June 2022 Reviews

 

I found the first two stories I read for June in the premier issue of Rakehell (Amazon paperback • Amazon Kindle • Kindle Unlimited) a magazine published by Young Needles Press dedicated to swashbuckling fiction edited by Nathaniel Webb which is well worth your time, attention, and money. When I think of swashbucklers, I think of Alexandre Dumas père, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rafael Sabatini and all three of those greats are called out in Webb’s introductory editorial. Not all swashbuckling stories are sword and sorcery, but some sword and sorcery stories (maybe even most?) buckle swashes with the best of them. I was delighted to find that two of the four stories here merit attention as part of this project.

 

I’m going to go ahead and state that here forth I will always refer to the writer Dariel R.A. Quiogue as Dariel R.A. Quiogue (as he is here) no matter what combination of middle initials (or identification as "Daniel”) editors, reviewers, or fans use. Let’s get on the same page, people! The page, in this case, being the one headed “The Temple of the Ghost Tiger,” that being the title of Quiogue’s venture into a jungle temple haunted by a...well, you can probably figure it out. The success this piece enjoys is based on its light and amusing voice, that voice belonging to the first-person narrator, who is a monkey. Specifically, a macaque, as makes sense in this energetic story based on Indian mythology.

 

J.B. Toner offers “When Your Only Tool’s a Hammer,” which is a straightforward adventure story about a barbarian who always chooses to fight for underdogs, and who has a lot more going on upstairs than a lot of characters described as barbarians who always choose to fight for underdogs.

 

For the first time this year, Swords and Sorcery Magazine, in their Issue #124, published a piece I don’t consider sword and sorcery (a story by S. Cameron David). So that leaves us with just two to consider.

 

“Better With Age,” by Alex Beecher, is a short piece told from the point of a view of an itinerant swordslinger (who is never gendered, though I strongly suspect Beecher meant for the character to be read as male-identifying) who doesn’t quite get involved with a tavern brawl but definitely takes care of a problem involving a local bully and a magic sword.

 

Fritz Leiber’s famous barbarian thief and hedge wizard thief pairing of master sword fighters probably have as strong an influence on contemporary S&S authors as any other past master, and that’s certainly on display in “The Mouse that Roared,” the first of two stories by Geoffrey Hart we’ll look at this month that tip a hat to a famous fictional duo. Here we have the origin story of a gender-flipped Gray Mouser (and actually, origin-flipped, Souris—“mouse” both in French and in the tongue of the character’s people–is raised in a clan of barbarians in snow country) who doesn’t meet the promised gender-flipped Fafhrd in this tale, but does engage in a bit of derring do involving a sewer monster and an employer who forces the piece right up to the edge of parody. Fluffy, but fun.

 

The fourth volume in a (largely) sword & sorcery anthology series edited by David A. Riley for his Parallel Universe Publications, Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy (Kindle paperback • Amazon Kindle) presents eleven stories, nine of them of interest for this project. I’ll consider them, as I usually do, in alphabetical order by the author’s last name.

 

Dev Agarwal’s “In the Iron Woods” is one of three, that’s three, stories in this book that center around soldiers escorting a princess on a perilous journey. This is the continuation—actually, apparently, it’s a direct sequel—to another story in an earlier volume of this series and unfortunately that makes for very rough going for a new reader at the beginning, when multiple characters with multiple names are meeting and conversing in what may or may not be a battlefront in the Holy Roman Empire. Thankfully, the rocky start is overcome with some good rendering of action. There’s no sorcery present, which probably technically lands this in the alternate history genre, but, hey, there’s a druid! That counts for something. Nothing is really resolved—a classic middle story problem—but the writing is good.

 

A story that, by contrast, definitely hits all of the sword and sorcery definitional points is “Slaves of the Monolith” by Paul D. Batteiger. The viewpoint character is a preternaturally strong young woman who is perhaps a shade too naturally gifted at armed combat travelling with some fellow villagers into a forbidden forest to investigate the deaths and disappearances of some of their neighbors. The resolution is pretty spectacular. This is vivid and energetic stuff.

 

While Andrew Darlington’s excellent “My People Were Fair and Wore Stars in Their Hair” doesn’t really start until page two, there are attack dirigibles circling a necromancer’s stronghold on page one so who cares? The author makes an unusual choice for sword and sorcery—the story is told in the present tense. It’s even more unusual given the span of time covered by the relatively brief piece. There’s some very humorous dialogue as well. This is one of the highlights of the anthology.

 

Our second princess-going-somewhere-with-some-soldiers story is “The Green Wood” by David Dubrow. It starts out with Byzantines versus Gauls and there’s no outsider hero here to shore up its sword and sorcery credentials, but there’s fighting and spellcasting aplenty. I do not know whether this is part of an ongoing series or not, but it definitely feels like the author at the very least intends it to be the start of one. The monstrous foes are interesting and original, but this piece is fatally flawed in that it doesn’t end. It just stops.

 

“Demonic” by Phil Emery rounds out the princesses and soldiers triptych with an interestingly told story from the point of view (largely, more on that in a bit) of a poet/swordsman who, in the tight third person voice, is basically experiencing the action as if he is composing a poem about what is happening in his head as things progress. Cool idea. Alas, it’s a cool idea undermined by what I call “thesaurus bashing.” I like nifty archaic words as well as—hell, more than­—the next reader or writer, but when they’re in the service of offering ancient and unknown synonyms for, as in one example here, “hangnail,” well, that’s just unnecessary. There’s also a brief sequence at the very beginning from the point of view of another character (who does not figure in the story thereafter) that undermines the narrative structure. The plot itself is fairly forgettable.

 

Geoffrey Hart’s second story for June is the amusing “At Sea,” with yet another take on a gender-swapped pair, this time not Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser but Asterix and Obelisk. The smaller woman here is, somewhat confusingly, named Mouse, but this is an excellent nautical adventure featuring rum, a fight with pirates led by a sorceress, and some tasty sounding roasted wild boar. This is a lot of fun.

 

Another story that nobody could possibly argue isn’t sword and sorcery is “The Whips of Malmac” by H.R. Laurence. In terms of plot and characterization, this is pretty standard fare with a barbarian hero, a lissome “Queen of Thieves,” and some nice heist-style reverses and reveals. But sometimes that’s exactly what you need. The cruelty of the sorcerous whips called out in the title is noteworthy.

 

Wendy Nikel’s “The Tracks of Pie Nereske” is workmanlike fare. There’s a magic amulet. There are some werewolf-like creatures. Ho-hum.

 

And rounding out the month we have “The Flesh of Man” by Frank Sawielijew. This, I must admit, is a very frustrating piece. Frustrating because there’s a really good, vivid, original story buried here in a story that is at least twelve pages too long. All the individual elements are great. The revisioning of a famous supernatural creature, complete with social mores and ecological impacts, is so good as to almost make this worth the price of admission. Another very welcome story element is that the barbarian hero has a living father, and they’re on good terms with one another! Whoever heard of such? Unfortunately, there’s just too much flab. What should have been the climax of the story is cut in half and separated by page upon page of dull action, which in turn makes what would otherwise have been a lovely denouement just feel tacked on. This story deserved much better editing than it got.