This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 14, 2021.

Barbary Slave

By Gardner Fox (writing as Kevin Matthews) – Gardner Francis Fox Library – May 12, 2017

Review by Robin Marx

Set in and around Tripoli in 1805, this swashbuckling adventure is about Stephen Fletcher, a United States Marine captured by corsairs and sold into slavery. After a chance encounter with the pasha of the city in which Fletcher exhibits bravery and martial prowess, he finds himself working as a harem guard, surrounded by beautiful women it is death to touch. He finds himself tempted by the exotic and lustful Marlani, the pasha's favorite consort, but his situation is complicated even further by the sudden addition of an American girl to the harem.

I wasn't sure what to expect, given that Gardner Fox also wrote a lot of fairly explicit erotica under various pseudonyms, but (unfortunately?) this story was much less salacious than the premise suggests. In fact, with its swashbuckling sword fights, decadent royalty, and love-driven heroics, this book reminded me a great deal of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The story is fast-paced and action-packed. There's a bit of reliance on coincidences and dei ex machina, but that's not unusual for this variety of story. Recommended for historical adventure fans.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 14, 2021.

Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery Issue One

Edited by Jason Ray Carney – Spiral Tower Press – June 12, 2020

Review by Robin Marx

While some of the stories are a little rough, for the first issue of a free amateur fantasy magazine Whetstone makes an impressively strong showing.

The issue puts its best foot forward with “The Wizard’s Demise” by Géza A. G. Reilly. While the premise is a fairly simple perspective reversal of the “barbarian stalks an evil sorcerer” premise, it’s cleverly written and just plain fun.

“The Temple of Vanas” by Kieran Judge is another highlight, with some nice twists, a paranoid feel, an a tough heroine.

D. M. Ritzlin’s “Undying Thirst for Vengeance” reads like a fantasy episode of The Twilight Zone. It has some excellent sword & sorcery names, too: Fanzubibar, Flargesht, Nilztiria.

While not every story took my breath away, there was at the very least something interesting about each of them. Some of the authors may lack experience, but even if one of this issue’s stories didn’t quite land right I was left looking forward to future work by them. It’s great seeing contemporary sword & sorcery fiction being promoted and new talent being cultivated, and this inaugural issue left me excited about subsequent installments.

★★★☆☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on July 3, 2022.

Hag of the Hills

By J.T.T Ryder – Old World Heroism – March 1, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

Set on the Isle of Skye around 200 BC, this heroic fantasy novel tells the story of Brennus, a young man who, stifled by pastoral village life, wishes to follow in the martial footsteps of his late father. He has an encounter with the titular Hag of the Hills, a wicked sidhe who promises that his wish will come true—but at a cost. Brennus' life is immediately thrown into chaos as mysterious invaders sweep across the island. He manages to survive the initial onslaught, but a doomed druid's final wish saddles him with a heavy burden.

This novel is exciting and action-packed, featuring plenty of both ancient warfare and bizarre encounters with the supernatural. The author has an archaeological background, and that clearly has enriched the story. Ancient Celtic customs and religion feature prominently; oaths possess an inviolable importance for the characters in the story and slaves are casually sacrificed to the gods in an effort to seek their favor. While the characters presented are largely relatable, I appreciated the occasionally alien mindset revealed by their actions.

First in a duology, this book tells a fairly self-contained story, but certain framing passages hint about a larger, more epic tale. I look forward to reading the forthcoming sequel.

★★★★☆

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This review originally appeared on Goodreads on September 19, 2021.

So Nude, So Dead

By Evan Hunter – Hard Case Crime – July 14, 2015

Review by Robin Marx

An addict wakes up next to a beautiful lounge singer he’d met the night before, only to discover two bullet holes in her stomach and the 16 ounces of heroin she showed him missing. Chased by the police, Ray Stone must find the killer and attempt to clear his name while fighting off the effects of withdrawal.

This book is a fast-paced tour of the underbelly of the city, bouncing back and forth from seedy hotels, bars, disreputable clubs, and the apartments of various temptresses. The prose is fast and the action tense throughout, but it sags a bit in the middle when Stone makes second visits to people he already visited during the course of his ad hoc investigation.

Overall this is a solid crime story with a driving plot, but the characters felt pretty stock. A decent read, but perhaps not worth going to great lengths to seek out.

