly the kind of info-dump that Kelliher has studiously avoided. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The Emberfolk - with their gifted Embers as principal
guardians - did not always live in the Valley. They were led there from their
desert home in a great diaspora after their Ember King fell before one of the
six sages in the world. It is a past they have not forgotten, as one character
remarks, “My father used to say that we never knew how full the desert was
until we left it.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The sages appear to have been wizards of almost godlike
power and incessant warfare. Amongst them the Eastern Dark was the enemy of the
emberfolk while his brother sage the White Crest was their friend and saviour
who brought them into the protection of this remote valley at the southern edge
of the world. </span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">However, the Valley was already inhabited and the assimilation
of the refugee Emberfolk was not a bloodless affair. Nonetheless,
the different peoples in the valley (Rivermen, Emberfolk, Rockbled and Faey)
have settled into relatively easy co-existence and intermingling with the
Emberfolk in their major towns of Hearth and the Lake. One factor in this rapprochement may have
been the rising of the Dark Kind, creatures of evil, bleeding into the world of
the Emberfolk from the World Apart. The World Apart is a place of demons and
darkness whose boundaries with the world of the Valley weaken in the dark
months allowing threats to seep in that need an Ember’s flames to destroy them
(or failing that a sharp sword and a few true arrows). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The sage known as the Eastern Dark was known to court the Dark
Kind – those creatures of the World Apart – and as the story opens, concerns
about a feared increase in the attacks of the Dark Kind has brought Kole and
others to a council of the great and the good of the town of Lake. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "calibri";">There are other wielders of different kinds of magic. The Faey appear to be a kind of rarely
glimpsed elven race within the Valley who bestow through training a power of
healing on the Faeykin. There are Seers, and Faeymothers, and the Rockbled. I cannot say that I totally got the
interrelationships between the different peoples and the intricacies of the
magic system. Even though the book is the
first in the Landkist series I never was quite sure what it meant to be Landkist. I guessed it might mean that one of the gifts
of the land (perhaps an Ember nature) had been awakened in the person. And that, I guess, is the for me the book’s
slight weakness. A cryptic nature to its magic, its peoples and their history that
did not readily unfold for me in the character action and interaction. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 107%;">Nonetheless, the story rollicks along at a good
pace and it is of course, the best tradition of epic fantasy, that nothing is
entirely as it seems and answers are hard to come </span><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-30781831081815998262016-07-25T03:40:00.002-07:002016-07-25T06:49:39.862-07:00An Eviscerating Anthology - my spoiler free review of "Gutted" edited by Doug Murano & D. Alexander WardSixteen masters and mistresses of horror writing regale us with a selection of "beautiful horror stories." That may at first seem like an oxymoron. Horror is traditionally scary, bloodcurdling, tense, shocking, in some way or other beyond the norm. I have read various pan horror collections in my youth, none that made much of a lasting impression on me, besides the frisson of fear reading dark tales under the bedclothes. Beautiful is not the adjective of first resort when describing Horror.<br />
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But, in the selection of stories and in the writing of them, this volume shows a haunting quality, a mesmerising style. The beauty lies not so much in the eye of the beholder as in the ear of the reader as elegant sentences and paragraphs wrap themselves around horrific cores. A juxtaposition reflected in the stylish cover of flowers sprouting from a skeleton.<br />
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Time prevents me from reviewing all the stories and, to be fair, some worked for me better than others. But below I have written more about my five top picks. Other readers may find different favourites, such is the nature of anthologies - and indeed of readers!<br />
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<h3>
Water My Bones by Mercedes M Yardley</h3>
Those used to Miss Murder's writing will be familiar with the challenge she offers to conventions of victim and villain. This story is again about two people, in some ways it reminds me of her piece Apocalyptic Montessa and Nuclear Lulu. Again two damaged people meet, drawn into each other's gravity like a binary star system, swirling closer the one feeding off the other, the other more or less willingly giving. Nikilie is a woman much abused by those around her and - in turn - she abuses herself, fresh wounds in her flesh to match each cut the world makes in her psyche. But then she meets Michael and everything changes. He sees an inner beauty she did not know she had. "That night she took a razorblade to her inner thigh, but the cuts were heartless and shallow." <br />
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<br />
<h3>
Picking Splinters from a Sex Slave by Brian Kirk</h3>
<br />
It is every parent's nightmare to lose a child to abduction, but what if the child is returned years later and the restoration of what was lost is a still greater nightmare. Kirk paints a vivid picture of a father reunited with a daughter abducted and abused long ago. It has echoes of all the real life abduction stories we have seen in the news, in some ways it reminds me of the Fritzl story in Austria. How can those freed return to a normal life, more importantly how can they find happiness after an experience that has changed and damaged them. The father in Brian Kirk's story will make many sacrifices to restore his daughter's happiness but the reader may ask - could they do as much?<br />
<h3>
</h3>
<h3>
On The Other Side of the Door Everything Changes by Damien Angelica Walters</h3>
<br />
Is it an accident that parenthood and horror are so akin? That having a child opens up a whole new vista of ways in which to fear the dangers of the world? Or is it that, being a parent myself, this story and others like it strike a resonant note more so than others. I also work in education, where everyday we have to confront another exploitation of new technology in old evils. Cyber bullying, the risks children are exposed to in the privacy of their own bedrooms, a world away from my own childhood. I've also relatively recently moved house and job dragging children in the vulnerable teenage years from their embryonic circle of friends. For my children it has worked out well, but those experiences and anxieties made this story sing for me. A two handed tale of child and mother, the one displaced, sullen, angry brooding with a horror she dare not share. The other, anxious - like all parents of teenage children finding that every word is the wrong word and so they stay on opposite sides of the same door trapped in a failure of communication. Beautifully written, horrifically real. <br />
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<h3>
Coming to Grief by Clive Barker</h3>
<br />
As a child when I walked home from school (a school I shared with Nigel Farage - but that's an entirely different horror story) there was a lane I had to walk up Low Cross Wood Lane, it had a kink in it - a sort of chicane - which made the top half invisible from the bottom. As a small school boy I always had a fear of what might lie unseen around that corner. Would it be kids from the other local school waiting to beat me up - in truth I was only hit once there - but I try to remember the vulnerability of that fear when imagining what it is like to be a woman in today's world, a vulnerability that grown men cannot so easily empathise with.<br />
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There is much more in cleverness in the writing of Barker's tale than the ingeniously punning title. Miriam has returned home to tidy up the affairs of her estranged and recently deceased mother. The antagonist in this story is the Bogey-Walk a curving lane along the edge of an old quarry that haunted her youth and still has the power to terrorise the older successful woman that the child has begun. Besides the obvious resonance with that not-forgotten Dulwich lane - this story appealed because of the exquisite writing as Miriam picks through the bones of her relationship with her mother, rekindles an old friendship, and all the while orbits the old fears of the Bogey-walk in ever decreasing circles.<br />
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<h3>
A Haunted House is a Wheel upon Which some are Broken by Paul Tremblay</h3>
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Skilful evocative writing abounds throughout the anthology along with some innovative takes on the horror genre. Most innovative perhaps is Paul Tremblay's Haunted House story which took me back to a childhood of Steve Jackson scripted adventure books (anybody remember the Wizard of Firetop Mountain?) where after each page the reader had a choice to make and - depending on that choice - would turn to a different page to advance the story in a different direction. The miracle of embedded links in ebooks makes that all so much easier and the reader gets to choose how far and which route they take through a Tremblay's tale of a woman revisiting a house that scarred her childhood and still plagues her dreams<br />
<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-83409106483437915062016-06-01T13:55:00.003-07:002016-06-01T15:46:11.074-07:00The disturbing sound of a "Silent City" - my spoiler free review of G R Matthews Sci-fi Book<h3>
A Fresh Direction</h3>
This is the fourth of G.R.Matthews novels that I have read and, at first glance, it's style and context is as different as you could imagine from the other three. <br />
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The Forbidden List trilogy (The Stone Road, <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/the-blue-mountain-by-grmatthews-spoiler.html" target="_blank">The Blue Mountain</a>, and <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/a-good-read-by-well-read-author-my.html" target="_blank">The Red Plains</a>) provided a fantastic re-imagining of ancient China - a refreshing alternative to the medieval European style milieu which is the staple of so much modern fantasy. It was a tale told from two alternating third person characters facing crises of epic proportions but the tone still had much of the formality that I would expect in high fantasy.<br />
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Corin Hayes' adventure in Silent City is an altogether more visceral first person adventure set in a far future where humanity has fled beneath the waves to live in undersea cities. The story is packed with action from the first page which has our hero preparing for a beating to the last where our hero is... (spoilers as Riversong would say).<br />
<br />
<h3>
What difference does a Point of View Make?</h3>
I have been curious for a while about what difference a point of view makes. For example, would Mark Lawrence's antihero Jorg have stirred up so much emotion amongst readers (either intoxicated or alienated by his evil) if his tale had been narrated in the third person? Would that detachment - that additional distance - have ruined the story? Lawrence writes powerfully enough in the third person tales of the Road Brothers, so maybe not but it would certainly have been different.<br />
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With G.R.Matthews, I have another chance to consider the impact of an author's chosen point of view. Silent City is told in Hayes' voice and it is an entertaining one. A sort of deep ocean Philip Marlowe, weary cynical, existing rather than living in a confined community that knows too much of his past. <br />
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Writing in third person point of view the author is a director manipulating and inspiring his cast without ever being one of them. With first person point of view the writer becomes an actor wholly inhabiting the character. As Iwan Rheon knows from playing Ramsay Bolton, acting an anti-hero can draw down a certain public opprobrium. Corin Hayes is not so much an anti-hero - more a likeable underdog (though there were times he was a little free with his wrench for my liking). But the story depends on us rooting for him and - with the intimacy of first person - we do just that.<br />
