Adrian Collins's Blog, page 188

REVIEW: Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King

Did you know that sometimes Stephen King is not scary? Not all stories need terror, sometimes existential dread will do the trick. If you are scared of the future and where you fit into the grand scheme of the world, then Gwendy’s Button Box is the story for you.

In my quest to read all the King novels, including his more obscure stuff, I came across this little gem. It stars Gwendy, as in a mash-up of Gwendolin and Wendy, as a typical young girl in the 1970s. The first scene if of Gwendy doing laps on a dangerous set of steps called the Suicide Steps. One of her classmates called her fat, and this has caused an intense need to exercise and lose any pudge that the 11-year-old might be holding on to. The theme of self-acceptance comes up often as a significant theme throughout the story. Gwendy needs everyone to accept her, and the button box offers a way for her to be above reproach. Gwendy encounters a weird man in a black top hat on her way to leave the Suicide Steps. Again, strange people in top hats are a common occurrence in Stephen King’s books. Still, I have no idea why top hats are a trigger point for the bizarre in King’s worlds, but there you go. The enigmatic man offers Gwendy a choice, take the mysterious black box with buttons, a box that Gwendy feels to the marrow of her bones that belongs to her, or don’t. Of course, Wendy accepts the responsibility of the box. And it is a responsibility because as the story progresses, we come to understand the innate power that the box has over the universe. Triggers and switches on the box can crush whole continents, buttons, and levers can make any desire that Gwendy has come true. Gwendy is not just some girl; she was, in a way, selected to protect the box for several years. In exchange for her acceptance and protection of the power of the box, Gwendy gets perks. She is gorgeous and healthy. Everything that she strives to do is effortless.

With an effortless existence comes a bit of ennui. What if she pulled a lever? Why does any of this matter at all? Coupled with typical teenageness, Gwendy has a difficult time controlling her impulses. That is the crux of the story more than the black button box. Given infinite power, what should Gwendy do? How does one weigh morals against exercising her power?

Gwendy is haunted by her ability to do destruction.

Gwendy’s Button Box a good Stephen King story. Instead of gross-out scares, we have the haunting of the mind and soul, which is think is way more interested than just being scared or disgusted. King does this kind of dread well; you see it a lot in his novels. It makes me think of the existential dread many of the characters in The Stand face.

I loved this story, more so than some of the recent Stephen king shorts and novellas I have been reading. Elevation I am looking at you; you are lame-sauce.

If you are looking for dread laced in your horror like strychnine on a cookie, this story is for you. And, at just under 30k words, it isn’t huge.

Give Gwendy’s Button Box a try.

Originally published on BeforeWeGoBlog.

Read Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King

The post REVIEW: Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest is a visual novel that is by developed by Different Tales and published by Walkabout Games. It is set in the World of Darkness tabletop roleplaying game universe originally created by White Wolf and currently owned by Paradox Games.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse is a game where you are a werewolf given his or her powers by Gaia the Spirit of the Earth to protect her from environmental damage. It has sometimes been called an R-rated Captain Planet but actually got fairly deep into spiritual, indigenous rights, and corporate satire. It wasn’t my favorite game of the World of Darkness and often handled things in a ham-fisted way, but I still spent many hours playing it.

The premise of this game is that a young Polish American girl named Maia is journeying to Białowieża in Poland, along the border of Belarus. Białowieża Forest is one of the few remaining primeval forests left in the world and current endangered by semi-legal logging. Maia is researching her family history and suffers from elaborate gory dreams that are full of symbolism even she doesn’t understand. Maia is, to no one’s surprise, a werewolf about to go through her first change and has no idea of what awaits her when this happens.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest is a solid and well-written game that provides an excellent introduction into the setting. Even better, it chooses to go the less obvious route with the game than they might have. Rather than a game based around bloodshed and berserk war like many W:TA games, it actually puts a large focus on controlling your animalistic rage. Rage is an actual attribute in the game and if you have too much of it then it will terrify regular humans as well as force you to do actions that you may not want to do.

One of the things that surprised me in the game is the fact that it is entirely possible to do a pacifist run. You can rely almost exclusively on your wits and cunning to resolve issues rather than claws or teeth. Indeed, using violence may result in things getting much worse. This doesn’t mean violence is not a way to resolve things, just that it can have consequences that can result in things escalating rather than decreasing.