★★★☆☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Mystery #Crime #SoNudeSoDead #EvanHunter #HardCaseCrime

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on December 21, 2021.

Fast Forward: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: Volume II

By Stephen Morris – Constable – December 3, 2020

Review by Robin Marx

Much like the previous volume, this is a brisk and entertaining look at one of the most important bands in pop history. Hooky’s books get into more of the dirt within the band, Bernard’s book was pretty shallow, but the two Stephen Morris books feel like the most clear-eyed and grounded account of the history of Joy Division and New Order.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Nonfiction #Autobiography #FastForward #NewOrder #StephenMorris

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on July 19, 2017.

number9dream

By David Mitchell – Random House – December 18, 2007

Review by Robin Marx

I enjoyed The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and when I discovered Mitchell had an earlier book set in Japan, I was eager to check it out. While there are some great moments and I was eager to see where the story led, overall I was disappointed.

This book tells the story of a Miyake Eiji, a youth from rural Japan who travels to Tokyo in a search for the father he never knew. Eiji also has a propensity for vivid dreaming, both of the waking and nocturnal varieties, and as a result the line between real world events and fantasy are frequently blurred.

The book is at its best when Mitchell describes Tokyo (a city in which I've lived nearly half my life) and the island of Yakushima (which I've had the pleasure of visiting), but the surrealistic interludes became more and more unwanted and intrusive as the book continued. Very few of them enhanced or illustrated the core narrative, and the recurring “Goatwriter” meta-fiction sequence was particularly extraneous and masturbatory.

Apparently this book was a sort of blatant homage to Murakami Haruki (who is name-checked in this book), and had I known that in advance, I wouldn't have bothered. I've assiduously avoided reading Murakami, as everything I've heard about his work has convinced me that his work is tepid surrealism for boring people too timid to venture outside of the capital-L Literary ghetto and pick up a decent fantasy or weird fiction novel. The more tedious portions of this book certainly mesh with the perception I've formed of Murakami's work.

I'm a big fan of surrealism, from classics like Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories to more modern work by people like China Mieville, but it just didn't work for me in this book. The more grounded parts of the story—like Eiji's childhood interactions with his sister, reading his grandfather's diary, his letters from his mother, even his somewhat unconvincing romance with a piano student—worked far better than the dream interludes.

Even more so than the hallucinatory fever dreams, it was the dialogue of this book that I found the most unrealistic. The characters all spoke like New York literary novel cut-outs, not living and breathing Japanese people. All of the customer service staff presented throughout the book speak in aggressive or dismissive manners that ring false to anyone who has spent any amount of time in Japan, for example. His characters are all demonstrative and outspoken, not indirect or concerned with propriety or hurt feelings in the way most Japanese people tend to be with acquaintances and coworkers. Early on in the book there's even a pun (“Company?” “No, I came alone”) that only works if the Japanese characters are speaking to each other in English. Mitchell apparently spent eight years living in Hiroshima and has a Japanese wife, but I suspect he never picked up much of the language. His portrayal of Japanese people is frustrating because his portrayal of Japan itself is so good.

Mitchell is a talented writer, there are glimmers of that here, but he wastes too much verbiage on stylistic trickery when a more straightforward approach would suffice. There's an entertaining portrayal of Japan and a nicely human story here, but it's absolutely suffocated by literary wankery and cruft.

★★☆☆☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Literature #Japan #number9dream #DavidMitchell

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on April 21, 2012.

The Tokaido Road: A Novel of Feudal Japan

By Lucia St. Clair Robson – Forge Books – November 29, 2005

Review by Robin Marx

This historical novel was a mixed bag. It had the best sense of place of any Westerner-penned novel about feudal Japan I've read and the characters were appealing, but its length and incredibly slow pace as well as the relatively unexciting plot hurt an otherwise appealing book.

This book was incredibly well-researched. I'm fairly well-versed in the Edo period and fluent in Japanese, and I could find very few nits to pick. The author demonstrated such a broad grasp of Japanese history that I was surprised to find out that her other books are set in historical America. I was pleased to see samurai Japan faithfully brought to life, and everything seemed authentic.

While I thoroughly appreciated the detail that went into the book, there were also times where it was overkill. Much of the detail explained at length for Western reader's benefit described facets of life that a Japanese character of the time would've found unremarkable, and probably could've been safely glossed over.

