May 2022 Reviews

 Before I get into May, I need to play some catchup on a few things I missed from earlier in the year.

 

In February, two Kurval stories as by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert were released as standalones. I love the conceit of these and the other stories Buhlert is unearthing by Blakemore. “Twelve Nooses” apparently fills in some backstory for Kurval before he becomes King of Azakoria and actually features no sorcery and almost nothing in the way of swords, but I mention it because of its place in the larger arc. It’s good work. The second story is “The Tear of Chronos,” which is a delightful piece of metafiction set on the day of Kurval’s coronation. It’s hard to discuss this one without spoilers, so I won’t.

 

In April, new author Kirk A. Johnson released a collection of stories titled The Obanaax: And Other Tales of Heroes and Horrors (Amazon Kindle). It offers four tales in the author’s richly detailed setting drawing on African and Middle Eastern history and mythology. While the collection could have used another copyediting pass, the energy and vitality here is startling and very welcome. My favorite of the four pieces has to be “The Oculus of Kii,” which is the pure quill stuff in terms of S&S. I can’t not love prose that features the word jackal as a verb. Humor (some scatological), quality sentence construction, and an undeniably rich imagination make Johnson an author to watch. [There’s a review of this collection by Robin Marx in the newly released issue #0 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine.]

 

And the last bit of catching up is a story I missed in April’s Thews You Can Use: A Sword and Sorcery Sampler which is available for free to new subscribers of the weekly Sword and Sorcery Newsletter. Nathaniel Webb’s “The Spine of Virens Imber” is given as “From A Book of Blades: A Sword & Sorcery Anthology” but appears here first (that anthology appeared in July). This piece apparently launches a new series featuring the bald and bearded Shar the Spearman, who is on a quest to recover the soul of someone very dear to him. Action abounds here, with some evil adversaries reminiscent of Elric’s fellow Melnibonéans imprisoning Shar. Demonic magic and some fine action make this worth reading. 

 

Now on to May!

 

Heroic Fantasy Quarterly issue #52 offered four stories in May. Of Ray Daley’s “Dragon Bait” I’ll just say that humor is subjective. For “Carpe Caput” (text plus audio) by Evan Dicken, I’m just going to paste in my reading notes: An excellent description of a sword: “Straight and wide-bladed in the old Imperial style, it was a little longer than Nastazo’s forearm. The sword’s sheath was colored the deep blue of an ocean sky shading into night. Branches of twining silver crisscrossed to form a stubby hilt, the pommel studded what

looked to be chips of sapphire.” Oh, this is great and perfectly conveys the tone, the mocking speech of the villain ends: “Your doom is sealed, and so forth…” This is just so good. An interesting pair of protagonists (he swords, she sorceries), an amorphous monster, a wildly original city, an attempt to revive a dead god, all told in brisk, efficient, and genuinely funny prose. The magic in this one is great. As you can no doubt tell, this one really pleased me. The story by Steve Dilks, “The Gift of Eons,” is notable for its fast pace and hints of Mesoamerican influences. The protagonist may be the reincarnation or descendent of an ancient king, or both, or neither. “Return to the Tower” (text plus audio) by Harry Piper is told in the first person and almost qualifies as a bildungsroman. There is some lovely and confident language here. Read this: “To see a thousand spears on the march, rising and falling like a vast wave, iron glittering under the sun. To see the golden campfires of an army spread out under the night sky like another field of stars. To forget yourself entirely in the shieldwall – to become one flesh with a thousand others. To have found, for a few brief hours, one’s place in the world.” This reminds me of Roy Batty’s dying speech in Bladerunner, and since that’s one of my favorite speeches in cinema, I can give this one an enthusiastic recommendation.

 

Savage Realms Monthly released their twelfth issue in May (Amazon softcover • Amazon Kindle • Kindle Unlimited). “The Jade Tower” by Shephard W. McIlvern opens with some convincing desert imagery then rapidly shifts gears into a luxurious castle with a banquet scene and a little sex then moves again to a nighttime assault on the titular tower. There’s a missed opportunity here in that the protagonist is said at the beginning of the story to suffer trauma from the death of his mother but nothing is done with it in terms of plot and it doesn’t show in the hero’s characterization. I liked the fact that David A. Riley’s “The Carpetmaker of Arana” is about a working man who is worried about the fact that he’s not giving his family a good a life as his father gave him—very topical. The ending is absolutely shocking. I’ll here take the opportunity to mention something that this story made me think about. It’s mentioned early on that the main character and his wife have three small children. But then they completely disappear from the page and their fates should certainly have been

