Adrian Collins's Blog, page 199

REVIEW: The Boundless by Peter Newman

I received a review copy of The Boundless in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to Peter Newman and Harper Voyager.

The Ruthless was my favourite fantasy read of 2019 and that lead to The Boundless being one of my most anticipated releases of 2020. When The Boundless was posted through my letterbox, all the other novels that I have to review ceased to exist temporarily until I had finished The Deathless trilogy. In fact, I re-read both The Deathless and The Ruthless before tackling The Boundless so that the characters, drama, and excitement were totally fresh in my mind. Through doing this I was reminded of some of the exceptional moments that concluded The Ruthless and the hints presented there of what could follow in the series finale. I was extremely excited to finally read The Boundless and Newman did not disappoint at all.

In The Boundless, we still follow the point of view perspectives of Sa-at, Satyendra, Vasinidra, Lady Pari, and Chandni. The events presented here happen straight after the conclusion of The Ruthless. Sa-at is now in Lord Rochant’s floating castle as is the dark doppelganger Satyendra. Lady Pari plans to venture to the chasm beneath the same castle to help her brother Arkav find the missing part of himself. Vasinidra hopes to rid the Wilds of the bane that is the Scuttling Corpseman and, elsewhere in the Wilds, exiled Chandni leaves her fate to the creatures and demons that lurk there.

I don’t want to talk too much about the events of this novel but there are many standout moments, stunning set-pieces, unlikely alliances, long-awaited meetings and reunions, great showdowns and battles, and lots of darkness, death, the unpredictable and the macabre. The Boundless is an extremely satisfying and fitting conclusion to a top-quality series that deserves many more readers. I enjoyed following every point of view perspective and found the characters extremely memorable and engaging. The Wilds is a great character in itself, and contains some wonderful entities like Murderkind, the Dogkin, Whispercages, and the moving trees.

Newman fits a lot of incredible moments into these 437 pages. The Boundless is fast-paced, action-packed and thrilling. In fact, a few scenes were so intense that they seemed to race by at supernatural, Deathless-like speed. A couple of moments seemed to rush by a bit too fast but this is just my personal opinion and it’s my only minor criticism.

I really didn’t want the novel to end, and actually slowed my reading speed as the conclusion approached as I really wanted to savour these moments and this may be the only time these characters grace the pages of fantasy books. I have no idea if Newman plans to return to this well-crafted and darkly endearing world of the Wilds, Deathless, floating castles and the Godroads; but he’ll have a reader waiting in me if he ever chooses to.

I’d give the Deathless series as a whole a 9/10 rating and guess it’s now about time that I try out Newman’s The Vagrant books. To finish up, I can confirm that I had a fantastic reading experience with this deliciously dark, engaging and unique fantasy series and recommend it wholeheartedly.

Read The Boundless by Peter Newman

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REVIEW: Angel Mage by Garth Nix

Angel Mage by Garth Nix is a competent foray into the grimdark subgenre meant for young adult (YA) readers.

Taking place in a setting derivative of Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, the narrative follows the adventures of four young strangers new to the city of Lutace, bound by a mysterious connection they struggle to understand. Meanwhile, the powerful mage Liliath has risen from more than a century of slumber to complete her enigmatic objective at any cost, even if it be the lives of her own people. Unknown to the four protagonists, Liliath has designs to use them to her own ends, and they must unravel the secret of their connection while being thrust into the upper echelons of the politics of their realm during a time of world-changing events.

Nix does an admirable job of crafting a credible fantasy world with an innovative magic system. The characters are relatable, the action sequences are sufficiently exciting, and the pacing is generally well-executed, keeping things moving along for the reader while still dwelling in the details long enough to really bring the setting to life. The supporting cast was also particularly strong, with even minor characters standing out as memorable.