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He is a man with more than his fair share of personal tragedy. In this relatively short book we get a few glimpses of Corin's backstory which I sense will run like a thread through the next book and beyond as inevitably the past casts shadows well into the future.<br />
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<h3>
Same author but a different setting?</h3>
<br />
There is an inventiveness to Matthews world building in Silent City. While the vision of the future appears as distant from ancient China and the forbidden list as it is possible to be, there are still parallels to be drawn between the tales that hint at their shared authorial paternity.<br />
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<ul>
<li>In his fantasy works Matthews departed from the euro-medieval conventions to set his tale in the orient; </li>
<li>In his sci-fiction writing Matthews has eschewed the traditional space opera and buried his protagonist as deep as the wreck of the Titanic in a diminished humanity ekeing out an existence on the ocean floor.</li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li>In the forbidden list, Matthews drew on an imaginative blend of spirit and spell based magic systems; </li>
<li>in Corin Hayes he creates equally inventive scientific solutions to the practical problems of living and working in an environment which humanity had only previously visited. </li>
</ul>
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<ul>
<li>In the forbidden list, the idea of family tragedy - either endured or avoided - was a driver for the two protagonists; </li>
<li>In silent city a dreadful crime still haunts Corin's waking and sleeping hours.</li>
</ul>
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The story cracks on at a decent pace - I read the last half in a single sitting. For all that the surface world has been abandoned and the human population decimated, those that remain still find plenty to argue about and fight over. In the midst of it all Corin Hayes nurses a drink in a seedy bar not knowing what opportunity is about to knock for one of his dubious past and unusual skills, still less aware of how quickly such opportunities can go belly up.<br />
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And for those wondering what pun I was trying to make in my title - here's a great piece of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4" target="_blank">music</a> enjoy!TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-88155891342706305442016-05-03T13:14:00.000-07:002016-05-03T13:14:17.655-07:00He does it with mirrors - a spoiler free review of "The Wheel of Osheim" by Mark LawrenceMark Lawrence recently challenged his facebook followers to give him a page number between 1 and 415 and he would try to find a spoiler free quote to share from that page of The Wheel of Osheim. There may have been those who hoped to tease the entire book from him in a giant literary jigsaw and so get a drop on its June 7th release date. For those who have not yet got their hands on an Advance Reading Copy - <b>circle that date</b> - (Think D-Day landings + 72 years and 1 day). The Wheel of Osheim is another feast of quality writing and high "quote per page" density.<br />
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For me though, the quote that spoke to me most comes from page 343.<br />
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<i>"A story will lead a man through dark places. Stories have direction. A good story commands a man's thoughts along a path, allowing no opportunity to stray, no space for anything but the tale as it unfolds before you."</i><br />
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There are times in our lives when we all need a story that good and The Wheel of Osheim is itself just such a story. I think I will struggle to rein in my review, for the book sets so many dominos toppling in different directions in my mind. The joy, as ever is in Lawrence's writing, his vivid imagery and his charmingly reprehensible characters cast mercilessly into a raging torrent of a plot.<br />
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Jal's timeline is entwined in a braid with Jorg's, the two very different heroes inhabiting the same time and setting. Here, as in Prince of Fools, the stories bump briefly alongside each other, ships that pass, somewhat drunkenly, in the night and part - the one not entirely untouched by the other. <br />
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However, even for those of us who followed Jorg all the way to the end of Emperor of Thorns, Lawrence still provides plenty of heart-in-the-mouth alarms and surprises as Jal skitters along at perilous heights and depths. Along the way, both Jal and the reader get some new perspectives on old friends some of whom need particular watching!<br />
<br />
Lady Blue manipulates her allies and her mirrors with a deft determination while the misshapen great-uncle Garyus, louring like the elephant-man in my imagination, shows wit and wisdom in guiding his great-nephew along a path of reluctant heroism,<br />
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<b><u>War</u></b><br />
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There is a poem from the mid-season finale of the sixth Dr Who series that the Wheel of Osheim put me in mind of. "When a good man goes to war." <br />
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Jal is not a good man, and his grandmother the <a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hJtgUmRHqYs/VyjjqsdWXxI/AAAAAAAAAjo/lnhDZi4e6ycdqKOIh6X2qPHBe2PZ0xUawCLcB/s1600/when%2Ba%2Bgood%2Bman%2Bgoes%2Bto%2Bwar.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>Red Queen is not - by most standards - a good woman. But it is not for nothing that this trilogy is called "The Red Queen's War," and in this final chapter Alica and her grandson both go to war. (Well strictly speaking, war comes to Jal - I mean, he's not the kind of hero to go out looking for such a thing.)<br />
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King of Thorns was built around a siege - the chaos of battle and the plans and the sacrifices that Jorg was willing to make to secure a momentary glimmer of advantage and seize that opportunity. In the Wheel of Osheim, Jal faces his own military test though his preference is for <br />
<br />
<i>odds stacked so heavily in my favour that the only danger to me is being crushed by them should they fall.</i> <br />
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However, while Jorg made a habit of playing dice with the fates themselves and winning, Jal's plans have a tendency to unravel faster than a cardigan in a threshing machine. And before long he is remembering<br />
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<i>My main rule of running, after "don't stop" and "go faster" is "go high or go to ground."</i><br />
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And to be honest, looking at the foes Jal faces, even Jorg might have thought twice about plunging in.<br />
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For me there were other resonances between Demons Run and the Wheel of Osheim. There are demons, there are men who run (Jal chief amongst them) and women who stay and there is the lost child - Jal's unborn sister, murdered in his mother's womb by the necromancer Edris Dean. The child may have been a pawn in an undead game, but - as the book's cover says - a pawn can change the game. In my limited chess experience that is usually when the pawn is transformed into the most powerful piece on the board - a queen. <br />
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The threat of that transformation drives Jal and the story on, through Hell (one l or two, it's all the same) and out the other side.<br />
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<b><u>Hel</u></b><br />
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Lawrence's Hell (or rather Snorri and Jal's Hel) reminded me of the Robin Williams film "What Dreams May Come" from the 1990s. The film was about heaven rather than hell, as a doctor already hit by family tragedy is flung into heaven by a road traffic accident. But both the film and Lawrence's book paint a vivid and fantastic landscape of the afterlife. A place shaped by each man's imagination, belief and misdeeds and - for someone with as colourful a past as Jal that ensures Hel is not a place to linger in. <br />
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But not everyone in Hel is an enemy and even in so desolate a place there is a chance of peace for a grieving Viking.<br />
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<b><u>The Wheel</u></b><br />
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However, there are worse things than Hel and the Wheel of Osheim calls inexorably to Jal and any few he can gather around him. The wheel is a machine - the machine that broke the world and allowed magic to leak into it so that men (and women) could manipulate reality by the power of their wills. And the machine is spinning faster and faster.<br />
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There are two images the wheel conjures up for me, the first - the large hadron collider in Cern - I mean come on! In his helpful "previously in the Red Queen's War" catch-up notes Lawrence describes the machine as <i>"mysterious engines hidden in a circular underground tunnel many miles across"</i><br />
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For those with a passing acquaintanceship with particle physics the link will prompt a smile at least, that a machine to probe the limits of reality might in Lawrence's vision of a distant future have ruptured reality so catastrophically. <br />
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But there was another link too for me - the 1956 film about a 23rd century rescue mission to a space-archaeologist and his daughter wrecked on the eponymous <b>"Forbidden Planet."</b><br />
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<b><i>(film spoiler alert)</i></b><br />
In that film as I recall it, a lost alien civilisation had been wiped out overnight by their greatest invention. The machine, drawing on unlimited resources of power, could create reality out of imagination; so - in their alien dreams - the nightmares came to life and destroyed them. The foolish archaeologist does not realise how he has - unwittingly - harnessed that same power to unleash his own nightmare on the spaceship crew.<br />
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In the film only the destruction of a planet could turn the machine off.<br />
In Osheim... well read the book and find out.<br />
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The film, however, has another side to it - for it was seen by many as a re-imagining of Shakespeare's play "The Tempest" where the wizard Prospero lives on an island with his daughter and uses magic to manipulate reality and tease and torment some shipwrecked sailors.<br />
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And I like that. For in the film magic was re-imagined as science and sixty years later in this the sixth book set in the Broken Empire, Lawrence re-invents science as magic. <br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-82378368138206873022016-04-16T10:30:00.000-07:002016-04-23T15:50:22.772-07:00The knives are out but will Nysta get her man? (Review of "Duel at Grimwood Creek" by Lucas Thorn) I read Lucas Thorn's debut book "Revenge of the Elf" a year and a half ago and reviewed it <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/of-nysta-spoiler-free-review-of-reviews.html" target="_blank">here</a>. As I wrote then, Nysta's tale was both enjoyable and different. It was a reminder that the pantheon of self-published work includes both quality stories and diversity of approach.<br />
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It has taken me a little longer than it should have to pick up the second part of Nysta's tale. There is a lot of reading (and writing) to be squeezed in the cracks and crevices between work and family life and there are a lot of books I haven't yet got round to reading. For example another blood spattered revenge-quest about a feisty female who lost a male companion (Joe Abercrombie's "Best Served Cold") sits amongst many others in the stack on my bedside table waiting for me to find the time the story deserves.<br />
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To be honest one reason for my delay in returning to Nysta was that the first book did not close the story circle of "atrocity committed" and "vengeance secured" <i>and</i> I was not sure how many more books it might be before Nysta's hurt (like her enemies) could be considered truly buried.<br />