The plot was also slightly disappointing. It's sort of a prequel to the Loyal 47 Ronin historical incident, which all Japanese people are intimately familiar with through theatre, film, and novels. The basic premise involves a revenge plot against the conniving samurai Lord Kira, who provokes rival Lord Asano into drawing his sword while in the Shogun's estate, a capital crime. After Asano's death, 47 of his retainers lie low for a couple years before avenging their former lord in a bloody, dramatic fashion. That's the historical tale, but this book focuses on Asano's fictional illegitimate daughter Cat. Hoping to round up her father's remaining loyalists and prepare for vengeance, she escapes from the brothel she works at and makes an epic journey along the eastern sea route (the eponymous Tokaido) to her father's fief. Her journey is mostly entertaining, but the book reads almost like an unabridged travelogue, with no detail spared. Several colorful characters drift in and out, but most are largely inconsequential to the narrative. Without giving too much away, her journey concludes in a less than triumphant manner, and the actual Loyal 47 Ronin revenge saga is resolved in about a dozen pages, with our heroine relegated to the sidelines. If you're familiar with the story through film and history books that's not a critical flaw, but those less of a background in Japanese history might feel slighted by the abrupt resolution.

While plot and pacing were a little on the weak side, I did enjoy the characters. Cat is beautiful, brave, and determined, but those qualities are balanced out by arrogance and occasional episodes of pettiness and imperiousness. Ronin bounty hunter Hanshiro lives up to the archetype while still avoiding becoming a cliche. He seemed like the kind of character Kurosawa's favorite leading man Mifune Toshiro would play. Peasant girl Kasane is a gullible bumpkin, but her loyalty and fundamental kindness endear her to both Cat and the reader.

Overall this book was a bit of a slog. Rich in detail, but meandering and overly long. I enjoyed the world it presented and the characters appearing within, but probably a third of the book's length was extraneous. I'd recommend it to fans of Japanese history and samurai, but those with only a passing interest in these topics would probably find this book frustratingly slow.

★★★☆☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Literature #HistoricalFiction #Japan #TheTokaidoRoad #LuciaStClairRobson

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on April 21, 2012.

The Blade Itself

By Joe Abercrombie – Pyr – September 6, 2007

Review by Robin Marx

This is the best recent fantasy story I've read in years. However, while it hearkens back to the grim earthiness and visceral action of the sword & sorcery tales I love, it perpetuates one of the most obnoxious trends in modern fantasy: the trilogy.

It was vehement criticism that attracted me to this book, oddly enough. Some fantasy fans seem to consider Joe Abercrombie the vanguard of a fantasy sub-genre they've dubbed “the new nihilism.” His books are bad because they're morally ambiguous. His characters are flawed, often in very nasty ways. “Nobles” tend not to be. There's a lot of gore. Unlike a lot of recent fantasy, he presents a world that's ugly and stinks and people shit and sometimes die for very little reason at all. I read all this criticism and thought “Sign me up!”

The characters were great. He takes archetypes (a dashing noble, an uncultured barbarian with a rough code of honor) and subverts them. They have flaws. Not Hollywood flaws, superficial quirks, but some pretty massive defects. “They're not people I'd want to be in the same room with” seems to be a frequent complaint. I can understand that, I probably wouldn't SURVIVE being in the same room with them. But what they are is interesting, in a way that is unfortunately uncommon in a lot of recent fantasy.

The action—and there's a lot of it—was also pretty exhilarating. Visceral in the truest, chunkiest sense of the word. Combat is an ugly, desperate thing, and if it takes groin-kicking and eye-gouging to get our heroes through a fight, well, those are tactics they don't think twice about adopting.

However, while I was thoroughly engrossed by the characters, their exploits, and the presentation, I was still left vaguely disappointed by the end of the book. I considered knocking down my rating another star, but in the end I went with the higher rating because this book was such a rush to read. The biggest issue that this book has is that it's the first volume of a trilogy. For marketing reasons, fantasy publishers just love trilogies, so everything has to be drawn out into several installments. I enjoy revisiting interesting characters and settings for further adventures, but it's disappointing when a book fails to stand on its own. This volume is a third of the story. The plot is basically introducing the characters and getting them in position, and while I loved the ride, it bothered me when I realized that this was 530 pages of Abercrombie taking out the pieces and setting up the chess board. It's clear that he's headed in an awesome direction, and the author has earned enough of my trust for me to add the rest of his work to my to-buy list, but it's disappointing that this book wasn't more self-contained.