An interesting twist is the fact that there are very few Wyrm creatures in the game. The biggest enemy to the forest is a bunch of loggers, cops, and an apathetic populace. You can slaughter all of these people but the consequences are likely to be the same as a bunch of eco-terrorists murdering “regular” people. Tricking them or destroying them nonviolently may work but that may not be a straight or obvious path.

This is not a typical video game but closer to a choose your own adventure novel like those that I used to enjoy in the Nineties. The writing style is delightful, and I enjoyed it from beginning to end. It manages to capture the surreal and terrifying nature of the Spirit World as well as the moral ambiguity of its entities.

There’s also a lot of local history and geography incorporated into the narrative that makes the story seem more real. The art is stylized and well done, giving a vibrant impressionist style that suits the game better than recent Vampire: The Masquerade game’s more realistic as well as subdued art. If there’s a problem with the game, I’d say that it’s too short and I managed to finish it at barely over two and a half hours. There’s replay value but having chosen a pacifist and intellect-based route, I’m really not interested in a more violent brutal one.

One small detail for longtime fans of W:TA, the game seems to come down rather heavy on the Get of Fenris. Its members are characterized as fascists and brutes. There is more to their portrayal, Maia’s ancestor being a member of the Polish resistance, but you have to really work to find it. Given the Get are one of the most popular clans, I found this a strange choice. Nevertheless, I highly recommend the game.

The post REVIEW: Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart of the Forest appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Lord of Order by Brett Riley

“Christ said to suffer the little children and let em come unto him. I don’t think he meant to kill em to get em there faster”.  Darkly humorous and brutal, the Lord of Order takes readers on a violent gun-slinging wade through a visceral, blood-soaked swamp of human frailty and redemption that pushes the boundaries of definition.

Set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian North America, Lord of Order is part spaghetti western and part thriller, mixed and painted onto a background that resonates with Old Testament sentiment blended with modern realpolitik. Imagine The Magnificent Seven meets Inglourious Basterds, with shades of The Handmaid’s Tale added for good measure.

The Lord of Order is Gabriel Troy, de facto Judge and Sheriff of the Principality of New Orleans, one of a number of Principalities that have been carved into a North America deliberately regressed to the 19th Century by the Bright Crusade after its founder, a messianic sandy-haired Christian demagogue (sound familiar?), used his ascendancy to the U.S Presidency to unleash a devastating biological attack on a disbelieving World.

Some years on, the survivors are kept under a seemingly benign theocracy under the leadership of the Supreme Crusader in Washington. Troy and his deputies spend their days surviving and maintaining order, ruthlessly and mercilessly suppressing any dissent from the heretically subversive ‘Troublers’. All in the name of the common good.

But cracks start to appear and Washington, fearing a loss of faith in the Crusade, decides to make New Orleans the site for a new Purge of biblical proportions. As one of the characters  says, “every suspicion in Washington turns into an accusation, and every accusation becomes truth.”. Troy cannot passively watch his beloved city be destroyed and Lord of Order unfolds into a thrillingly violent, dark and brutal story of conspiracy and insurrection.

Lord of Order is viscerally, pungently, well-written. In parts it is almost cinematic. The physicality of violence is described in brutally frank terms. As a deputy says of the Crusade, “it was much easier to glorify death if you had not tromped through the bone and gristle of it most of your life”. This is not a book for the squeamish.

It is also morally challenging.  On one level it is a simple tale of good versus evil, but a closer reading reveals a richer, complex and more satisfying experience.  Here all the characters are painted in shades of grey and this is a story about navigating the thin line between right and wrong, where good guys do bad things for the right reasons and bad guys believe they are doing good.  Lord of Order searches for a greater good and moral redemption in the most heinous of acts.  In this world the only innocents are the horses and a young orphan girl is the stoniest of stone-cold killers.

Lord of Order is not a perfect book.  But it is a damn good read.  The author has a couple of eccentricities that are frankly irritating at first. The “g” is dropped from many verbs, presumably to impart more of a cowboy vibe, and speech is rendered without quotation so at first it is hard to know who is speaking, or to tell if it is speech and not an internal dialogue we’re being presented with. But you get used to them and, I admit, they work! The grand finale for me worked less well than the tauter, more intimate scenes of action earlier on and I found the end of the book to be slower going compared to the tension and crackle of the rest.