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So the first thing to be said is that Duel at Grimwood Creek completes the story begun in Nysta Revenge of the Elf. It does so in much the same way and with a similar amount of blood and violence as Tarantino's "Kill Bill 2" completed the story begun in "Kill Bill". Thorn's own author's note makes the point (and I do love the insights an authorial note gives you). <i>This book is the second half of the first book...I split the book into two for a simple reason. size</i>. One reviewer of my own work criticised Lady of the Helm (book one of the bloodline <u>trilogy</u>) because it "just ended." I was left wondering if Tolkein had the same kind of complaints about the ending of "The Fellowship of the Ring." In those circumstances, I should have had more faith in Thorn and returned more quickly to Nysta's tale.<br />
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Another observation is just how much I am reading electronic books now more than physical books. The convenience of a backlit kindle screen for night time reading when everyone else is asleep (or wants to be). It is like being a child again reading by torchlight under the bedclothes long after the official "lights out." I consumed The Duel at Grimwood Creek very easily a chapter or two at a time in those moments between the end of one long day and the rest needed for the start of another.<br />
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Thorn's writing retains the same edginess (pronouns strictly optional) but he also conjures up some vivid images through his descriptions and the dialogue is as sharp as Nysta's favourite knife (named <i>A Flaw in Glass</i>). I bookmarked several lines, these two amongst them.<br />
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<i>A thick line of grey cloud swept its belly over the cliffs.</i><br />
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<i>"(He) died the second he planted a knife into the only man I ever loved. Just took a while for him to stop breathing was all."</i><br />
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Thorn does enjoy discovering puns - at one point when threatened by howling wolf like creatures called draugs, Nysta tells Chukshene <i>"I reckon you're about old enough to know how to say no to draugs"</i> In Revenge of The Elf, some found the pun-peppered text with to be a little overseasoned such that it intruded on their reading pleasure, but I was fine with it.<br />
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The story picks up where Revenge left off, with Nysta and her side-kick Chukshene the warlock ('lock for short) hot on the trail of her husband's killers. Nysta has been changed and yet is the same by the climax of book one - as Chukshene describes it she is still "an ill-tempered bitch." The ramifications of that invisible transformation will doubtless carry Nysta on into further adventures and books. For the moment however, the ill-matched pair travel on a road movie through a desolate landscape, overhauling Talek's murderers one bloody nine at a time. <br />
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Thorn conjures up some bizarre imagery for his world ruined by a war between gods. There is a richly built world lurking beneath Nysta and Chukshene's violent escapades, but it has the decency to appear only when required by the plot - rather than in tedious infodumps. While this does leave the reader feeling like a traveller in an alien land - that's the kind of experience I want in my fiction. If I liked infodumps I'd read an encylopedia.<br />
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Thorn's creativity conjures up a walled castle straight out of a nightmare - leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would have struggled to imagine it, though I expect he would have appreciated it. When an elf walks into a bar - well it isn't going to end well. Most bar room brawls are battles of the many against the many, but Thorn writes a simpler tale of one against many in the bloodiest brawl since Clint Eastwood walked in on Gene Hackman in "Unforgiven."<br />
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And there is something of the old west in Thorn's story - an intention he set out for and I think achieved. When Nysta finally comes face to face with her foe it could have been scripted by Sergio Leone, one can almost hear the musical pocket watch from the denoument of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JPnR7C8mZQ" target="_blank">"For a Few Dollars More"</a> And, just as with that particular western, we discover there is a history to the emnity between Nysta and her quarry, a hatred rooted in the past that runs deeper than the death of a beloved husband. <br />
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So, Duel at Grimwood Creek brilliantly concludes the story that began in Revenge of the Elf. Yet, like all good stories it sows seeds of a sequel, mysteries that arose as side-plots in the course of Nysta's quest for revenge and which - I am sure - are fully explored in the following books.<br />
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I must also give a shout out to the free short story about the small band of goblins from the longrunners tribe thrown into the book after the author's note. In T.S.Elliot's "Old Possum's Practical Cats" there is a long poem about the significance of the naming of cats and the multiple titles each feline must bear. In Thorn's world, the naming of goblins is a much simpler affair with tribe leaders being called "Bossyou" or "Bosslots" but naming is still a cause for argument as in this exchange.<br />
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<i>"I Rummage, Broketoof Mob."</i><br />
<i>"Rummage," Spitblood said, wiping his stumpy nose with the back of a finger. "That most stupid name ever."</i><br />
<i>"He namefucked," agreed Onespud.</i><br />
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Still, if your tribe is called longrunners, it must say something about you and Bossyou and his bunch's brief adventure in the mushroom forest is a very entertaining read and further proof that there is much more to Thorn as a writer (and to Nysta as a character) than an F-bomb laced killing spree.<br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-30407756726597772112016-03-31T11:36:00.000-07:002016-04-07T00:32:38.333-07:00A Worthy Winner "The Thief who pulled on Trouble's Braids" by Michael McClung<h2>
McClung and the SPFBO </h2>
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Just over a year ago, Mark Lawrence launched his Self Published Fantasy Blog Off in which over 250 self-published novels were submitted in batches to ten volunteer bloggers in a two round competition. Each blogger identified the favourite in their personal batch and then the ten batch winners were reviewed by all bloggers to identify an overall winner.<br />
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You can read more about it <a href="http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/final-round-self-published-fantasy-blog.html" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Yesterday, on an impulse, I bought the overall winner "The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids" by Michael McClung. Today I finished it and then discovered that Mark Lawrence had just announced the SPFBO #2 (posted <a href="http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-min=2016-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2017-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=26" target="_blank">here</a>) and that makes this not simply a review of this very worthy winner of SPFBO #1 but also an opportunity to reflect on self-publishing in general and the SPFBO process in particular.<br />
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As a self-published author myself (and SPFBO #1 first round entrant) I have a natural sympathy towards self-published work and McClung himself wrote eloquently in Lawrence's blog (<a href="http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/instant-gratification-takes-too-long.html" target="_blank">here</a>) about his own motives for self-publishing. It was more to do with impatience and disappointment with the traditionally published route, than the blinkered narcissism that most of those who still look down on self-publising would assume.<br />
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I have read many self-published books, including three of the eight I have read so far in this (irritatingly busy) year. There is a range in their quality just as there is in the quality of traditionally published books but, unsurprisingly, the range in self-published work is greater with authorial enthusiasm carrying some weaker works half-formed into the public domain.<br />
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However, there is a significant region of overlap where the best of the self-published works can put many a traditional piece to shame. The SPFBO had a degree of randomness in the approaches of bloggers and the allocation of titles, but it is reassuring to find that the book which eventually emerged victorious is a shining star in the self-published pantheon.<br />
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<h2>
The Thief who pulled on Trouble's braids</h2>
This is a well crafted book about a thief called Amra setting out to avenge a friend. Its central mystery carries it through a series of intruiging plot developments and engaging new characters, while the high quality of the writing gives the reader many points at which to pause and smile in appreciation.<br />
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It reminds me of Daniel Polansky's Low Town series which had the cynical first person narrator "The Warden." Amra, like the Warden, has carved out a successful career on the wrong side of the law yet preserves an inner morality that she would die rather than admit to. There are touches of Scott Lynch's work "The Lies of locke Lamora" in a well developed sense of city and culture and a multiplicity of Gods, priests and temples none of them to be entirely trusted. There is also a resonance with Lucas Thorn's (another self published novelist) work, the tales of the violent elf Nysta. Like Nysta, Amra has a wide variety of bladed implements whose individual properties she is intimately aware of and very efficient at using. Like Nysta, Amra also has a friend of the wizarding persuasion. And, yet again I find myself enthralled by (or in thrall to) a feisty female who takes crap from absolutely no-one.<br />
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The world building is cleverly incidental. Asides that tell us Atan the Camlachan purveyor of cooked meat is from a fallen warrior race and "should have been handling a broadsword, not meat skewers."<br />
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Like all good cities Lucernis has its own version of the Shanghai Hilton, though I did wonder if Havelock prison was a homage to Pratchett's Patrician Vetinari. The city is, if not quite a den of vice and iniquity, certainly no better than it should be. "You can't just go walking around with a severed head in Lucernis. But you can, I discovered, walk around with a lumpy head-shaped item, wrapped in linen and dripping blood. I think it's just that nobody really wants to know you're walking around with a severed head, and are appreciative of the courtesy of leaving room for doubt."<br />
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McClung gives his heroine a sharp and distinctive voice, in describing her friend and ally she muses "Why he chose to live next to a field of bodies in various states of rot I'll never understand. But I never asked him. I was afraid he might tell me."<br />
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The book is littered with economical but powerful descriptions which I always think are the mark of a great writer - making every word punch above its weight. Such as one grieving woman, "She sat rigid as ever, but one manicured hand was white-knuckled, throtting a silk napkin." Or an old man whose "wrinkles had wrinkles and his hair was little more than a silver net across his spotted pate."<br />
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Amra is an entertaining and educational narrator, a skilled thief who speaks to the camera every so often, such as explaining why she wraps her grapnels in white cotton.<br />
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She meets and describes a variety of people and, while she is unlucky in her enemies, she can count herself fortunate in her friends who are loyal and/or powerful, though for Amra the relationship is often seen in simple terms "We put meat on each other's tables."<br />
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This is a short book in an age when fantasy fiction seems to require door stopping blockbusters filled with backstory. McClung handles exposition by putting some of it in the mouth of a cussed priest of a dead god of knowledge. In most unpriestly but entertaining language he berates our heroine and fills her in - somewhat belatedly - on what she is up against. Then, just for badness, there is an epilogue of said priest's rantings - far more enteraining than a dry appendix of info-dump.<br />
