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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Where to read your favourite authors for free (without being a pirate bastard)

Let’s face it, if you download people’s books without paying for them, and without the author or publisher’s permission to download them for free, you are a pirate bastard. It’s pretty black and white. However, if you’re struggling (especially in the 2020 economy) or you just want to read ALL THE THINGS, or maybe you’re a pirate bastard that could change for the better, there are plenty of places where you can find fiction by your favourite authors online, or gain access to it legally, for free.

If you’re here for help, then I’m glad you’re here and I hope I can point you in the right direction for plenty of great fiction from the big names you love, and I hope your 2020 gets better my friend. If you have a pirate bastard smirk upon on your face and a copy of a book you obtained illegally open on your kindle, then give me one last paragraph before you bail on this article.

I feel that often pirate bastards are attacked without the full range of potential solutions for their circumstances presented. I hope that I have achieved the opposite in this article–attacking people I morally disagree with, while presenting a full range of legal options to read your favourite authors for free while the author and publisher obtains some return for their work.

Check out legally free works by your favourite authors online

The first and easiest option is to search the web for legally free content. There is an absolute tonne of it out there. It’s on author websites, publisher websites, review and news websites. And there are a surprising amount of short stories, as you’ll find below in this short list of people I like to read. Read them. If you like them, comment, share, follow, interact, hell, maybe even buy a book by them the next time it’s on special or write a review somewhere for them.

Third Law short stories by Joe Abercrombie, free on Tor.com

Joe Abercrombie is a personal favourite of mine, and his book The Heroes is responsible for getting me back into reading SFF after going off it for years. You could say that it’s kind of responsible for this website three anthologies and over twenty issues of GdM. Without it I’d likely just be a standard desk jockey with a hole in my soul I couldn’t quite find an answer for. It was a starting point, and as you can imagine it started an obsession for finding every tie-in story to the Third Law that I could find. Here are a couple you should check out for free.

Some Desperado
Two’s Company

Gunlaw by Mark Lawrence, free on WattPad

Mark Lawrence is the second of my grimdark favourites. His Broken Empire trilogy remains some of my favourite fiction to this day, and is the most expensive / valuable set of signed first editions in my collection. Now, while Mark (being the prolific legend that he is) has a tall stack of short stories up on his website, he also has a cracking fantasy western novel called Gunlaw up on Wattpad. Since, unlike his other works, Gunlaw probably does need a little bit of an introduction, the blurb is below.

Mikeos Jones is a gunslinger, faster than thinking, part of the gunlaw, a man who can seldom afford the luxury of looking past the end of any given day.

Jenna Crossard is a hex-witch, but her ambitions are larger than spells and charms – the need to understand the world consumes her. They say the gunlaw keeps men safe from the endless horror of the sect, but to Jenna it’s a cage and she wants out. If that means breaking open the world and killing a few gods … so be it.

Either way, with Lawrence’s versatility, you know there is a good chance you’re going to enjoy yourself. And it’s an entire novel! Start reading Gunlaw now.

Empires of Dust short stories by Anna Smith Spark

Anna Smith Spark’s body of work so far has been one of the most amazingly visceral reading experiences I think I’ve ever had. I don’t remember ever being so pleasantly exhausted and emotionally worn out after finishing a trilogy as I have been with hers. So, much like the above authors, if I can find something of hers–especially if it ties in to Empires of Dust–then I’ll move my butt to my reading spot and get in to it.

Anna has a couple of Empires of Dust short works on her website which are well worth checking out.

A New Year on Seneth Isle
The Feast of Year’s Renewal on Sorlos

Raven’s Mark short story by Ed McDonald

McDonald published one of the best trilogies of the last decade with his Raven’s Mark series. Gritty, fun, and almost completely unputdownable cover-to-cover and book-to-book, anything I can find from Ed, I’ll read. We’ve published Ed in Issue #16 and he’s also a massive D&D fan.

You can find a free Raven’s Mark short story and a free D&D campaign written by Ed on his site.

Character is What you Are by Michael R. Fletcher, free on DailyScienceFiciton.com

It’s no secret that Fletcher is a favourite author of mine, not just because he is a brilliant grimdark author, but because he’s just a genuinely brilliant bloke. We’ve interviewed together, he’s been in two or three GdM issues and two anthologies, and we’ve got another awesome project on the way with Anna Smith Spark for our Patreon page.

You can find the story here.

Free online fiction by Aliette de Bodard

de Bodard is one of the most prolific and successful short story authors I’ve known during my time at GdM. She’s won a BFSA best novel award, a couple of Nebulas, and a Locus, and has been a finalist for major awards almost more times than GdM has published magazine issues. She is that good, and you can use the below link to find 40 (let’s repeat that together, FORTY) short stories free online, and then a host of short stories available from paying markets (including one from us). You could literally spend an entire day in the imagination of one of this generation’s finest creatives and not spend a cent.

Go check them out.