But these are quibbles. Lord of Order is entertainingly good and challenging gunslinger grimdark that well-deserves its four stars. I’ll be searching out the author’s back catalogue whilst awaiting the sequel (I hope) to this – I recommend that you do the same.

Read Lord of Order by Brett Riley

The post REVIEW: Lord of Order by Brett Riley appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: The Pyres by Dylan Doose

The Pyres is the third book in the Sword and Sorcery series by Dylan Doose. All is not well in the war-ridden kingdom of Romaria, and Theron, Kendrick, and Aldous must find a way to once again save the world from the machinations of the evil organization Leviathan. This review contains spoilers for the first two books in the series.

Fire and Sword review

The Catacombs of Time review

The Pyres picks up a little over a year from where Fire and Sword left off, with our three protagonists a bit more battered and a lot more jaded. Though they successfully saved Brynth from total destruction by defeating the witch who created the Rata Plaga, the team’s fight to save the world isn’t over yet. They take up a contract in Romaria and become embroiled in the midst of a religious civil war. The trio is still reeling from their losses: Theron an eye and his sister, Kendrick a hand, and Aldous his first love.

“I see the river of blood, and you, all of you, drown in it.”

Set at a breakneck pace, the novel takes place over the course of a very bloody 24 hours. The Pyres is arguably even more steeped in blood, guts, and ultra-violence than the previous two works. Doose vividly introduces new kinds of monsters, each more horrifying than the last, and the human monsters that could be even worse.

The Sword and Sorcery series has a similar atmosphere to Netflix’s Castlevania that expanded on the classic video game’s mythos. Fans of Castlevania will likely enjoy The Pyres. Unceasing fight scenes with bigger and badder bosses create an experience akin to a playthrough of a video game.

Doose employs an almost-hyperbolic level of grim darkness in his choice of language. Stones aren’t just grey-black, they’re the “grey-black of broken souls”. Wind doesn’t just howl, it howls “with the sorrowful moan of the endless dead.” Implausibly, the characters often have conversations with each other in the midst of cacophonous battle. Doose is a big fan of cheesy alliterative nicknames: Kendrick the Cold, Corvas the Cruel, Chevic the Cheery. When taken together, these immoderate elements add up to a reading experience that is often eye-rolling.

The Pyres is strongest in the quiet scenes between the three heroes and in the (few) chapters following new character Dammar. rather than constant action, more character development and a deeper focus on Dammar’s conflicts and path to vengeance would have strengthened the narrative immensely. Dammar, named for a forest god, was born of a pagan mother and a powerful religious figure in the Church of the Luminescent. As written, Dammar serves primarily as a final boss battle to the three protagonists rather than as a unique character with complex motivations.

Dammar is  is coded as a queer character, but is never really allowed to be queer. Dammar’s love interest is briefly introduced, kissed once, and then burned to death in the titular Pyres. The death serves as a primary impetus for Dammar’s revenge against the Church of the Luminescent. Doose may have been striving for a memorable scene like ASOIAF’s beheading of Ned Stark and Arya’s subsequent promise of blood, but there’s just not enough character development in The Pyres to make the moment feel earned.

The rest of the novel is readable, but unmemorable. Dr. De’Brouillard from Catacombs of Time makes a disappointingly brief cameo. Familiar tropes and storylines aren’t subverted. This book does not honor the moral ambiguities that make the grimdark genre so compelling. It’s primarily blood and guts. Most of the bad guys are one dimensional. Religion=bad. The Church of the Luminescent and the pagan forest god and his followers are both complicit in murder, rape, and violence and have little to no redeeming or interesting qualities. The unsubtle climax of the novel, which involves sexual coercion, forced feminization, daddy issues, and demonic childbirth, appears to be written simply for shock value and has little literary merit. Unfortunately, rather than that comfortingly enjoyable feeling of familiarity evoked by Fire and Sword, The Pyres falls deeply into cliche and cringe.

Though the next book in the series follows an entirely new cast of characters, there is little desire to read it due to the disappointments of The Pyres.

2.5 stars.