The prose should prove sufficiently verbose and challenging for the young adult reader, although the narration perspective did, at times, seem peculiar. Specifically, Nix employs a particular mix of third-person omniscient and third-person limited perspectives. The former works quite well when multiple protagonists share a scene, however, the perspective seems to shift to the latter in most other situations, creating some minor confusion; I can recall at least one instance wherein the limited perspective wandered into the omniscient, mid-scene, and I was surprised to be reading the thoughts of a non-point-of-view character. Nevertheless, I applaud the ambitious choice, and other than the aforementioned specific instance, I found it to be overall beneficial to the structure of the story.

While Angel Mage does many things well, it -arguably- fails to do anything great, with the exception of the world-building, which as mentioned, was very well crafted. However, the attention to detail on the realization of the setting was, perhaps, at the expense of using a greater portion of the narrative to develop the characters or deepen the plot. While the four protagonists were all quite likable, I would have enjoyed a stronger focus on their characterization and wish they had displayed more dynamism over the course of their journeys. The plot was interesting and the stakes sufficiently high, but never had me so invested as to call it a ‘page-turner’, though this is, of course, a matter purely of subjectivity.

While, overall, I really did enjoy this novel, I was left with a lingering thought: who is this for? Genre neophytes will be turned off by the density of the world-building, while initiated readers would probably be better served by simply reading adult-oriented fantasy, as many of us did as teenagers. However, for the specific demographic of young, hardcore-fantasy fans seeking a more adult tale without risking exposure to overtly graphic content, Angel Mage may be a near-perfect choice.

Read Angel Mage by Garth Nix

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REVIEW: Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

Space opera is not always grimdark, indeed it often verges on the utopian but as it’s title suggests, Embers of War deals with the messy aftermath of conflict and it’s universe has lots of moral greyness to spare. Indeed, for much of the book it feels like a military science fiction novel before it broadens into space opera.

Embers of War starts with the human portion of the galaxy recovering from the aftermath of a bitter civil war that reminds me a lot of the background conflict to Firefly/Serenity with an independent minded faction (the Outward) losing to the central powers.

That war ended in an atrocity and resulted in combatants of both sides setting down their arms. This includes our main characters, Captain Sal Konstanz and her ship, the decommissioned and repentant sentient warship, Trouble Dog, who now work for the House of Reclamation – who are sort of an ad hoc International Rescue in this universe.

Elsewhere in the Embers of War universe, a cruise liner is attacked while viewing a system scale archaeological curiosity and a jaded spy is given a strange new posting.

Embers of War is bursting with interesting characters and settings. Sal Konstanz nurtures self doubt and loss by getting drunk in the hold of the ship. Her mismatched crew of veteran soldier Alva Clay and a box fresh medic rub up against each other in all the wrong ways while the most interesting characters are possibly the ship itself and the alien Druff engineer, Nod.

Elsewhere, Ona Sudak and Ashton Childe are shown to be deeply grey characters, both with secrets that remain untold and motivations that are both complex and opaque.

One of Powell’s great strengths is the description of the outlandish, with the realisation of the many many limbed, faces-on-the-hands Druff and the characters of the sentient spaceships standing. Otherwise, the vivid portrayal of such mind boggling things as the hypervoid and the Gallery which are both key to Embers of War’s plot really help to put you in a place which is almost past description.

The action is portrayed via a close third person view of specific PoV characters for each chapter and while some of the voices are samey, the distinct perspective given really helps in portraying different views of similar events. It is a device that takes a little tuning into and Embers of War is a book that takes a good few chapters to hit its stride.

Much of the story takes place with most of the characters not entirely sure why events are unfolding and there is a sense of the story being railroaded rather than each character having full agency to make their own decisions. This makes sense in some cases more than others – (especially for Sudak who is pursued deeper into an ancient alien megastructure) but it does lead to an excellent confrontation at the end which is resolved in a manner which is both a wee bit anticlimactic (as these things tend to be) and completely changes the scale of the story for the rest of the series.

The conclusion involves a number of tough moral choices and the Trouble Dog being a complete badass, despite being largely demilitarised. I’ve not liked a ship this much since Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints in Iain M. Banks Surface Detail.

