Things I Didn't Finish - The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie

The Blade Itself
by Joe Abercrombie
Gollancz, 2006

Grimdark is supposed to be a dark, morally ambiguous reaction to the strict good/evil dichotomy in High Fantasy, much as spaghetti westerns were to the white hat/black hat oaters.  It does this while maintaining the core theme of High Fantasy - walking from one place to another.

I picked up The Blade Itself after reading pearl-clutching reviews of how violent, gory, and nihilistic it is.  Having gotten several thousand pages into it, I can only include that fantasy fans are incredible wimps.

The world building is good - the gods of old were killed years ago, their powers stolen by megalomaniac magicians.  There's a grizzled barbarian, a disillusioned minor magic user, and an idealistic young fighter who's only purpose is to mock the concept of the "hero's journey".  As much as it deserves mocking, it doesn't make for good reading, or at least not for hundreds of pages.  And it's not subtle, either.  He's in league with some escaped prisoners who mock his piety, and I'm sure he eventually makes moral compromises or turns out to be a hypocrite.  But mostly the other escaped prisoners just rub his face in the lack of honor in the world, at one point even calling him a "snowflake".  I tapped out there, before someone explained ethics in gaming journalism.

We get exchanges like:

Flashing Goodboy: "You must be a political prisoner like me!"
Grimey McRapey: "Nope.  I'm a rapist.
"But you must have been falsely accused?"
"Nope.  I done the rapes."
"But you'll change your ways and become a hero like me!"
"Nope.  Gonna keep raping."

There's only a little bit of hyperbole there.  As much as I enjoy moral ambiguity or outright nihilism, I'd rather have a book with black and white morality with something actually happening.  I think there may have been one quick action scene in the part I read, and somebody gets stuck with a needle, which I guess is torture?  Reviews I read said things don't pick up until the end (over 500 pages), and then only to set up the second book in the trilogy.  Joseph Rosenberger would have quadruple digit body counts by then.

Genre Overview: High Fantasy

High Fantasy is set in an alternate history or planet, set in the equivalent of the dark ages through the renaissance, with non-human intelligent races, monsters, and magic.  Lord of the Rings and everything that's ripped off Lord of the Rings.  It's different from Sword & Sorcery (Conan and stuff that rips off Conan), mainly in the amount of clothing worn on the book cover, but there are literary differences I'm not nuanced enough to explain.  It may be the same as Epic Fantasy, or Epic may just be a subset of High.

I should love this stuff.  I loved the Rankin Bass TV specials, and listened to the Hobbit storybook album obsessively.  I played D&D.  Hell, I even liked Willow.  But I could never stomach the fiction.  I read the Hobbit, but got to the first poem in Fellowship of the Ring before giving up.

This is purely a matter of my tastes, but these things seem to be hundreds of thousands of words of people walking from one place to another.  While the movies and video games are all hack & slash, the books seem to be G-rated.

Somewhere in the stretch between the paperback explosion of the 60s & 70s to self-publishing today, there must be something that suits my tastes.  Short (or at least reasonable), violent, gory, exploitive, and fun.  Tie-ins seem to be more readable, but tend towards the young adult side.

So, dear readers, please fill me in on what I'm missing.  And don't tell me about grimdark.  That's just High Fantasy with more dirt smudges.

Moonslasher by Douglas D. Hawk

Moonslasher
by Douglas D. Hawk
Critic's Choice, 1987

A werewolf story in a Jaws plot.  A mysterious creature stalks a vacation town.  Business leaders don't want to shut down the beaches, er, lake.  A depressed, one-armed cop tries to fight the creature between drinking spells.

The pacing is dictated by the phases of the moon, which gives us long pauses between action.  And it's not a werewolf, it's an Egyptian cat goddess.  The creature isn't described at all for the first few scenes, and my mind filled in a giant wolf.  Later, it still isn't described, other than calling it catlike.  I still had a picture of a wolf for a while, until it was replaced by the image of a twelve foot long house cat biting off heads and being shot at by M-16s.

Decently written, and I'm looking forward to reading more Hawk.

Available in Kindle ebook from Amazon

Click here to read a sample

Author Overview: Douglas D. Hawk

Douglas D. Hawk published three novels during the 80s horror boom, returning 18 years later to self-publish more horror as well as some new pulp, starting in 2012.

Moonslasher (1987) - Available for Kindle

The Occult Madonna (1988) - Available for Kindle

The Devouring (1994) - Used paperback from Amazon

Encounter with the Unknown

Encounter with the Unknown



Hosted by Rod Serling, this one is packaged like the unexplained documentaries of the time period.  It isn't, it's a zero budge horror anthology.  The concept is that a researcher found that several unexplained deaths had their corpses buried in 23 cemeteries, and these are three of their stories:

A prank goes wrong, leading to a young man's death.  His mother curses them to die at seven day intervals.  To be honest, if you go skydiving while under a curse, you've got it coming.

A hole opens up in the ground in a small town.  A man is lowered in by rope and goes mad.

A ghost lady hangs out on a bridge.

It has a low budget charm, but then lost me when it replayed scenes for like ten minutes at the end.

Available at Amazon Video

The Ants by Peter Tremayne

The Ants (aka The Ants are Coming)
by Peter Tremayne
Sphere, 1979

An anthropologist looks for her missing father in the jungle, only to find cleared fields and a pile of bones.  She meets up with a native child and an American pilot, and together they flee from mutated soldier ants to a plantation.

Well researched, but weak sauce, to the point that I would shelve this as Adventure rather than Horror.  A couple of interesting angles poke their heads up (native workers regressing to human sacrifice, the ants having mind control powers), but nothing comes of them.  Any tension is immediately dissipated and our heroes escape the ants with few obstacles.

Kindle ebook available from Amazon

Click here to read a sample

Bad Influences: Max's Mondo Madness

Max Headroom is one of those formerly ubiquitous cultural artifacts which society collectively decides to scrub from it's consciousness, like Gangam Style or Zach Galifianakis.  Either it's time has come again or I have lost all sense of taste, but I think it holds up well today, at least the movie and TV series, if not the Coke commercials.

In 1986, Max hosted a series of what were then called "mondo" or "midnight" movies.  I recall very little of it, except that's where I taped Reefer Madness and The Forbidden Zone featured prominently in the intro, though I may be confusing it with Night Flight.

This show has almost no internet fingerprint, but it's likely called "Max's Mondo Madness", a term that I am now ruining the googlewang for - it's only reference is at Max Headroom Notes.

Strike Commando 2

In the 80s, three Mississippi kids filmed a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Bruno Mattei did the same thing in 1989, with a little bit of Rambo and every other 80s action movie.  The additions of ninjas did not improve on the original.

A near low point in Richard Harris' career, rivaled only by MacArthur Park.

Currently on Amazon Video

The Sound of His Horn by Sarban

The Sound of His Horn
by Sarban
1952, Peter Davies Ltd.

A hundred years in the future, after the Nazis won World War II, a forester hunts human game dressed as deer, using genetically altered leopard women with steel claws.  Sound cool?  Well, that sentence is more exciting than The Sound of His Horn.

The book is all premise, with almost nothing happening outside of the clumsy narrative gimmick.  A soldier escapes from a POW camp during WW II.  He wakes up a hundred years from now, hangs around a bit, thinks about escaping, then is "poofed" back to his original time.

This story is highly regarded in some circles, appearing in several "best of" lists, for reasons that escape me.  It's arguably edgy for it's time, but edgy for 1950s England is a pretty low bar.

Paperback from Amazon