Read The Pyres by Dylan Doose

The post REVIEW: The Pyres by Dylan Doose appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road

Text-based adventures are something that I was initially familiar with from the old “Choose your own adventure” books from the Eighties and early Nineties. They were entertaining but as video game graphics improved, they became increasingly obsolete. Everything old is new again, however, with Android and other phones making it so that interactive novels are something a person can experience with relatively small computer systems.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road by Choice of Games is a game set in the World of Darkness like the recently released Coteries of New York or Shadows of New York. Unlike those visual novels, though, Night Road consists entirely of text and a handful of scattered character portraits. This is a game that exists primarily as a tool of your imagination and that is both its greatest strength as well as greatest weakness.

The premise is you are a newly Embraced vampire that has recently acquired a job as a courier for the Camarilla (the vampire government). Vampires do not trust the internet or packaging services in the age of Big Brother and prefer their messages to be hand-delivered. Unfortunately, this is a harder job than it sounds since many vampires have a tendency to shoot the messenger.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road takes place entirely in the American Southwest, primarily Tucson, Arizona. The game does a nice job of evoking the feel of the place with both its florid prose as well as making use of recent events. The vampires of the game take advantage of immigration, the healthcare crisis, and technobabble solutions to the environment in order to firmly establish this in a stylized version of “real” world circa 2019 or so. The COVID-19 crisis isn’t referenced and is obviously something vampires would have an opinion on (breaking into houses for your meal is so frustrating) but the novel was obviously written before then.

I personally feel the politics are well-incorporated into the storyline and enhance it rather than detract from. Regardless of your political opinions, I think we can all agree vampires are bad and are going to take advantage of vulnerable people to feed their unnatural appetites. The protagonist can exploit a free hospital to make themselves a fortune, feed from imprisoned migrant workers controlled by a deranged Elder vampire, or even do something insane like actually try to help the humans inside.

The use of the surveillance state in the game is particularly well done. It’s a very different world from the one Dracula inhabitated with everyone having a cellphone and modern forensic. As such, the government (called “The Second Inquisition”) is actively hunting vampires in secret. If you aren’t careful, hunters will stalk you and blow up your daylight haven. There’s also the option to side with the Second Inquisition and turn on your fellow vampires for a few more nights of respite.

The variety of choice is the best part of Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road. You can choose a variety of Clans, respond to situations in numerous ways, and be a monster or a hero (or both). The reliance on text for the game means that the author didn’t have to spend thousands of hours programming events into the story. If you don’t mind treating it like a tabletop roleplaying game played online, then this is a solid and entertaining title.

Play Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road

The post REVIEW: Vampire: The Masquerade – Night Road appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

5 Grimdark Characters in Dune

Grimdark is about more than setting, but about the characters that inhabit that setting. It doesn’t matter if your story is set in the most dystopian and hopeless world imaginable if your lead character is relentlessly cheerful, overcomes all obstacles and lives happily ever after. Grimdark demands suffering, repercussions and no happy choices.

So, with Dune originally set to be released on December 18th, and now delayed for a year, let’s use the extra time to check out some of the grimdark characters that populate Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic. Naturally, spoilers for Dune, both the movie and book series are contained below.

Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

What better place to start than with our primary antagonist. Harkonnen ticks almost every box of villainy and is disgusting in every conceivable way. He is a devious manipulator both in the games of the Imperial Houses, but of his nephews and prospective heirs, Glossu and Feyd-Rautha as well. He openly uses slavery and torture as methods to instill fear and secure power. He is morbidly obese to the point that he requires suspensors to walk, he is rife with infectious skin diseases and he is a sadistic murderer, sexual pervert, and rapist.

It’s worth saying that it’s very problematic to have a sadistic villain be the only overtly homosexual character in your story and it’s similarly dubious to indicate their evil via obesity and infection. That’s lazy and bigoted characterisation, even for the 1960s.

Nonetheless, the Baron is a great example that in the Dune universe, very bad people do very well and that is ultimately, very, very grimdark.

Alia Atreides

Let’s move on from the Baron to his murderer, who also happens to be his granddaughter via rape and the twisted genetic schemes of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood. It’s not just an act of great-patricide that marks out Alia as a grimdark character as both her birth and later life are marked far from immaculate.

When Alia was still in utero, her mother took the Water of Life narcotic and that awakened Alia not just to adult awareness but to the full power of a Kwisatz Haderach, being able to access her ancestral memories, both male and female.