Check out Tor.com

You’ll likely notice a few links to a site called Tor.com throughout this list. If you’ve been living under a rock, Tor.com is probably the most epic SFF site currently online. They cover pretty much everything from reviews of anything SFF you could possibly consume, to well thought out listicles, articles, and, importantly, fiction. And because they historically paid US$0.25 per word (as far as I am aware far and away the highest paying short fiction market on the planet) they got to publish a huge range of the big names in fiction–and they put them online for free.

Click here and thank me later.

Read excerpts

Excerpts are a common part of book launches and a great way to sample books before you buy. Oftentimes you’ll find some pretty random samples out there that go beyond the Kindle sample on Amazon. For example, George RR Martin drops chapters online from time-to-time, and you can find a stack of them here on Grimdark Magazine. With a bit of effort, you could track down plenty of content.

Go to a library

Go to the library. Ask the librarian if they stock the book you want. If they don’t, find out what needs to happen to get the book ordered in and added to the library’s shelves. Do that. Some countries even pay authors per borrow (it’s not like it’s raining gold, but publishing is nothing if not trying to come up with as many small streams of income to create a river).

Join a review team

Now, if you just want free books, and you absolutely cannot or will not pay for them, then in my mind your last potential saving grace is to find a different way to actually contribute to this community and the authors you’re reading.

Join a review team.

Good review sites get access to the majority of novels by the authors you want to read before the rest of the world gets to see them. Sites like booknest.eu, SFFworld.com, and our very own Grimdark Magazine team already have access to pretty much every new release coming from any publisher, while other sites like the one run by one of our brilliant blog managers Beth (https://beforewegoblog.com/) are up and coming and building their teams and now is the time to jump on board to be a part of something fun. All you need to do is email them and figure out how to join. It’s not hard; most sites are always on the lookout for reviewers. Hell, if you live in the US or UK, there is even a really good chance you’ll get paperbacks or hardcovers as opposed to ebooks.

All you need is the time you spend reading the books anyway, an opinion on them, and to be able to put that opinion into a coherent 400+ word post.

Either way, where short fiction, excerpts, and one-off Wattpad books don’t cut the mustard, and you need full length books, then this is the way to not be an enemy of the publishing community.

Summary

If you still feel you have an excuse for being a pirate bastard at this juncture, then you’re a deadset lost cause. If this has resonated with you, then it’s time to change and be a positive part of the publishing community by reading, commenting, sharing, reviewing and helping the authors and publishers who create the content you consume.

For the people struggling through this monster of a year, then I hope this resource provides a little more light in the grimdarkest year I can remember in my 35 on this earth.

The post Where to read your favourite authors for free (without being a pirate bastard) appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.

REVIEW: The Reverie by Peter Fehervari

The Reverie by Peter Fehervari was released (fittingly!) on the 31st of October, the first of his novels in the Warhammer Horror line. As with all Peter Fehervari’s work, it can be read alone and remain compelling, though it has a place of its own within his interconnected stories, dubbed the Dark Coil.

I first entered the Coil with Fehervari’s first book, Fire Caste. This isn’t a bad entry point, but there is no one entry point to it – it isn’t a series per se. The Dark Coil is largely populated by worlds, factions and characters of Fehervari’s own imagining, in the same vein as Dan Abnett’s Sabbat Worlds. This has allowed him the freedom to write some of the most fascinating recent outings from the Black Library. His new place in the Horror line locates him in the periphery of the Black Library, far from flagship outings like the Horus Heresy, or anything dealing with the steadily advancing setting of Warhammer 40,000. Peter Fehervari is more likely to invent an Imperial Guard regiment out of whole cloth, or pick a Space Marine chapter with only a colour scheme to their name and expand on them in his own way.

The Reverie is about just such a Chapter, the Angels Resplendent. Their home world is Malpertius, to which we are drawn, where these post-human warrior artisans have established their citadel, Kanvolis. This is as much an artist’s colony as it is a fortress, populated by the chapter’s servants and muses, quite far from the Gothic-industrial hellscapes that so often characterise the 41st millennium. Despite the artistic wonders of Kanvolis, however, there is a lurking taint on Malpertius: an area of unnatural anomalies and space-time distortions called the Reverie. This is not only a place for the spiritual quests of aspiring members of the Angels Resplendent but it also draws human pilgrims and seekers after truth.

This is a Warhammer novel and a horror novel at that, so the Reverie was never going to be terribly benevolent. There are slow, delicate revelations about how the Angels Resplendent have adopted their atypical customs and have grown so different from their cousins in other Chapters. The Reverie and Kanvolis both are described with a lucid, even delightful, quality, but the slow, churning wrongness of these places and how they can twist the inhabitants through a mix of wonder and revelation is cutting. Our view of both is shaped by returning Space Marines and their attendants who must uncover some of the mysteries of the heart of the Reverie, both for their own sake and the sake of the Chapter as a whole.

In The Reverie Peter Fehervari has successfully laid out another significant portion of the Dark Coil, intact in itself and with its own thematic and aesthetic flavour. It’s a somewhat more coherent story than some of his other works, though with a less overtly grimdark sense to it. Still, I would suggest that you read this, and rank it at Four Stars.

Read The Reverie by Peter Fehervari

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