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The story develops rapidly with the twists and turns enough to satisfy an afficianado of both fantasy and murder mysteries (which may explain its dual appeal to me.) In so doing McClung lays the seeds (if I have read my runes correctly) for seven more sequels in Amra's troubled life. In book one we have got to know her and her most significant allies. If there is character development (as opposed to revelation) then I guess it lies in Amra discovering not so much that "the only thing to fear is fear itself" (there are plenty of really scary things well worth fearing in Amra's world) as that "the only thing to hate is hate itself." Which, by the way is not a bad message in the troubled contemporary times in which we live.<br />
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<h2>
What other Self published works might learn from McClung's success ?</h2>
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The Thief who Pulled on Troubled Braids, more so than other self-published works I have read, is one that could easily take its place within the higher echelons of traditionally published fantasy.<br />
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I read H.G.Wells "The Time Machine" recently and was interested to discover that it was Wells' early big idea, rushed out without the time he felt it deserved for the fuller development. For many self-published authors there is that same enthusiasm for a single big idea, a theme, or style, or perspective that makes their story unique. But, the big idea is not enough, the craft and the mastery of basics are essential and that is what McClung has achieved. <br />
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In my youth I used to play cricket at a fairly low grade level. I bowled and I, and other bowlers I played with would strive for that same unique specialness in our bowling that so many authors aspire to in their writing. We dreamed of that special delivery, the unplayable ball, the one that was as fast as a rocket, that spun like a top, that did stuff no batsman could predict. But the truly successful sportsman, like the truly successful writer, is not the one with the isolated flashes of innovative brilliance. It is the one with the control of craft to deliver consistently high quality performance. It is within such a disciplined environment that brilliance can be most properly and effectvely expressed.<br />
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McClung maintains that quality and control - getting the basics consistently right, and it is that foundation which, for me deservedly lifts a good story into the truly professional bracket. <br />
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<h2>
What impact has the SPFBO victory had for McClung?</h2>
Even with SPFBO success there does not appear to have been a clear or immediate translation into Anthony Ryan or Michael J Sullivan style success<br />
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At this moment on Amazon, "The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids" ranks as follows<br />
Amazon.co.uk 75,537 Paid in Kindle Store and 15 reviews <br />
Amazon.com 69,884 Paid in Kindle Store and 74 reviews
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For comparison <br />
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My own "Lady of the Helm" which did not make it past the first round sort for SPFBO and (which has had minimal marketing due to work pressures) ranks as follows<br />
Amazon.co.uk 86,797 Paid in Kindle Store and 19 reviews<br />
Amazon.com 254,768 Paid in Kindle Store and 14 reviews<br />
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I would hypothesise that critical acclaim is of itself not enough (I guess no surprise there). To get success a book needs<br />
a) luck and<br />
b) a well mobilised and vociferous fan base spreading the word<br />
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and that b) is something every author needs to work on - and fans need to support.<br />
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McClung's book is a really good book - it deserves a wider audience than it seems to have got so far.<br />
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Maybe SPFBO as a competition needs to find ways to spreading its own message more widely, so that this great winner shall succeed beyond the competition, with countless readers clamouring for copies! <br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-52762631414342460062016-03-29T12:58:00.001-07:002016-03-29T12:58:28.677-07:00Pulling all the right strings a spoiler free review of "The Prince and the Puppet Affair" by G.W. RenshawThis is the second in G.W. Rewnshaw's Calgary set series about Veronica Chandler, a feisty young private eye whose escapades challenge the expectations of age, gender and indeed genre.<br />
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I reviewed the first of them here <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/the-stable-vices-affair-review-of.html" target="_blank">The Stable Vices Affair</a> The second had languished on my kindle for some months, waiting for the various clouds of work, family and other commitments to lift and - on a not exactly bright easter day I finally found the time to return to Veronica's increasingly bizarre world.<br />
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It is a testament to the story and the writing that I consumed it in a single day - and at 287 pages this is far more than a novella.<br />
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Renshaw's tale is sustained by his heroine, an engaging and resouceful young woman given a credble voice. The kind of nineteen year old who likes to pretend "that there's only one seven o'clock per day: the one right after supper." A misapprehension that those of us wh have ever tried to awaken teenage daughters will certainly recognise.<br />
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The second book is set a year after the first and, for Veronica, the intervening months have been filled with a succession of reassuringly ordinary cases quite unlike the bizarre events of book one and a being claimining to be demon with an interest in dressage fetish. However, all good things must come to an end. The marital woes of Alyssa Blakeway ("She was not one of those people who can cry prettily") set Veronica off again mixing her own brand of police procedural (we learn how to climb telegraph poles safely - and repeatedly) with all manner of occult happenings.<br />
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Renshaw's writing is unobtrusively good. It rattles along with many flashes of wise-cracking (and self-deprecating) humour from the heroine. "This guy was so dense he made lead look like a souffle" The descriptions are ecnomical and easy on the mind's eye such as this sunrise "A graded wash of orange faded upwards until it met a band of clouds that also turned a deep orange."<br />
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There are also little asides in deference to pop-culture that appeal to me but are subtle enough not to irk those who may be too young (or old) to get them. Miss Blakeway's "gallifreyan" handbag, a car named "binky" and a pythonesque reference to potentially being turned into a newt with the proviso "you'd get better."<br />
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For all the demons' demonic power (sufficient to confound a whole alphabet of plans starting with Plan A) I could not help rooting for them, they seemed so much nicer than some of the humans. As Mercedes M Yardley's own feisty heroine Luna Masterson found in Nameless (my first book of 2016 reviewed <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/a-breathless-read-my-spoiler-free.html" target="_blank">here</a>), your status living with demons is best described as "complicated." And even demons move with the the times -as Veronica reflects "See, Collin, even demons don't give a rat's ass about virginity. Welcome to the 21st century."<br />
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This is an entertaining read again illustrated by the author's own particular expertise in martial arts and cooking - even knee deep in criminal demonic invocations we write best when we write about what we know. <br />
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Veronica carries the story but with excellent support from friends - if not always lovers. However, bargains have to be struck and fascinations fuelled which means that Veronica's demons (the internal and the external) have certainly not finished with her. Indeed like a close coupled binary star system, they seem fated to spiral into an even closer embrace in the books ahead.<br />
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I can hardly wait! <br />
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TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-78134394791105673182016-03-28T15:12:00.000-07:002016-03-28T15:12:30.259-07:00A good read by a well read author, my spoiler free review of "The Red Plains" by G.R.MatthewsG.R.Matthews has created and sustained a unique world in this trilogy that takes what we thought we knew about Imperial China and re-imagines it in a way that feels both different and authentic.<br />
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In this concluding installment of the forbidden list trilogy, a struggle that began (In the Stone Road) as a dispute between two city states and their rival dukes has escalated to a conflict that threatens to consume not just the Empire, but the whole of creation.<br />
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Matthews keeps that epic scale firmly grounded through the same approach seen in the first two books. The reader follows two key participants in a series of alternating Point of View chapters. There is Zhou, the diplomat, who through the trauma of losing his wife and child discovered the raw power of the spirit realm and his link as a <i>wu</i> to the primal spirit of the Panther. There is Haung, the soldier trained in two forms of warrior magic and elevated like Zhou to the forbidden list, those servants of the Emperor to whom no-one may offer any let, hinderance or harm as they serve his majesty.<br />
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In some ways Zhou and Huang are unlikely protaganists of this tale, there are others with greater powers and higher stakes. At times Matthews' heroes serve as the readers' eyes and ears, witnesses to the power of greater beings. Jeff Salyards in his Blooodsounder Arc trilogy had the scribe Arkimondos tell the tale of intrigue and warfare from a worm's eye view. While Zhou and Haung are far more formidable than Akimondos ever could be, their own development - attending as guests at the table of power (like hobbits at the council of Elrond) - means Matthews can and does use them effectively to guide the reader through his incredibly complex world of multiple realms and ancient conflicts.<br />
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In his afterward and elsewhere, Matthews has written of his great hatred for info-dumps - those long chapters of exposition, those prologues of pretend history - in which some authors have unwisely indulged. Epic fantasy must have a backstory of course, and the author must know it - know it all, but like seven eights of an iceberg (or a building's foundations) most of it should be hidden from view, not thrust down the reader's throat.<br />
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So Matthew's story builds through the experiences and observations of Zhou and Huang as they follow very different paths. Battles are fought, friendships forged, heroes discovered and secrets revealed all in an entertaining way and at a lively pace. The use of chinese terms and names lends a sense of immersion in a different world without going to the extremes of unpronouncable invented names with a muliplicity of apostrophes.<br />
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Plot seeds laid in the earlier books get to sprout and flower here in surprising ways and at the heart of this tale there is a theme of family. Not just the family that Zhou lost, or the family that Huang has vowed to protect, but other families who must resolve their differences or else the Jade Emperor and the world as they know it will fail.<br />
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TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-34140280321264441982016-03-28T12:55:00.003-07:002016-03-28T13:27:00.246-07:00A Spoiler Free Review of "The Second Death" by T.FrohockThis is the third novella in Frohock's Los Nefilim trilogy. You can see my reviews of the others here <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/mighty-men-of-old-my-spoiler-free.html" target="_blank">In Midnight's Silence</a> and here <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/a-walk-on-dark-side-my-spoiler-free.html" target="_blank">Without Light or Guide.</a><br />