dealt with by story’s end. This makes me reflect on the fact that young children are almost completely absent from sword and sorcery, which of course makes a kind of sense, but is nonetheless an interesting characteristic I’ve never seen called out before. Now, this last one is difficult to talk about because it did not work for me at all. The thief Fex, the protagonist of Remy Morgesen’s “Sword in the Tomb,” is a profoundly unlikable character. That’s generally fine in sword and sorcery, but he smirks his way through the deaths of multiple people he callously uses to, basically, find and disable traps. I could almost hear the dice rolling as a “party” of characters explore an ancient ruin that seems to have been designed by the author with a role-playing game rulebook about traps and hazards open at hand as he wrote. Morgesen doubled down on this approach by using the wildly out of place phrase “meat shields,” which is, of course, straight out of video game culture.

 

Swords and Sorcery Magazine offered their usual three stories in issue #123. P.J. Atwater convinced me that he either has wrestling experience or has researched that martial art extensively in “The Wrestler’s Son.” This has an origin story feel to it and has some nice visuals. “Glamour” by Matthew Ilseman also features characters who, if they’re not already part of a series, certainly could be. The prose is strong here, stronger than the ideation, alas. I’ve talked about “proper noun soup” before, I believe, and how it can hamper story beginnings. But in the case of “Eliza Sky and the Lodestar Warrior” by Neil Willcox, those nouns and phrases are so evocative and original that I didn’t mind managing them at all. It starts as a criminal investigation and features a pairing of competent young women (I admit to occasionally confusing them because of the brisk pace and the fact that both of their names end with the same phoneme) who must eventually save their mentors from a powerful foe using their hard-earned skills and their native wits. Fun stuff.

 

Finally this month, I read an excellent anthology edited by Doug Draa for DMR Books, Terra Incognita: Lost Worlds of Fantasy and Adventure (print book • Amazon Kindle • Kindle Unlimited). The book offers seven stories, but one of them, Adrian Cole’s “The Place of Unutterable Names,” is, as is no doubt obvious from its title, a Lovecraftian Mythos story. Neither do I classify S.E. Lindberg’s entry here as sword and sorcery. The remainder of the pieces hew variously closer to and further from traditional sword and sorcery. “Warriors of Mogai” by Milton Davis owes its considerable strengths to a setting steeped in African history, folkways, religion, and mythology. It tells the story of a boy named Koboye, who must undertake a difficult journey in an attempt to rescue his people. There’s what may be a were-hippopotamus, and for my money, that earns this story a hearty recommendation even beyond all of its other considerable merits. [Oliver Brackenbury conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Davis transcribed in issue #0 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine.] John C. Hocking’s “Necropolis Gemstone” is more of a pure secondary world(s) fantasy than a traditional sword and sorcery tale, but features an interesting first-person narrator, some shrewd observations about greed, and a very original monster. “The Siege of Eire” by J. Thomas Howard is a story utilizing the trope of a contemporary man thrown back in time or into another world who then discovers his competence and true calling as a heroic figure. In this case, the other world is a version of the underworld of Irish mythology. The story has a convincing narrative arc. The anthology is bookended by stories by two masters of the form. The book closes with “From the Darkness Beneath” by Howard Andrew Jones, who, as usual when things turn nautical, offers very convincing world building and details of setting. A ship is carrying a number of very diverse passengers and, unknown to anyone at first, an existential threat to the entire world. The main point of view character, a twelve-year-old girl, is deftly and convincingly characterized and the slow buildup and two or three subplots make this a deeply satisfying story. And finally for this book and this month, a new discovery of a veteran writer for me in “Shadow of the Serpent” by David C. Smith. I just purchased Smith’s award-winning literary biography of Robert E. Howard (Amazon paperback) and was happy to discover that the man clearly knows his stuff. From the title, which evokes the best of old school sword and sorcery, to the fascinating protagonist (to whom Smith is returning here decades after his last appearance), to the fascinating magic, provocative villains, and wonderful evocation of deep time, all of this is demonstrative of the raw wind of story that rises in the best of this genre. Highly recommended.

 

Stories of the Month: For me, a very strong May had these stories as standouts.

 

“Carpe Caput” by Evan Dicken

“Return to the Tower” by Harry Piper

“From the Darkness Beneath” by Howard Andrew Jones

“Shadow of the Serpent” by David C. Smith

 

From earlier in the year, be sure to check out “The Oculus of Kii” by Kirk A. Johnson