This made her an Abomination in the eyes of the Bene Gesserit and more than a little feared amongst the Fremen..

She was only two years old when she killed her grandfather with a poisoned knife during the climactic battle of Arrakeen.  You would think being the little sister of the new Emperor isn’t a bad deal but Alia’s nature and status led to estrangement from her family and mental instability. Ultimately, she became Regent upon the apparent death of her brother and set about establishing an autocratic rule. Lacking her brother’s prescient ability, she relied on her ancestral memory which allowed her grandfather’s influence to all but take control of her. Eventually, faced with being tested for possession (which she knew she would fail) or suicide, Alia killed herself. A sad end to a tragic tale.

Duncan Idaho

Surely they wouldn’t cast Jason Momoa as a grimdark character, he’s too… jolly? Duncan Idaho certainly starts out as an almost cartoonishly noble character, both built up as the pre-eminent warrior of his time and ‘well liked by the ladies.’

However, Idaho falls in battle during the betrayal of the Atreides, although he did manage to kill seventeen of the Emperor’s Sardaukar special forces while allowing the escape of Paul and Jessica Atreides.

If it ended there, it’s a glorious way to go.

However, Idaho was resurrected as a ‘ghola’ (clone) by the Bene Tleilaxu in an attempt to undermine the Emperor Paul. This attempt was unsuccessful but the resurrected Idaho ended up marrying Alia before realising her regime was an evil one and getting himself killed by the Fremen to set them against her rule.

Paul’s son, Leto II later took on the mantle of God-Emperor and during his 3’500 year reign, had a succession of Idaho gholas made so he always had his father’s swordmaster at hand. The vast majority of these gholas also realised that Leto was a tyrant and tried to kill him.

Even after Leto II’s death and the Scattering, Idaho kept being resurrected in the Bene Gesserit to aid in their new disputes with the Bene Tleilaxu & Honored Matres.

A noble warrior, resurrected over and over again by manipulative factions only to die again when he chooses to oppose their schemes. That’s grim.

Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

Effectively the Baron & Emperor’s proxy in the final confrontations of Dune, Feyd-Rautha is – like Paul Atreides – the near-completion of the Bene Gesserit breeding programme.

Under the mentorship of his uncle the Baron, he is schooled in the cruel Harkonnen ways – and adopted as Harkonnen and named heir to the Harkonnen demesne against his father Abulard Rabban’s wishes.

Feyd-Rautha is intelligent, physically attractive, charismatic and an excellent swordsman. However, he’s also sadistic and ambitious, to the point where he would cheat in single combat, even in handicapped battles with slaves, to prove a point or develop his popularity amongst the Harkonnen followers.

His ambition leads him to attempt to kill the Baron to accede to the leadership of the house, and the Baron has to emphasise to him that patience is a virtue and the house will fall to him in due time.

Ultimately Feyd is killed by Paul Atreides in single combat, despite cheating and his influence on the later stories is limited to that of his unwitting, bastard daughter.

In many ways, Feyd is a tragic character and we can assume that he could have been a noble individual, had he been raised by someone like Duke Leto, rather than under the tutelage of the Baron. As an example of how twisted and debased someone with all the privilege and talent in the world can become, he’s definitely grimdark.

It is interesting that Feyd-Rautha does not appear to have been cast in Dune 2020, although he may appear in the sequel given he figures little in the first half of the book. It’s possible that the roles of Glossu Rabban (played by Dabe Bautista) and Feyd-Rautha have been combined for the purposes of the film, but I guess we’ll find out.

Paul Atreides

What, you can’t have the all conquering protagonist being all grimdark! Yes, I can, because he is.

Paul appears to be the image of just nobility. He’s kind, talented and a great warrior. His arc is notionally one of righteous revenge and that’s the most standard fantasy fare imaginable. I could argue he is grimdark purely because of the circumstances he was forced into – the betrayal of his House, death of his father etc. but that’s not enough in my eyes.

However, I believe Paul is grimdark because of his inhumanity and his failure. As the realised Kwitsaz Haderach, his prescience and ability to sift through his ancestral memory makes him fey and he struggles to relate to others, even his mother and sister who share some measure of his gifts. He turns firm friends such as Stilgar into fawning acolytes, even lamenting this as he watches it happen.