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In reviewing "The Second Death" there will be some spoilers for the first two books, so you have been warned!<br />
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The story that was begun in "In Midnight's Silence" is carried forward as the daimon Moloch and his idea for a bomb again becomes a cause that angels would go to war over. We also find out more about how Frohock's world - or rather universe of daimons, angels and mortals is organised.<br />
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The question in my last review as to whether Guillermo is leader of all the worlds Nefilim is answered as we meet Die Nephilim of Germany and realise that the nations of the world mirror and are shaped by the nations of the angels and their respective bands of nephilim. Struggles and warfare in our world reflect clashes within heaven itself and the fate of a war yet to be fought is resolved in an spanish asylum where an angel might fear to tread. <br />
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Frohock's story juxtaposes simple family scenes with moments of great terror as Miquel and Diago strive to both be good fathers to Rafael and good Nefilim for Guillermo. All three of the closeknit nuclear family take their turn in the Point of View spotlight with writing that effectively conveys disparate voices ranging from a five year old child to an immortal.<br />
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However, in Frohock's world immortality is not something to be taken for granted - as the title suggests, there is more than one kind of death. With Frohock's Daimons and Angels as with Claire North's <span class="st">kalachakra in the </span>First Fifteen lives of Harry August (reviewed <a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-first-fifteen-lives-of-harry-august.html" target="_blank">here</a>) even perpetual reincarnation must have limits. At the same time there are tempting reminders that this is Diago's second incarnation, that he and his fellow nefilim have shared a previous existance from which both lessons and prejudices leak into the one he knows now. There may be a backstory novella in there. <br />
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Frohock paints her story with a colourful palette, language that conjures a vivid sense of the world her characters inhabit in all its tones. <br />
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"The humid air was tinted in sallow shades of yellow and green. Tornados dropped from skies like these."<br />
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The overall effect is of writing with the smoothness of southern comfort wrapped around a plot with the kick of a single malt. <br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-56803342559421673362016-03-28T05:50:00.002-07:002016-03-28T05:50:20.065-07:00A spoilery review of "The Time Machine" by H.G.WellsThis review will contain spoilers because, for me, the books greatest curiosity was what its plot set about the time in which it was written and indeed what any book says about the time in which it was written.<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--PVF0BXafsU/VvkoZtbksCI/AAAAAAAAAhk/AVxN0XGmE3Y0LFEdIQR_cMjcXpfcXBYYA/s1600/the%2Btime%2Bmachine.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--PVF0BXafsU/VvkoZtbksCI/AAAAAAAAAhk/AVxN0XGmE3Y0LFEdIQR_cMjcXpfcXBYYA/s320/the%2Btime%2Bmachine.jpg" width="198" /></a><br /><br />Reflecting back on this his early work from the lofty heights of his later success, H.G.Wells also gives an interesting insight into the process of authorship. The Time Machine was "the big idea" lurking in his head and waiting for the moment when he could give the theme the time (no pun intended) that it deserved. Yet, financial pressures forced him to rush the story through and preciptously out into the world like Shakepseare's Richard III <br />"Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time<br />Into this breathing world scarce half made up" <br /><br />Who amongst us writers has not feared that the big idea would be squandered in a work that would not do it justice and Well's experience shoudl reassure us at least that there will be other big ideas to follow. We all have more than the apocryphal "one novel" in us and the big ideas are like the "magic penny" of love that my wife used to make primary school children sing. <br /><br />"love is like a magic penny, hold it tight and you won't have any, lend it spend it and you'll have so many they will roll all over the floor."<br /><br />That writing breeds ideas which breeds writing in one of the few natural positive feedback loops.<br /><br />Anyway, what about the book itself?<br /><br />Well, written at the end of the ninteenth century it was a time of great social and scientific change<br /><br />The industrial revolution was in full swing with Blake writing of the "dark satanic mills"<br />Darwin's theory of evolution was still relatively new.<br />Einstein and others were pondering the nature of time and space.<br />Oscar Wilde was writing witty plays poking fun at the rigidities of manners in an intensely class bound system.<br /><br />H.G.Wells flung those ideas into the authorial melting pot and the melded them into a tale that told as much about his present as our future. In the first place he had his collection of gentleman identifed by profession rather than name, discuss the concept of time as a dimension through which one travelled. <br /><br />Then he flung his eponymous hero hundreds of thousands of years into the future to see what evolution had done to human kind and the species had bifurcated.<br /><br />The industrial workers had evolved into the Morlocks, disappearing underground to maintain machinery whose purpose they had long since lost sight of (indeed Wells himself offers no clue as to its function).<br /><br />On the surface dwell the eloi, in some way descendants of Wells upper classes (or the farming classes or both). The technology has made work neither necessary nor relevant and they have lost the impetus of leadership and become pleasant but feeble minded pleasure seekers fed but not challenged with their intellect withering in consequence. <br /><br />And in this twisted world the morlocks rise from the deeps to feed on the eloi in what cannot quite be cannibalism since they are clearly no longer the same species.<br /><br />It is funny how we all of us live in the moment, how we assume a permanence to the culture and technology of the time in which we live. Our imagination of the future projects those themes forward and my own germ of a science fiction idea is built around our mdoern challenges of global warming, population growth and sea level rises. Maybe someday I will get the time to give that big idea its proper treatment. <br /><br />At the same time we assume our own present - in its culture, attitudes, system of government - has some perfection and permanence. Those who might criticise one religion for its demeaning attitudes towards women forget that a couple of centuries earlier their own religion espoused discriminatory views as its own orthdoxy. Those who berate the intolerance of sexual difference in countries forget how recently their own countries repealed laws that made homsexuality illegal. Which is of course, not to say we were right then and wrong now, but just to be aware that we are all (as nations and individuals) travelling through time and being changed by the journey and should be mindful of that before we try to claim we stand on some unique peak of moral high ground. <br /><br />Wells projected the issues of his own time forward and what had been a class divide became not just a racial divide but a species divide as technological advances spared all from the need to work. That was - in essence - the big idea and one is mildly curious to see how Wells might have developed it if he had given the bigger fuller treatment he originally intended.<br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-1673127864002325452016-01-01T07:01:00.000-08:002016-01-01T07:46:35.583-08:00A Breathless Read - my spoiler free review of "Nameless: The Darkness Comes" by Mercedes M Yardley<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yjByc7j-Neo/VoaSDVSAOHI/AAAAAAAAAgw/ht3Xz-VnMFE/s1600/Nameless.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a>I had hopes to finish this book before midnight fell somewhere in the world and so claim Nameless as the last book I read in 2015, but new year celebrations and a family game of Cards Against Humanity intervened (Best play made by Tess - "I drink to forget... alcoholism."). So Nameless is instead the first book I finished in 2016. There is perhaps more of a coincidental link to be drawn between a nihilistic card game and a story about inhumanly demonic posession.<br />
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Mercedes Yardley takes the book's central premise - a young woman who sees demons, has seen them since she was a child - and runs with it. Luna Masterson is a feisty heroine who spends much of book running, either towards things or away from things - though often she and the reader are unsure which of those two directions it is. <br />
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Luna is an orphan. Her only family are her brother and his daughter - the pair abandoned by the child's mother. Her constant companions are the whispy insubstantial demons seeking to gain entrance to her house, to creep beneath her skin into her soul, to walk in her flesh, stalking her mistily until they can coallesce into sufficient form to attack, or be attacked.<br />
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Growing up with the ability to see such creatures is bound to leave its Mark, and Luna certainly has an attitude. In someways she reminds me of Lisbeth Salander - the quirky heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There is the same defiance of societal norms from someone who society fears because her talents and experiences put her beyond normal comprehension. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from http://dragontattoofilm.com/2010/09/does-lisbeth-salander-really-have-aspergers/</td></tr>
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As with Stieg Larsson's creation, Yardley's protagonist bristles with suspicion and resentment; a reluctant princess who carries with her her own personal wall of thorns to repel the good and the bad without fear or favour. Her choice of clothing, of hair style and colour, make not so much a
statement as a challenge and at this point I feel the author has most pushed something
of herself into Luna's soul.<br />
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The plot feels organic, its evolution leaving the reader breathless as Luna swivels within a demonic maze, neither she nor the reader sure of the truth of what they are seeing, or hearing - none of us knowing who to trust when even the darkest demons are clad in shades of grey. Like the characters in the film Insidious, Luna finds scenes of horror overlaid on the ordinairy in an illusion so seamless one cannot see the join with reality - and in the midst of such nightmares, madness beckons.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">insidious franchise</td></tr>
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The prose is clipped, efficient, stripped down like the powerful motorcycle Luna is fond of riding. Luna leads the reader through a compression of scenes to give that sense of accelerated living (and dying) you might get in a video game.<br />
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I was warned that Nameless, Mercedes Yardley's first novel, was different to her other works and it is that, but does not suffer from the variation. In her other stories Yardley surveys the scene from the lofty perspective of mutiple third person Points of View, the perfect vantage point from which to deploy the whimisical omniscience - the dark authorial asides - that keep us gripped and smiling in the midst of dire themes of inhumanity. We see that style too in the prologue to Nameless, an ill-fated sleep-over that gives an insight into Luna's childhood.<br />
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However, for the rest of the story, the author descends into the first person viewpoint of Luna, a ground level perspective in the head of a frenetic and sometimes frantic heroine. It is an authentic voice in a fast paced story that can leave the reader breathless with its switches in direction. We do not always like Luna - like those around her we find her headstrong and frustrating at times. But she is always true to herself and she, unlike so many of the creatures around her, is always human <br />