All in all, Embers of War is a rip roaring space opera that cherry picks some of the most fun elements from the likes of Firefly and Iain M. Banks. While it doesn’t quite hit the heights of Banks or Ann Leckie, it’s very readable and you end up caring about the characters, feeling their moral quandaries and being invested in what happens to them.

Four Stars

Read Embers of War by Gareth L. Powell

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An Interview with Grady Hendrix

Award-winning author Grady Hendrix has written about a retail store gone to hell, the souls of a 90s heavy metal band named Dürt Würk, a book club in the south described as “Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias meet Dracula“ and more.  He also has written the Bram Stoker Award-winning non-fiction book, Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. His books are full of equal parts tender and terrifying moments, but at the heart of them, there is something very appealing. When your readers can empathize with the literal retail hell in Horrorstör or the great joy Kris has listening to metal music in We Sold Our Souls, you know you have something special. 

I had the great pleasure of having a chat with Grady about his upcoming projects, writing books with settings in the 1990s, retail hell, and more. 

Hey Grady, you have a knack for writing women. I especially enjoyed Amy from Horrorstör and Kris from We Sold Our Souls. Although these two characters are put into implausible or impossible situations, there is an element of authenticity to their reactions. Do you connect better with a female protagonist as a writer?

All my characters need to have something that distances them from me so that I see them as a fully rounded three dimensional person rather than myself in a fiction suit. Often I’ll have a story that I just can’t crack then I’ll make the main character female and suddenly it works. Kris in We Sold Our Souls was originally Chris and it was my book about male anger, but then the 2016 election happened and I realized that if I wanted to have a character who had been told they didn’t matter in the slightest, it really only made sense for them to be a woman at that moment in time.

As a former IKEA employee, years, I worked there for years, do you have retail or service

industry experience? You nailed the ennui and general horror of doing a customer

service job day in and day out.

I couldn’t hack retail. I tried but I don’t have the guts, the skills, or the smarts, so I salute the retail warriors out there dealing with stained returns, unreasonable customers, and their terrible jokes. Valhalla awaits.

I also heard that Horrorstör was possibly being adapted to a film. If you could cast some of the characters from the novel, whom would you have to play them?

I’m actually writing the Horrorstör movie but I am terrible at playing casting director. I’m sorry. I’m also terrible at parties.

In terms of story creation, how do you write your books? Do you start with a single idea or single scene and work outwards in all directions or do you have a linear process and go start to finish?

A linear process? That sounds great! I’ll have to try it. Southern Book Club actually has two

entirely different versions that I finished before getting to the prototype of the version people read, and while it was deeply educational to write three books in order to publish one, it’s not very efficient. My writing process could be defined as: mess. I start with tons of research, fill a couple of notebooks, develop a firm, 100% rock solid idea of what’s going to happen and it usually takes me a full draft before I toss all my notes and realize my research is useless. Then I sit down, write backstories for every single character, write chapters about their lives I never use, and slowly weave my way towards something resembling a book the way a drunk walks a line during a field sobriety test. Then I rewrite and rewrite until my editor threatens me with physical violence, then I keep rewriting while they send the last draft off to the copy editor and block my email at which point I burst into tears.

Your newest novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires the setting was particular and deliberate. What attracted you to this period instead of say, the early 00s?

Writing about the recent past is hard because the ‘90s are far enough away to be another

planet, but close enough to not have an identity we’ve all agreed on yet. The ‘40s are the

Greatest Generation, the ‘50s were squeaky clean, everyone loves the ‘80s, but the ‘90s are

usually referred to as “the decade when nothing happened.” In reality, everything we’re living

through now had its roots back then: the Anita Hill hearings were the first big public reckoning

about sexual harassment, Bill Clinton got impeached (see also: sexual harassment), the world

met Hilary Clinton, the banks were deregulated, the first World Trade Center attack, the first

Gulf War, every major female singer-songwriter released her first album (from Beyonce in

Destiny’s Child to Celine Dion), reality TV was born, and the news cycle went 24/7. To give you

a specific example: Wal-Mart started the decade with stores in only 33 states with $15 billion in

sales. By 2000 it was the world’s largest private employer with $100 billion in sales. The ‘90s where the cause and the 2000s are the effect.