Despite his apparent success in leading the Fremen to defeat the Harkonnens on Arrakis, he fails to stop the jihad, doesn’t act to stop his sister’s authoritarian rampage and ultimately fails to curb the machinations of the Bene Gesserit, leaving the difficult path of saving humanity from prescience to his son.

Despite supposedly being the hero, Paul has the death of 61 billion people, the creation of a heretic theocracy and ultimately Leto II’s 3’500 years of authoritarian repression all on his hands.

More personally, Paul echoes his father’s practical concession to political expediency over love (his father never married Lady Jessica in case a political marriage became necessary) by marrying the former Emperor’s daughter, Irulan and thus keeping his true love, Chani as a concubine.

This directly led to Chani’s death and Paul’s apparent suicide and exile in the desert. While Paul developed the concept of the golden path that Leto II would eventually follow, he had allowed his wife to die and was not present for his children growing up. Despite the scale of his greater failings, these personal ones are arguably even more tragic.

Paul is a lesson that even the most talented and well meaning individual can fail spectacularly and never find true happiness. There is no happy ever after in Dune, and Paul is the finest example of that.

The post 5 Grimdark Characters in Dune appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Ghost of Tsushima

Ghost of Tsushima, developed by Sucker Punch and published by Sony, is the last big game of PS4. It is a pretty magnificent one in terms of technical achievement as it may be the most beautiful video game I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen some beautiful video games but aside from The Last of Us and the Witcher 3, I don’t recall ever seeing something as lovely as this game. It re-creates the Medieval Japan of fantasy where everything is blowing cherry blossoms, haunting pipes, and stoic samurai caught in impossible contradictions of honor. Is it great? Ehhh. Not really.

This is a solid game and I have a lot of praise for it but my feelings about it are decidedly mixed after forty hours of playing it. It’s a stealth open world action RPG and I’ve played a lot of those over the years. Ironically enough, I’d say that this is really the best Assassins Creed game since Assasins Creed: Black Flag and pretty much what a lot of fans wanted from the series. I recall a game set in Medieval Japan was one of the constant requests for Ubisoft before they decided to stop making stealth games about their Medieval ninjas and started making Witcher 3 knock-offs.

It’s not an Assassins Creed game, though it pretty much is without the Animus or Templars vs. Assassins conflict. It plays almost identically to one, though, and you are set in a historical fantasy where you are the plucky underdog forced to go around slaying leaders of an all-powerful occupying force using guerilla tactics. You also use things like smoke bombs, throwing knives, distractions, and poison to eliminate your foes. This isn’t a complaint but I feel a bit like I did when I played my first Arkham Asylum or Dark Souls knock-off.

The protagonist is Jin Sakai, who is a samurai serving his uncle on the island of Tsushima. Lord Shimura has the misfortune of being the Lord of Tsushima during the Mongol Invasion of 1274. Unlike the historical lord of Tsushima, who took advantage of terrain and archery to repel the Mongols, Lord Shimura is an idiot and charges directly into the greatest cavalrymen in history. The defenders of Tsushima are annihilated, Shimura is captured, and Jin is left the only remaining samurai on the island. Rather than call in reinforcements from the mainland, Jin gets it into his head to Batman his way against the Mongol Khan with the help of beautiful thief Yuna.

Every game needs a central premise and Jin’s problem is that his uncle raised him to be an idiot. Specifically, Lord Shimura is a kind of Ned Stark-esque stickler for honor and that apparently means loudly announcing yourself to your enemies before facing them head on. Jin gets increasingly depressed as well as ruthless due to the nature of the conflict he’s in. Jin must learn the principles of asymmetrical warfare from thieves as well as other dishonorable cowards so that he can drive the Mongols out of his home. It tortures him the entire way through the game, though.

I both love and hate Ghost of Tsushima due to the fact that I got my degree in Asian History, specifically Japanese. As mentioned, I don’t think much of Lord Shimura or his tactics given that the actual samurai knew that honorable tactics were only for OTHER SAMURAI. No one would have gainsayed using them against the Mongols and the fact that Shimura does means that the Shogun should ask him to commit seppuku. This is also a thoroughly anachronistic game that treats samurai as the way they were during the Tokugawa Shogunate rather than the Minamoto Shogunate. Which for laymen is, “They treat samurai like when they were bureaucrats and poets versus when they were hardcore killers.”