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<br />TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-84289919216216972882015-12-30T12:00:00.000-08:002016-05-21T16:03:21.290-07:00More boundless leaps of Imagination - Part 2 of my Spoiler free review of UnboundSo here is the second part of my review of the Unbound anthology published by Grimoak press. I will post it also on goodreads though I should warn you that just putting <i>unbound</i> in the goodreads search box seems to lead to an entirely different genre! <br />
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<h3>
The Diamond Queen - by Anthony Ryan</h3>
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This is story that reaches skywards with its epic scope. The opening battle of tens of thousands, is a bloody victory won that would make<i> </i>Nirnaeth Arnoediad look like a minor skirmish (allow me a little hyperbole here). The warrior general Sharrow-met flies into combat astride her blackwing like a Nazgul Lord and none dare come between her and her prey. But the spoils of victory prove elusive and Sharrow-met's past stubbornly intrudes on the present. The Voice that is her master, commands, controls and rewards but Sharrow-met finds mysteries it cannot answer as she strives to complete her subjugation of the last city on the continent.<br />
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And when the dust has settled and silence has fallen, I am left feeling I have finished a novel, rather than a short story.<br />
<h3>
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<h3>
The Farmboy Prince - by Brian Staveley</h3>
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There is a distinctive voice in this first person point of view tale, the unnamed narrator coarsely dismissive of both noble and ignoble visitors to his home town which aspires - at its best - to be a shit-hole. The noble are reviled as they sit "<i>holding one of Nick's filthy tankards as though he'd filled it up with some pox-victim's phlegm instead of ale, which, considering Nick's ale, was about right." </i>while the ignoble are warned <i>"if you go for your sword in Two Streams, you'd better be ready to drop some motherfuckers"</i><br />
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In short, in this short story, the lives of the people in Two Streams - like the people themselves are short and ugly. Throw into the mix a traditional tale of hidden parentage, dodgy fake names, and a looming national crisis, and it becomes clear that something needs to be done. What is less clear, is exactly what that something is, and who's going to do it but Staveley manages to raise a smile and surprise in the process.<br />
<h3>
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<h3>
Heart's Desire - by Kat Richardson</h3>
The style is hauntingly strange, like a letter to an absent lover. The narrator sits entwined in the twisted ghosts of fairy stories of old, atop a tower tall enough to have held Rapunzel. There is a wall of thorns such as entombed sleeping beauty. There are helpful talking animals though their purpose and manner is a long way from the timely home helps that assisted Snow White.<br />
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Something is awry in this fairy tale world, a story too full of desperation and shadow to lift the reader's sense of foreboding, but the twist when it comes, still cuts to the heart. <br />
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<h3>
The Game - by Michael J. Sullivan</h3>
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Those of us brought up on the SIMS and World of Warcraft will love the inventiveness of this tale. My second daughter, not the most skilled SIMS player, used to get genuinely upset when - by some accident in playing the first version of SIMS - she managed to set her SIMS on fire and watched them reduced to a pile of ash and then an urn. My eldest, slightly more clinically observant, used to experiment with different ways of killing them off - for example putting them in a pool and then removing the ladder so they could not get out and would eventually die of exhaustion. <br />
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In the Game Sullivan plays with the idea of games and the characters that populate them as well as the people that play them. It is cleverly done, so I cannot - in all spoiler-free safety - say much more than that Jeri Blainey, Project Lead for the Realms of Rah - MMPORG is about to have a very bad day.<br />
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<h3>
The Ethical Heresy - by Sam Sykes</h3>
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Dreadaeleon is an apprentice wizard with more to worry about than his mouthful of a name. Even as they hunt down heretic mages, wielding ice, fire and lightning, Dreadaeleon - in the grip of adolescence - is obsessed with his cooler, taller, more gifted fellow apprentice Cresta. In the midst of death and destruction and the disdain of their grim tutor Vemire, Dread vainly tries to draw some approval from his crush. The prose captures his failures well as Dread tells himself <i>Well done, old man. She dressed you down like a six-copper prostitute, and you simply stood there and took it. </i><br />
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But even apprentices can find danger in this well crafted piece, the backstory of politics and magic system<i> </i>injected seamlessly into the writing<i> - </i>like the fine marbelling of fat within the lean of a high quality steak that gives the whole its flavour. Humour and pathos mix perfectly as Dread finds himself thinking<br />
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<i>At that moment what he was going to do seemed to fall along the lines of "die horribly, possibly while crying"</i><br />
<h3>
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<h3>
Small Kindnesses - by Joe Abercromie</h3>
The story spins around three women and the men who underestimate them. There is Shev the young but retired thief turned smoke house hostess, Carcolf the alluring blond siren from Shev's past still flinging temptation in her way, and there is the unconscious redhead. Though - as facebook told me only this morning - "It takes a special kind of stupid to piss of a redhead and expect calm"<br />
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Shev is the central sympathetic character, given to small kindnesses, to protecting others from their own foolishness, from striving to escape the trap of being the best thief in Westport. M<i>aybe there was some stubborn stone in her, like the stone in a date, that refused to let all the shit that had been done to her make her into shit.</i><br />
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Shev, has her share of earthy passions but tries not to let these cloud her thinking too much. <i> </i><br />
<i>She tore her eyes away as her mind came knocking like an unwelcome visitor. </i>When you live in life's gutter, a certain caution has to be your watchword.<br />
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But in a grippingly related day that grows increasingly turbulent, our charming but diminutive heroine discovers that fate neither forgets, nor forgives a small kindness. <br />
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<h3>
The Rat - by Mazarkis Williams</h3>
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A boy, Emil, awaits his great-grandpa coming to stay, hoping for an insight into the past. In this well written tale a backstory of epic grandeur is distilled down to a child's eye view of a simple hut and four people sharing an evening warmed, inflamed even, by fires of history. The title at first seems misleading, the eponymous rodent and its feline huntress little more than shadows on the fringes of the lyrical prose. But by the end the story had put me in mind of the sad fate of the crew of USS Indianapolis, torpedoed in 1945 and left for days floating in shark infested waters, their numbers steadily and inevitably diminished until they were spotted and rescued by chance. A horror like that would etch deep into an old man's memory and so it is with great-grandpa curmudgeonly and distrustful when awake, restless and fearful asleep.<br />
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And for Emil the excitement of the new, not just great grandpa but his road companion the musician <i>"young enough to hold his shoulders straight, but he carried snow in his hair.</i>" quickly gives way to questions he dare not ask, answers he does not want.<br />
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<h3>
The Siege of Tilpur - by Brian McClellan</h3>
I had heard of the powdermage series, but this was my first excursion into the world of magic and musketry that McClellan has created. It is a tale of warfare, of a desert siege, of prejudice, class and incompetence. Sergeant Tamas and his squad, serving the aristocratic General Seske are in the classic mould of the infantry lions led by officer donkeys as they bid to take the fortress that has never fallen. It also has shades of the Sharpe novels of Bernard Cornwell, the period feel (if not the generalship) more suited to the Napoleonic era than the first world war.<br />
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It is visceral action, but with very human heroes. For a moment I saw a hint of Blackadder goes Forth as Tamas explains his cunning plan to a disbelieving general clad in a silk dressing gown (perhaps one of General Melchett's cast offs?). As with most cunning plans, things do not run exactly smoothly, but then that is what makes the story so entertaining.<br />
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<h3>
Mr Island - by Kristen Britain</h3>
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A charmingly atmospheric tale of what happens when a strange traveller is welcomed to a small east coast community, all told with a true 19th century period feel by a narrator known only as Mrs Grindle. If Jane Austen and Jules Verne had been inspired by the story of Grace Darling to collaborate this might be the tale they came up with. Of propriety and love, science and shipwreck, mystery and loss. <br />
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As the layers of the story are peeled back, and truths are raised - in some cases from the sea bed - several themes enjoy a brief flash of illumination, as though from the sweep of a lighthouse beam. Women's emancipation, commercial advantage, luddite impulses, all flare in this skilful depiction of small town life exposed to new influences. But Mr Island and the woman whose kindness captures his heart form the spine to the story and prove that - no matter how small the space in which you stand - there is no limit to the direction in which you can look. <br />
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<h3>
Jury Duty - by Jim Butcher</h3>
There have been many great courtroom dramas since Henry Fonda first swung a jury in "Twelve Angry Men" but when Harrry Dresden - Chicago's wizardly private investigator gets involved in an open and shut case the debate will be won with spells and claws more than words and points of law.<br />
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This fresh fast paced story was my first introduction to Harry Dresden and the cynical wit that permeates the writing as Harry first questions <i>"What does justice have to do with the legal system?"</i> and then observes of the judge <i>"This was a woman who had seen a great deal, had been amused by very little of it, and who would not easily be made a fool."</i><br />
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Strings pulled beyond the courtroom threaten to make a mockery of justice, but for a hardboiled kind of guy, Harry has an unusually soft centre; when the lives or happiness of children are at stake... well let's just say you wouldn't want to be at the sharp end of any stake Dresden might be holding. <br />
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<h3>
The Dead's Revenant - by Shawn Speakman</h3>
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A bit like Delilah Dawson's tale of Monsieur Charmant, Shawn Speakman gives us the point of view of a main story antagonist. For 9000 words we walk with Tathal Ennis as he prepares to bring death and disaster to a sleepy English village. He has a certain amoral charm, an indifference to right or wrong as he draws people in with the spell of his words, or the words of his spell.<br />
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There is young Tim Becket <i>"tossing in his sleep, his nightmares darker than the purpling new bruises that mingled with old yellow and green, all delivered by a grandfather who abhorred weakness."</i> Tathal offers him an escape of sorts, not caring whether he takes it or not. There are old sisters and a not so young barmaid who all must yield and give Tathal what he wants lest he takes it anyway.<br />
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But Tathal does not dispense death and cruelty for its own sake. There is a darker purpose a deeper quest that he pursues, a destiny sown on a bloody battlefield of long ago. The names Camlann and <span class="st">Myrddin Emrys evoke links to a legend - to t<i>he</i> legend - of dark age Britain.</span><br />