Tell me about a book where you first discovered the power of language?

Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, which is essentially a 1985 precursor to Alan Moore’s 1989 Jack the Ripper graphic novel, From Hell. Written half in 18th century English, and half in a sort of “Ramsey Campbell in a bad mood” urban bleak speak, I was way too young to understand even 70% of it, but the heady ideas and the psychedelic language shot lightning through my brain. Music plays a massive role in We Sold Our Souls as an appreciation for the genre of metal, and the connection one has to music as a part of their soul and who they are. Has music played a big part in your life? And why did you choose Metal as Kris’s genre? I think music is important in everyone’s life. We all soundtrack our break-ups and our summer drives to the beach.

We Sold Our Souls is about metal because I wanted it to be about a genre of music that gets no respect. Tell people you love metal, and they immediately rush to judgment.

I’m not a natural metalhead but metalheads are the sweetest, most generous people and they totally took me under their wings when I wrote that book. I have bar napkins covered in songs and bands and albums I need to try and I naturally I fell in love with metal while writing it. What is next? Is there another common horror theme you want to tackle and turn on its ear? I would love to read a body snatcher or plague book by you.

I’m not sure anyone wants to read a plague book for a while, but I’ve got a new, 100% coronavirus-free novel coming out in 2021 called The Final Girl Support Group about someone murdering the members of a therapy group for final girls. I’ve been working on this book since 2014 because I wanted to take the idea of final girls seriously. What does it mean when the worst thing that could possibly happen to you happens when you’re 16? How do you have a life after seeing all your friends killed? So many books and movies about final girls treat them as campy comfort blankets woven from warm, wooly nostalgia, but I wanted to take these women seriously.

Tell me about the non-fiction book you are writing?

My great lifelong love affair has been with Hong Kong movies and I’m in the middle of wrapping up a big nonfiction book about kung fu movies coming to America back in the ‘70s. It’s bristling with wild art, and my co-author, Chris Poggiali, and I have dug up a ton of unknown stories about everything from an 11-year-old boy who created a huge Bruce Lee blockbuster, to Japanese judo teachers being rounded up and sent to concentration camps and what that has to do with Jimmy Cagney. It’s been a wild ride.

I know for me, asking me my favorite book is like asking me who my favorite kid is. Instead of your favorite book, I would love to know about books that affected you or you just generally loved and why?

Everyone needs to accept that Charles Portis’ True Grit is the Great American Novel. The

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the Great American Novel of the 19th century, all about exploration, and finding yourself, and boys on a river, horsing around but True Grit is the Great American Novel of the 20th Century. Narrated by a 14-year-old girl, it’s about the hard people we needed to build America, and how embarrassing they became once we didn’t need them anymore.

I also wish more people read Vernon Lee, who wrote lush, psychologically precise stories about ghosts, blending them with liminal mental states like dreams, madness, and memories to paint a detailed portrait of the human mind. Lee loved life, and was always hungry to learn more, to see more, to do more, and her sentences come without the accumulation of dust or the tortured

constipation of James. If she was a man, we’d read her A Phantom Lover rather than his Turn of the Screw. And while Ken Greenhall wrote some great horror novels like Hell Hound, Elizabeth, and Childgrave, all those recently came back into print. What hasn’t come back into print is his final novel, Lenore, which broke his heart and convinced him to give up writing. It’s about the freed slave who posed for Rubens’ 1617 painting, “Four Studies of the Head of a Negro” in Amsterdam and it’s one of the funniest and most surprising historical novels I’ve ever read. I’d honestly put it up there next to Hilary Mantel.

Is there another genre outside of horror, and non-fiction that you would like to write in?

I think horror is one of those genres that can absorb anything into its disgusting oozey body, whether it’s politics, comedy, romance, or historical fiction but I’ve got two horror novels that I’ve been trying to convince publishers to let me write for ages. One is about marriage, and one is about 19th century mediums. For some reason, they seem to think these are “risky” when to me the only risk is doing the same thing over and over again.