Still, Ghost of Tsushima is a lot of fun and not at all bad. The central story of Jin slowly accepting that being a ninja isn’t all that bad doesn’t compel me much but I love all the side characters. The Japan in this game is beautiful and the Mongols are suitably hateable villains. Still, I wouldn’t categorize this as a must buy.

Play Ghost of Tsushima

The post REVIEW: Ghost of Tsushima appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Catacombs of Time by Dylan Doose

Catacombs of Time is the second book in Dylan Doose’s Sword and Sorcery series. Taking place roughly 300 years after and many miles away from the events of Fire and Sword, the short novella follows the brilliant but unbalanced scientist Dr. Gaige De’Brouillard. His underlying credo as a scientist is that science, not magic, is the solution: “science is beyond sorcery. What I will come to learn will not even the battlefield between us and those with arcane blood… it will dominate it.”

Gaige De’Brouillard is a classic Dr. Frankenstein type whose unusual and sometimes unethical experiments have allowed him to treat and cure magical curses such as lycanthropy. His impetus for scientific discovery is his own disability – a withered leg that can barely support his weight and causes him constant pain. Due to this pain, he has become addicted to an opioid-like painkiller, as well as a cocktail of injectables he uses to improve performance. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, his main (living) subject of experimentation is himself, which leads to some nearly fatal issues at the end of Catacombs of Time.

The doctor has been tasked by the mysterious Lord Regent to capture and cure a certain blonde female werewolf and bring her back to him. Throughout the novella, Doose heavily implies that the enigmatic Regent is a certain magical character we know and love from Fire and Sword. The reader does not learn the Lord Regent’s connection to this woman in Catacombs of Time, but perhaps her identity will be revealed later in the series.

The premise is engaging and Gaige’s character well-defined, especially considering how few pages there are in the novella. Doose’s penchant for dark and gruesome settings continues here, with one particularly memorable scene detailing a “research facility” containing human body parts.

“Stacked in the corners were hundreds of limbs, heads, and torsos. Gaige thought of the many times when he was a student that he had used Butcher’s facility for his own medical research. It was for a greater good, he always told himself, and not some sort of sick curiosity.”

Disappointingly, just as Catacombs of Time seems to be picking up steam, it ends. The titular catacombs of time are set up as a fascinating place where time and space do not work as they should, but the author barely spends any time on this interesting spot and its paradoxical implications for the overarching narrative. Indeed, Doose’s choice to release a slim novella as the second book in a series is confusing. The novella could easily have been expanded or incorporated into the third novel, The Pyres. Due to Doose’s shallow treatment of many intriguing characters and ideas, many readers are likely to experience frustration upon completion of the novel.

The questionable inclusion of the short story, “I Remember My First Time,” at the end of the book adds little to the experience of the reader or the conclusion of the novella. The short story, set in the same world, is an unmemorable recounting of a random character’s first time killing someone. The short story was difficult to get through and was mostly skimmed for purposes of this review.

Three Stars for Catacombs of Time.

One Star for “I Remember My First Time.”

Read Catacombs of Time by Dylan Doose

The post REVIEW: Catacombs of Time by Dylan Doose appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Not Saying Goodbye by Boris Akunin

Not Saying Goodbye is the last of the Erast Fandorin books by Boris Akunin. It must operate thus both as a farewell and a fitting capstone for a long running series (the first book, was published in Russia as Azazel in 1998; it appeared in translation as The Winter Queen in 2003). Not Saying Goodbye was published in 2018 and translated into English by Andrew Bromfield for Weidenfeld & Nicholson in 2019.

Despite a dangerous career as variously a police detective, counterintelligence agent and private investigator, Erast Fandorin has lived to the age of sixty-two. However, he has spent the last few years in a coma. It is now the year 1918 in Russia, and the Revolution has begun. Fandorin, apart from preserving his own life and safety – which is no mean feat when so many of his resources, physical or otherwise are depleted – must negotiate his way across a Russia that no longer has much use for a principled polymath detective.

The structure of Not Saying Goodbye tracks through the various factions of Revolutionary and Civil War-era Russia, each portion of the novel being named after one ‘truth’ or another: truths Red, White, Green and Black. There is a literal journey from Moscow to the Crimea through a splintered Russia, but though one might imagine that this could become didactic (every chapter, a new revolutionary faction!) it never seems so.