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<h3>
<span class="st">A Goodreads target reached?!</span></h3>
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<span class="st">So there we have it - an entertaining anthology by the great and the good. This is the 24th book that I have read and reviewed this year, far short of my goodreads target of 42 ... but hold on, if I treat each of these excellent short stories as a book read and reviewed, then I add 23 rather than just one to my total, and sail past my target with room to spare.</span><br />
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<span class="st">Hmm ... somewhat like that moment when Legolas brings down the Oliphant and all who ride in it in "Return of the King" and Gimli insists that counts as "just one."</span>TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-40363513147623141422015-12-29T14:44:00.001-08:002016-05-21T15:56:37.833-07:00With an Unbound They Were Free - Part one of my spoiler free review Unbound <h2>
An assemblage of short stories liberated from the imaginations of great story tellers </h2>
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Perhaps it is a product of the busy age we live in that short story anthologies have become more appealing to my taste than before. Bite sized fiction for a world driven by sound-bites, and there are plenty of bites of different kinds in this riveting collection which Shawn Speakman has edited.<br />
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Some of the authors I already knew and had read, others are names glimpsed on social media. Some of the stories have roots in the authors' main works though still read well as stand alone stories, others are tales told in isolation, their backstory fashioned at the convergence of each reader's and author's imaginations. The anthology is inevitably an eclectic mix, but still entertaining in its own right and a powerful taster of different authors' styles and approaches.<br />
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In some ways it is like those trios of deserts offered in the best restaurants these days, a mix of different but complementary taste sensations that leave you hungering for more. Just as a festive season taster can lead to bigger things and a damaging expansion in the waisline, so too this anothology might cause an explosion in my already daunting TBR pile.<br />
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But - to the stories themselves - and there are so many and with such variety that it will take two blog posts to do them justice.. <br />
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<h3>
Madwalls - by Rachel Caine. </h3>
Beautifully written, the transition from the normal world of a teenager into some dark secret, an accident of birth landing her in the midst of an ancient covenant handed down from generation to generation on which the fate of the world rests, the world and one captive. Surreal, hypnotic, like its central theme, the reader like the protagonist is drawn into a world that lingers in the mind, or is it the mind that lingers in the world?<br />
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<h3>
Stories are Gods - by Peter Orullian. </h3>
A story that believes in the power of argument, or perhaps an argument that believes in the power of stories. A hero who is physically weak, but mentally strong fuelled by a powerful love and a tragic schism to take to a debating floor in a world where academic philosopy has suddenly become dangerous. Themes from a wider well-built world (The Vault of Heaven I infer) bleed into this story though, like its protagonist, the story stands well enough on its own two feet.<br />
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<h3>
River and Echo - by John Marco. </h3>
If you have seen Will Smith's "I am Legend" or the film "Silent Running" you may see the same similes that I did. A lone survivor and his unusual companion, living ghosts in the detritus of a plague ridden city. There is a traditional fantasy feel to it - rather than sci-fi, a city with walls, lit and heated by fires, defended with arrows. Though with a slight steampunk feel. The story is sustained by the wonderfully well-drawn poignant relationship between River and Echo.<br />
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<h3>
A dichotomy of Paradigms - by Mary Robinette Kowal </h3>
With this story the anthology lurches into a far future of interstellar piracy and technological innovation that enables artists to pursue their craft with the same vibrant immediacy of a war photographer. Patrick the brush wielding protagonist reminded me of a pen scribbling character W.W.Beauchamp in the Clint Eastwood film "Unforgiven" - the journalist hack turned biographer chasing after a gunslinger to document his life. Only Patrick finds that painting the pirate queen poses more of a challenge to his conscience and his craft than he expected. <br />
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<h3>
Son of Crimea - by Jason M Hough</h3>
John Crimson is a policeman perched on the cusp of the age of science and reason - a time when method replaced madness, when passionate crime would yield to patient investigative technique. And into his world steps the disturbing Malena Penar, intoxicating and bewitching. In a journey that spans half the world she challenges his faith in the rational, his dismissal of superstition but in the end I found it hard to tell who won! <br />
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<h3>
An Unfortunate Influx of Filipians by Terry Brooks </h3>
The story is a bridge into the magical world of Landover where lawyer turned King Ben Holiday finds himself presiding like a cross between Judge Judy and Solomon over a gnomish dispute. Problems beget problems in a progeny of biblical proportions and in the end it is management, rather than leadership which must resolve the crises that competing incompetencies have created.<br />
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<h3>
The Way into Oblivion by Harry Connolly. </h3>
When the centre of an empire has suddenly fallen to an unknown power, that is not so much an opportunity as a threat to those previously subjugated peoples who might be tempted to flex the muscles of their newfound independence. Song, sister to the leader of the Holvos people, finds more dangers lurk beside a crocodile infested river than within it. When all choices are difficult and all options are unpalatable, she must decide what motherhood means to her. <br />
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<h3>
Uncharming by Delilah S Dawson </h3>
The writing is delicious, a tasty heady morsel as the daimon Monsieur Charmant frequents the darkest corners of an alternate Paris and London in an obsession to utterly possess a poor desperate soul who had already sold him the best part of herself. The story draws on a well built world of Dawson's other works but gives what I assume to be a smalller character his moment to preen his awful nature in technicolour limelight. I liked this line especially <i>Money had been important to him once. Now it was power and possession, the tang of owing that hit the air everytime a client gave more than they really had.</i><br />
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<h3>
A Good Name by Mark Lawrence. </h3>
This is another work where a supporting player from Prince of Thorns (and the short story Select Mode) has an opportunity to be fleshed out in more detail. Jorg had his band of brothers and "the Nuban" - never given an identifier beyond that - was one of my favourites. In this short story we find what brought him from the village of his birth to a place at Jorg's side in Ancrath. It begins with pride, the pride in a name won through hardship, a name that should not bow when it was not merited. But sometimes it is not enough to be right, and the consequences of pride cast long shadows.<br />
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<h3>
All in a Night's Work by David Anthony. </h3>
In an action packed adventure Ash - a prince's faithful bodyguard finds a night off is anything but quiet. Deadly demons stalk the palace of an alternative Egypt and our young hero sets off in a pursuit of the assassin as single minded as it is foolish. The only assistance to be had comes from a beetle with a broken antenna and as Ash realises partway through the chase <i>"..you can't think of everything when you're dangling a hundred feet in the air, holding on to the scrawny legs of a faulty beetle." </i>The action is as relentless as the opening sequence of a James Bond movie, and the hero scarcely less resourceful than 007 himself.<br />
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<h3>
Seven Tongues by Tim Marquitz </h3>
A grim tale with a grim hero illuminated by some startling pose from the very first line onwards- <i>The clouds gnawed at the moon, devouring it in slow steady bites. </i>Gryl is an unusual killer - a Prodigy - who escaped enslavement and sells his formidable powers, though still constrained by some sense of a just cause, of a distinction between the guilty and the innocent. When such a man goes in pursuit of a slaver who has been trading in and abusing children the outcome is unlikely to be pretty. However, it is the jobs that seem easiest at first, that are likely to end most messily and by the end of this gripping piece Gryl has certainly painted the desert red. <br />
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<h3>
Fiber by Seanan McGuire. </h3>
This was outrageously entertaining. My eldest daughter has resolutely resisted the lure of the fantasy genre but also enjoys cheerleading as a base with the Cambridge Cougars, so a story that throws a carload of squabbling cheerleaders into a dark fantasy/horrow blend should be the kind that would fire her interest. It's a bit like the way "Dawn of the Dead" combined zombie apocalypse with fantasy shopping to become one of my wife's favourite films. Speaking of which, this riveting short story also features a reformed zombie amongst its kick-ass, kick-head, kick everything leading females. <i>"...thus proving the old adage that you should never forget to wear a cup to a cheerleader fight. No matter what kind of junk you're packing in your pants, a good boot to the groin is going to put you down if you don't have protection."</i><br />
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So there I am, 51% of the way through. I'm off to enjoy the rest of the anthology and I would suggest that you do the same. TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-39658190493906828872015-12-25T06:04:00.000-08:002015-12-25T06:04:08.767-08:00Sometimes Numbers are not Enough - My spoiler free review of Chains of the HereticJeff Salyards has conjured up a remarkable world in his debut series. I was delighted that my unsubtle badgering yielded an ARC of the final instalment of the "Bloodsounder's Arc" trilogy. While this review will eschew spoilers for Chains of Heretic, the whole work is such an interlocked series that there will inevitably be spoilers to the preceding two volumes. So, if you have not yet met Braylar Killcoin and his band of cussed and cursing warriors then look away now. Or still better, look here at my reviews of the preceding books. <br />
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<a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/scourge-of-betrayer-by-jeff-salyards.html" target="_blank">I review Scourge of the Betrayer</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://tomunro.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/a-betrayal-of-memory-my-spoiler-free.html" target="_blank">I review Veil of the Deserters</a><br />
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However, those like me - who have lived and travelled in the head of Arkamondos scribe to Captain Killcoin's ferocious Syldoon company through two gripping books - you gentle reader may read on - though bewarned any gentleness in this book begins and ends with the reader.<br />
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At the end of Veil of the Deserters it had all pretty much gone to hell in a handcart, as Braylar's argumentative Lieutenant Muldoos would say. Or at least as he would have said if his thinking and speech had not been slurred into incomprehensibility by a memoridon's attack.<br />
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Fighting their way out of their home city of Sunwrack, the coup masters of the Jackal tower had been out-coup-ed by the emperor they thought to overthrow and Braylar's already depleted company heads out on a desperate mission to find the previous emperor Thumman lurking in exile. Arkamondos, never especially lucky where women were concerned, was reeling from being betrayed by a kiss. Such concerns of the heart (or - as Muldoos would consider it - somewhat lower than that) are swiftly shown to be of small consequence against far greater threats.<br />