Check Out Our Grady Hendrix Reviews:

The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires

Horrorstör

We Sold Our Souls

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REVIEW: The Skald’s Black Verse by Jordan Loyal Short

The Skald’s Black Verse by Jordan Loyal Short is a novel that is hard to describe but if I had to then I would say it is a science fiction fantasy akin to Warhammer 40K. Magic is real (and terrifying) but it is set on a Medieval world at the far reaches of a vast interstellar empire. You know how Star Wars has planets with castles, huts, and vast poverty despite legions of stormtroopers? Yeah, that’s sort of how it is on the planet where the village of Skolja rests.

Skolja is a fascinating village that is a microcosm of culture for their world. It combines Viking, Irish, and Scottish influences while representing the various oppressed peoples throughout history. The empire conquered it about three generations ago and the population has been trying to adjust to it ever since. Some of them choose to try to make the best of the situation, others strike back as bandits, and others simmer with long-festering resentments.

The most interesting character to me is Bohr, who is half-local/half-Imperial and born under inauspicious circumstances (to say the least). Hated by the locals and ignored by the Imperials, he dreams of another life with his girlfriend. Unfortunately, he’s cursed with a berserk fury as well as the ghost of his dead brother. One so furious and terrifying that it causes him to murder a man and drives away his girlfriend when she sees the level of violence inside him.

Bohr discovers that his grandfather, who despises him as a living reminder of his daughter’s abuse, has been grooming him as a weapon against the Imperials for his entire life. The skalds used to wield vast power on their home planet but have been all but wiped out. The power exists in both Bohr and his grandfather, though. One that can tap into dark and insidious powers that summon demons or warp minds.

Part of what I like is the fact that the situation on the world is pretty much hopeless. Revolting against the Empire is silly because they have a vast army, technology, and starships. However, the Empire is so rotten and corrupt they don’t even care about controlling a backward like their planet as well with the people assigned there viewing it as a form of punishment. The locals who collaborate are stuck between the rock and the hard place of trying to deal with the situation practically while having “allies” who utterly disrespect them.

The situation comes to a head when the planet’s moon is set to be struck by a comet that will result in massive amounts of debris falling down on the world below. In the face of a natural disaster that doesn’t care about politics or ethnicity, the people could unite but don’t. Sadly, that feels like a very topical subject.

The world-building is a little too similar to Warhammer 40K in places with the interstellar Empire being positively Medieval and theocratic in its own way despite its advanced technology. I also felt confused by the fact “cold iron” is an extremely rare metal when, in real life, it’s just iron that isn’t properly smelted. If they’d called it adamantium or mithril, I would have been less taken out of the book.

The Skald’s Black Verse is a solid and entertaining novel, perfect for grimdark fans. There are no good answers and everyone is one kind of bastard or another, which I like. I look forward to the sequel.

Read The Skald’s Black Verse by Jordan Loyal Short

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Grimdark Historicals’ Rising Stars

It’s no news to any Grimdark fans that George R.R. Martin is often credited with the rise of grimdark fantasy, a modern form of ‘anti-Tolkien’ fantasy writing. Despite this, it’s often heard that Martin’s inspiration for A Song of Ice and Fire — grimdark’s most successful and popular fantasy series — owes a lot to Tolkien’s work. Curious to note then, that in his foreword to Maurice Druon’s The Iron King, Martin writes that “I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth”. In this same foreword, Martin also claims to have been inspired by historical novelists like Howard Pyle as well as Marcel Druon’s The Accursed Kings series which Martin also goes on to describe as “the original game of thrones”.

All of which would appear to address the following questions: can certain historical novels which inspired so much great grimdark fantasy also be said to be grimdark themselves? Can historical novels produce a genre of fiction that is characterised by disturbing, violent, or bleak subject matter and a dystopian setting? I certainly think that this is the case. After all, historical fiction is too broad a category to helpfully identify many of the sub-genres that abound within it. And it’s not the first time that we’ve seen Grimdark Magazine reviewers review historical fiction titles by the likes of Bernard Cornwell and Giles Kristian.