Part of Akunin’s success in this regard is that he does not discard Fandorin, but allows him to drift out of focus, allowing for other, younger characters to take up the role he might have taken on – or to reflect on him as a member of a previous generation. Fandorin’s milieu has always been as a creature of Tsarist, pre-Revolutionary Russia – whatever his travels or the events of Not Saying Goodbye, I am certain that this is how he will be recalled. Therefore, allowing for Alexei Parisovitch Romanov (who appears in some of Akunin’s other works) to take on a number of the more action-heavy portions of the book is beneficial. Romanov, the ironically named Bolshevik officer is an implicit successor to Fandorin, who is examining the possibilities of retirement in the face of old age and a Russia whose problems are beyond his capabilities. The more reflective, character-driven portions of Not Saying Goodbye are driven by an encounter with the passionate sculptor Elizaveta Anatolieva Turusova, known as Mona.

This is a historical novel, and one that throws out references to political factions and geography with the expectation that you have some faint familiarity with them. As with the other Erast Fandorin novels, a passing familiarity with Russian literature and customs will be useful to the reader, though one becomes used to the patronymics rapidly enough.

I was, at root, satisfied by Not Saying Goodbye. It is something of a departure from other novels, but that is exactly what one would expect from the subject matter. Erast Fandorin’s response to and exit from a changed Russia is well-staged and satisfying. As a long-time reader of these, I might give it Four Stars, though for the complete newcomer Three Stars might be more apt.

Read Not Saying Goodbye by Boris Akunin

The post REVIEW: Not Saying Goodbye by Boris Akunin appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #2

Vampire: The Masquerade the comic is a new series by Tim Seeley and published by Vault comics that is set in the World of Darkness setting. The World of Darkness is the setting for classic roleplaying games Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Mage: The Ascension. I really enjoyed the first issue and was eager to see if they could continue the mixture of politics, horror, guilt, and violence in Winter’s Teeth #2.

Thankfully, they did.

The premise of the first arc, Winter’s Teeth, is divided into two arcs. The first arc is Cecily Bain, a former Anarch, has become a servant of the Camarilla to guarantee her freedom. It has cost her self-respect and morality, though, leaving her as nothing more than the Prince’s minion. The second arc follows Colleen Pendergrass, Anarch Thin Blood, as she struggles to care for her misfit band of fellow undead.

Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #2 introduces us to the arrogant sun goddess-esque Prince of the Twin Cities. Prince Merraine has ruled Minneapolis and Saint Paul for almost a century but has grown lax in her rule. She’s more interested in her art and cityscapes than putting down the dissent brewing around her. She’s also blind to the fact Cecily is trying to pass off a newly discovered Caitiff, Ali, as her childe.

The best part of the issue is Cecily taking Ali on her first hunt. Cecily attempts to impart a lesson to her childe that it is not good to make yourself judge, jury, and executioner of mortals as a Kindred. Unfortunately, Cecily has lost touch with her humanity and the lesson is not only confused but insane to poor Ali. I think this nicely captures how vampires can become confused about morality and struggle to relate to more “normal” Kindred.

Colleen’s situation is almost the reverse as she has a good head on her shoulders but is herding cats with her coterie of self-pitying Anarchs. Unfortunately, her husband Mitch is the worst of the lot and can’t control his hunger around mortals. This all comes to a head with hunters tracking them down and mistaking Colleen for a human servant.

In Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #2, we’re getting a sense of who the villains for this arc are with increasing hints there’s something not right with Ali as well as the fact that the Second Inquisition is moving in on the Twin Cities. There is an air of conspiracy to the events and it fits well with the intrigue-heavy atmosphere of the tabletop game. Both protagonists are growing on me, though Cecily is the more dynamic of the two with her being, well, evil, as something that is a bit more interesting in a protagonist than Colleen’s inherent decency.

The artwork remains fantastic for this series and I recommend checking out the alternate covers of the physical copies, since they’re the kind of things I’d want to hang on my wall. This is shaping up to be rapidly one of my favorite comics in the past two decades and I really hope this ends up being an ongoing series.

Read Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #2

The post REVIEW: Vampire: The Masquerade – Winter’s Teeth #2 appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.