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In war one must be able to outrun whatever one cannot outfight. But Arki and the Syldoon find their foes are legion and disinclined to give them a simple and accessible choice of fight or flight. It is hard to imagine a more friendless band than the one Braylar Killcoin led out of Sunwrack, and along a tortuous path they find not only more enemies, but a climate of distrust amongst even those friends who should hold each other most dear. <br />
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The previous books had set up an array of plot threads. <br />
<ul>
<li>What is the mysterious Godsveil - that shimmering thousand year old curtain dividing the world in half with the power to drive any who approach it insane - who created it, and how and why?</li>
<li>Where does the flail Bloodsounder draw its power and what is its purpose, beyond its ability to steal the memories of those it slays and torture its wielder with them</li>
<li>What caused the deep-seated antipathy between siblings Braylar the warrior and Sofjian the memoridon, a mutual distaste which makes Liam and Noel Gallagher look like the Osmonds. </li>
<li>How can the crisis at the heart of the Syldoon Empire be resolved now that the Emperor Cynead has destroyed the delicate balance of power between the Towers and the throne. </li>
</ul>
These questions carry an implicit demand for Salyards to weave them into a satisfying conclusion as Braylar wends a twisted and arduous path through political and military perils,<br />
<br />
But they are not small questions and answering them requires new people in fresh environments as the circle of Arki's vision and Salyards' world expands still more widely. Salyards also shows again his vivid creativity, with whole new settings that stretch the envelope of his innovation. There is an originality to his world building, to the creatures he populates it with and to the system of magic that he uses, which - for me at least - defies any comparison.<br />
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After all the casualties of the first two books the brief stopover in Sunwrack gave Braylar a chance to replenish his company and we get to meet Rugdi a female sergeant and an ogrish lieutenant more belligerent even than Muldoos. But for all these intriguing characters, it is the sparring between Soffjian and Braylar that still drew my attention most. The warring siblings who seemed to hate each other almost as much as I - as reader - loved them both. Brother and sister circle each other, tongues as sharp as swords, conveying a bitter and weary disappointment which still does not mask the respect they hold for each other's powers. Soffjian's journey is more tortuous than her brother's, her perils more grievous her desires more complex. Braylar takes his greatest chances on the battlefield driven by an unswerving loyalty to the orders of his Tower Commander and to the welfare of his soldiers.<br />
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The great strength of Salyards' writing continues to be his description of battles all seen from the near ground level of the cowering Arki. To be fair the scribe makes efforts to extend his contribution beyond penmanship to some semblance of swordcraft and even gets tuition from an unanticipated quarter. There may have been an element of luck in the survival of so useless an unarmoured civilian through the hard fought battles of the first two books. But it is dangerous to taunt fate for so long and Arki - the progressively more embedded war correspondent - dons gambeson and helmet as well as strapping on a blade.<br />
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Over the course of the trilogy it is Arki's arc that shows the clearest development. At the start we had the awkward, bookish civilian in company with soldiers so coarse their funniest story concerned the death of a colleague beneath the mountainous prostitute whose suffocating favours were his particular predilection. By the last few pages Arki has grown into a far more worldly and resourceful individual prepared to take up arms and brave any danger alongside the soldiers whose grudging respect he has earned. Still nervous and squeamish - he nonetheless has learnt that mercy has consequences and does not flinch when it is his turn to stick the knife in. I am reminded, as Arki is, of how miserable and barren his life had really been before he fell in with Braylar. Life without companionship is more a matter of existence than living and there is no companionship quite like that of soldiers facing the most desperate of circumstances, knit together into a corporate being by discipline, training and such loyalty that they will lay down their lives for their comrades.<br />
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Salyards paints a vivid picture of the crude coarse camaraderie of fighting men, of a military spirit buckled to the point of breaking by the sledgehammer blows of adversity, and of an unlikely hero who finds his place, indeed his family, in the middle of a battlefield where far more than the Syldoon Empire is at stake. It was with a certain serendipity that my favourite iPhone playlist (The one titled "Sad shit that I like") tripped round to play Dire Strait's "Brothers in Arms" just as I reached a crucial rain filled point in the perils that beset Braylar, Arki et al. <br />
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The trilogy is called Bloodsounder's arc and it is only as I write this that I see the meaning of that title. For it is not just the flail that carries the name Bloodsounder! The story may be told by Arki, but this is the story of Braylar Killcoin, one time son, brother, nephew, but above all else he is Syldoon.TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6457199827530368746.post-19288919761266105752015-12-24T15:06:00.000-08:002015-12-24T15:21:35.897-08:00Fraternal Fragments - my review of Road Brothers by Mark LawrenceMy goodreads target of 42 books to be read (and reviewed) in 2015 continues to mock me, supremely confident in its inevitable victory as - even now - I just crawl over the halfway line. However, I am determined to go down fighting and Mark Lawrence's latest publication - an anthology of short stories about Jorg and his brothers - is an easily digested morsel which nonetheless packs quite a punch.<br />
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Jorg bestrode the Broken Empire trilogy dominating his stage as completely and charmingly as Shakespeare's Richard III. With a central character of captivating brilliance, I found that the brothers sometimes struggled to illuminate and define themselves. It is like the search for planets orbiting distant stars (exo-planet) where the planet's characteristics must either inferred from the effect they have on the central star, or can be observed directly only when the central star is obscurred. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pGgiBzMMCzk/Vnx3Hi2o3vI/AAAAAAAAAfY/JB64C5F0oow/s1600/The%2Bcoldest%2Bexo-planet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-pGgiBzMMCzk/Vnx3Hi2o3vI/AAAAAAAAAfY/JB64C5F0oow/s320/The%2Bcoldest%2Bexo-planet.jpg" width="305" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Gemini Observatory - an exo planet (Brother Makin perhaps) outshone by a central star (Jorg of course)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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This collection of short stories offers plenty of opportunity for individual brothers to showcase the subtle nuances of their own pasts, free from Jorg's dazzling light. We see Makin (twice), Red Kent, Brother Sim, the Nuban and of course Rike operating alone, driven (mostly) by their own motivations. It is interesting to see, in Makin and Kent's stories particularly, how slim is the line between the bandits and those that they prey on. Jorg's rampaging band of brothers, after all, was not a single abherration in the midst of a perfect civilisation (it's not called the broken Empire for nothing). They were one band amongst many in an era reminiscent of the 12th century turbulence of King Stephen and the Empress Matilda - a time when it was said that God and his Saints slept.<br />
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There are also two stories specifically about Jorg - "Select Mode" and "Sleeping Beauty" - which I have a particular fondness for having read both when they were previously published. As a result of one of Mark's many competitions, I got to do a sound recording of Select Mode while the author Richard Ford did a recording of Sleeping Beauty. I liked the economy of Select Mode - an insight into a young man still near the start of his road career. Sleeping Beauty, a longer piece, has all of Mark's inventiveness, more of Jorg's cussed refusal to lose, and an entertaining take on some familiar fairy tales.<br />
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You can listen to both audio recordings here.<br />
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/empire_of_thorns/select-mode-by-mark-lawrence" target="_blank">Select Mode - read by T.O.Munro</a><br />
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/empire_of_thorns/sleeping-beauty" target="_blank">Sleeping Beauty - read by Richard Ford</a><br />
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Right up until the end of this collection of short stories, I was unsure which would be my favourite. I had always liked Sir Makin and the Nuban so their tales - filling in back stories in a way which made sense of their behaviours in the main trilogy - had a head start insecuring my affections.<br />
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But then I read the last story that of Father Gomst, and here perhaps I return to my initial observation for - intriguing as Father Gomst is - this is a story of the Ancraths - dazzlingly dark as they outshine all others. Gomst appears in their lives with all the hope but none of the power of a Mary Poppins figure put in charge of a murderously rebellious nursery of two young brothers. In this story we see Olidan - instinctively cruel. We see Jorg aged six and you may, like me, be reminded of the Jesuit saying, "Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man." We also see William aged four and see how even the very young can manipulate and control adults, snaring them in a mesh of their own threats and promises. It is this story too, where lines of Lawrence's prose most readily leapt out of the page at me.<br />
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"Clergy, no matter their station, do not bow to crowns, but Gomst felt the pressure on his shoulders even so." <br />
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"Gomst had told bigger lies for worse reasons. One could hardly rise in Roma's church these days without a crooked tongue."<br />
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"Lies are soft and accomodating. The truth is hard, full of uncomforatble angles. It rarely helps anyone."<br />
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In this venture Mark Lawrence joins the ranks of the self-published
authors - or at least hybrid authors - ably assisted by Pen Astridge's
wonderfully professional cover. <br />
<br />
Within all the stories and their footnotes, there are massive spoilers for the Broken Empire trilogy, fateful forecasts and promises - enough to make those of us who have read to the end of Emperor of Thorns, smile at a circle completed, while others new to Jorg would find the trilogy denuded of some of its biggest twists.<br />
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But then, although these stories mostly precede the trilogy's bifurcated chronologies, they were not intended as an introduction to Jorg's tale, so much as an opportunity for those of us who loved it to revist some old acquaintances an ambition it fulfils splendidly.<br />
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<br />
<i>I might also mention at this point that I too have found some inspiration in Jorg's tale, having twice used him as the subject of entries in fan-fiction themed short story competitions at Fantasy Faction, so for those still hungering for Jorg related short stories, my own offerings are here.</i><br />
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<i><a href="http://fantasy-faction.com/forum/%28feb-2014%29-fanfic/%28feb-2014%29-fanfic-submission-thread/msg78815/#msg78815" target="_blank">The Road to Arrrow (Feb 2014 Fanfic entry)</a></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><a href="http://fantasy-faction.com/forum/%28feb-2015%29/%28feb-2015%29-fanfic-submission-thread/msg94297/#msg94297" target="_blank">Kittens, always the kittens (Feb 2015 Fanfic entry)</a></i><br />
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TOMunrohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16765922761332758600noreply@blogger.com0