In this feature on historical fiction, Grimdark Magazine catches up with two highly talented and free-spirited historical novelists, whose work possesses disturbing or violent subject matter, if not also a dystopian setting. British-American author Alex De Campi is a daring and brave British-American career comics writer whose historical fiction debut The Scottish Boy is bursting with suspense. It’s a finely crafted novel which surprised many readers expecting to read an old-fashioned medieval romance about knight errantry, in that it explored certain sexual relations which existed within martial orders, which were highly dangerous at the time.  Our second author to watch is Scots novelist Steven A. Mckay, a relentless and unstoppable force of nature in the historical fiction indie circuit, renowned for his popular Forest Lord series which featured an exciting new portrayal of Robin Hood, as well as his more recent Warrior Druid of Britain series, featuring the larger than life protagonist Bellicus the druid. Interestingly for fans of all things Grimdark, McKay’s writing is also being used in Hood: Outlaws & Legends, an upcoming gritty and violent Xbox/Playstation game about the famous outlaw Robin himself.

Interview with Alex De Campi, author of The Scottish Boy (Unbound, 2020)

JVB: How’s life as a published novelist treating you? Living the dream? And how does being published novelist differ from being a comic book writer?

ADC: Gosh. It’s really cool but also no different at all. I’ve published a bunch of graphic novels, some though big bookstore publishers, and my second prose novel has been bought, so it’s not like I feel a sudden validation of “yes, I am a REAL writer!” I’ve known that for a while now. The challenge at this point is to keep publishing, and try to make the next book better and more successful than the previous. There’s so much I want to do in prose. I have so many stories. I’m actively angry that I have so many deadlines right now — I’m in the production stage on two graphic novels and revision stage on my second prose novel — and all I want to do is write some new stories. But, no time. (All you baby writers out there angry at yourself when you don’t write every day: sssh, it’s okay, you’re still a writer. Write when you can, and forgive yourself when you can’t.)

JVB: Before reaching debut novelist stage, you had to go through the hairy challenges of crowdfunding campaign on the Unbound platform followed by pre-publication serialisation on The Pigeonhole. Was it exciting? Would you do it all over again?

ADC: It was exciting with a big side order of terrifying. I didn’t have a great agent at the time I pitched my book (he was more a comics guy rather than a fiction guy) and he didn’t know what to do with my book or how to market it, but Unbound were honestly fantastic. Their editorial team is one of the best I’ve ever come across; I can’t say enough good things about their professionalism and attention to detail. And hey, it worked! Since crowdfunding The Scottish Boy, I’ve crowdfunded a sci-fi graphic novel I co-wrote with film director Duncan Jones, Madi, on Kickstarter, and I’m about to launch another Kickstarter for True War Stories, a military anthology I’ve been working on for a while. Look, times are weird right now. Crowdfunding is a tremendous way of getting books to people when publishers are on slow-down and shops are closed. I wish I could be Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger and just live quietly on a farm, occasionally burping out a big novel that my agent and publisher take care of while I feed chickens, but you gotta play the cards you have, rather than the ones you wish you had.

JVB: Tell us what fascinated you about the time that The Scottish Boy is set in, what drew you to this historical period, what makes it so special? Do you prefer a man in armour to a man in uniform?

ADC: My favourite books growing up was D’Aulaires’ Greek Myths, a book of Romanian fairy tales, and Howard Pyle’s illustrated King Arthur stories. I’ve always loved knights, but I also love history, so instead of making up a fantasy medieval world out of whole cloth, it was really fun for me — like a puzzle, in many ways — to delve into the actual history and politics of the time and think, how can I make my story work with these constraints? I absolutely am going back to write more in this era; I have a heist book I can’t wait to begin work on.

JVB: The novel is written in the third person present, it reminded me a bit of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. How do you go about choosing a tense? Was it carefully chosen or did you dive straight into it?