Still, my primary objection is something that probably doesn't bother most fantasy readers. I'd recommend this for fans of George R.R. Martin, David Gemmell (the closest example I can think of), and Robert E. Howard. (If only Abercrombie had Howard's ability to tell epic tales succinctly!) If you like clean-smelling fantasy with honor and romance, you're going to have a bad time.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Grimdark #Fantasy #JoeAbercrombie #TheBladeItself #TheFirstLaw

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on October 17, 2021.

The Disfavored Hero

By Jessica Amanda Salmonson – Ace Books – January 1, 1981

Review by Robin Marx

While I found the idea of a female samurai sword & sorcery protagonist appealing, I was a bit let down by the book itself.

The book starts off strong. Tomoe finds herself under the sway of an evil not-Chinese sorcerer, who compels her to join a demon horde and slaughter thousands of her former master’s warriors. She manages to free herself from this magical influence, but the damage is done: her master is slain and her honor as a samurai besmirched. She goes off on a journey to restore her good name.

Unfortunately, the book that follows is largely directionless and disjointed. It’s more of a sequence of events than a cohesive narrative. Tomoe is afflicted by a curse early on in the story that gets resolved about halfway through the story, and the book concludes with a duel with the shogun’s champion, who she encounters early on (not that there’s much of a dramatic build towards this duel, or a sense of inevitability), but there’s not really a driving plot. Tomoe wanders and experiences strange events involving magic and monsters.

The decision to set the book in an alternate world is a strange one. I suppose setting the story in “Naipon” rather than Nippon offers some cover for inaccuracies and allows license to do a “good bits version” of historical Japan. But Tomoe is a historical (if mythologized) figure and real world locations and religions are used, rather than fictionalized substitutes. Real Japanese terms appear frequently throughout, if occasionally misspelled or misused. Characters sometimes have names that would be unpronounceable in Japanese (“Noyimo”), and the western first name-last name order is used. I wished Salmonson had committed to either sticking close to the real Japan or taking a much freer hand with the source material. Her “Naipon” seems like a frustrating half-measure.

Published in 1981, this book is notable for using a non-Western fantasy setting and for having a lesbian heroine, but the plot wasn’t especially engaging.

★★☆☆☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #Japan #TheDisfavoredHero #JessicaAmandaSalmonson #TomoeGozen

This review originally appeared on Goodreads on August 5, 2015.

Gentlemen of the Road

By Michael Chabon – Ballantine Books – October 30, 2007

Review by Robin Marx

Impishly nicknamed “Jews with Swords” by its author, Gentlemen of the Road is a historical adventure tale about a pair of rogues—a giant African soldier named Amram and a German physician/fencer named Zelikman—and their journey through the (largely unfamiliar to me and apparently scantly chronicled) city-states of Khazaria.

Pleasingly reminiscent of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Amram and Zelikman are introduced in a very amusing fashion that immediately familiarizes the reader with the most salient aspects of their personalities. They overcome their baser instincts to grudgingly become involved in what looks like a simple escort mission, only to find their task rapidly balloon in importance, until they end up having an inadvertent and significant political impact on the region.

While this book is dedicated to Michael Moorcock, to me it felt more like a swashbuckling yarn in the tradition of Robert E. Howard or Harold Lamb. The narrative travels along at a brisk pace with no wasted verbiage, and characters are mostly rendered in broad, archetypal strokes. The episodic format (the novel was originally serialized in the New York Times Magazine) and monochrome illustrations by the excellent Gary Gianni (who also handled the Del Rey Conan and Solomon Kane books, etc.) also contributed greatly to the pulp adventure appeal.

My only complaint with the book is that there isn't more of it. I would love to read more of the “Gentlemen's” adventures, but with his “literary” pedigree Chabon is probably loath to be perceived as repeating himself. Indeed, parts of the included Afterword seem a bit like a defense of him writing the story in the first place, saying effectively “Yeah, I mostly write New Yorker-style slice-of-life stories, but adventure tales are also really great!” Personally, I'd rather see him continue to experiment with genre rather than write any more “Jewish writer has marital struggles” stories, but it remains to be seen when he'll release his next “fun” novel.

★★★★☆

#CapsuleReviewArchive #BookReview #Literature #HistoricalFiction #Adventure #GentlemenOfTheRoad #MichaelChabon