ADC: I’m a huge fan of present tense, as someone who always ends up writing a suspense thriller, no matter how I start out. Present tense feels much more immediate to me than past; you’re in the moment. Like with all things involving writing, you try a lot of different things, end up in a bunch of cul-de-sacs, and then you get somewhere and instinctually you know this is right, this is my voice.

JVB: Myles Falworth vs Sandor Clegane: who wins? And tell us more about your influences growing up, what spurred you to write a historical fiction novel about medieval knights. Did you recognise more of your literary influences after you wrote the novel or did you know them all along beforehand? 

ADC: Myles Falworth for sure, if nothing else out of my loyalty to Howard Pyle and because of just how badly GRRM showed his ass at the Hugos last month.

Oh, I know all my influences. The aforementioned books of myths and tales, and then folks like Thomas Pynchon, Italo Calvino, Edward Albee, Cormac McCarthy a little bit… pulp writers like Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler. Film is also a really big influence on me, and I think that and my comics background helps me as a storyteller to hone in on the most important elements of each scene to describe. Everyone always thinks I’m very descriptive, and I’m absolutely not, it’s all an illusion. It’s just, the few things I do describe, you remember them.

JVB: Those prolonged, gay sex scenes between two men. Written by a woman. How did you pull them off? Were they overdone? What did it feel like, writing them?

ADC: I did a lot of my early practice writing in fanfic, which often involves a lot of explicit scenes — and is very accepting of them. And you sort of forget, coming from that world, that a lot of stories aren’t explicit, or the explicit bits are really badly written. Writing sex is fun. It’s like writing a fight scene, except horizontal. There’’s the same considerations of blocking (in the theatrical / staging sense), momentum, and creating an emotional arc within a primarily physical scene. I think my books will always have a bunch of sex in them; it’s just how I write.

JVB: Probably an understatement to say that yours is a novel that breaks boundaries, which is often the case with grimdark. Should this always be the purpose of art?

ADC: No. I think the purpose of art is catharsis, and artists should not necessarily consciously be trying to break boundaries (therein lies quite a lot of self-satisfied but ultimately unenjoyable work). You shouldn’t be constrained by societal mores or audience expectation, but it’s a little cheap to be deliberately tweaking your audience to create a reaction.

JVB: What other projects are you working on? Will there be a sequel to The Scottish Boy?

ADC: There’ll hopefully be a sister book to The Scottish Boy — the aforementioned heist novel. Other than that,  I’ve got a graphic novel, Dracula Motherf***ker, coming out from Image Comics in October, and then Madi and True War Stories out in November. My second novel, Heartbreak Incorporated, comes out next year.

Interview with Steven A. McKay, author the upcoming ‘The Northern Throne’

JVB: So you went from writing original and historically respectable tales about the easily identifiable and legendary Robin Hood, to crafting your own legendary character of the druid Bellicus, protagonist of your The Warrior Druid Of Britain Chronicles. Which was harder to pull off?

SAM: Good question to start with! I would say neither was really “hard”, exactly. With the Robin Hood legend there’s an element of expectancy, as fans always want to see their favourite characters and, while they want them to be recognisable, they also want them to be realistic and for an author to put their own stamp on them. But I didn’t find it hard to do that, because the original characters and tales were already so rich and layered that I could just take the bits I liked and add to them. So, to an extent, that made my job easier, as the foundations were already there, I just had to build on top of them.

Now, you might think it would be a breeze to create new characters for my druid series, because, starting from scratch, everything would be from my own head so no-one could say it was “right” or “wrong”, BUT! Of course, everyone has an idea of what a druid was really like, and their religion or spirituality or whatever, so I inevitably had readers telling me “the druids didn’t do that” or even, genuinely, “the druids didn’t have haircuts like that!” As you know, you can’t please everyone all the time and there’s no point trying. I’ve had great fun coming up with these characters and stories and people seem to enjoy them which is all that matters really.

JVB: The period in which The Druid and Song Of The Centurion take place is very interesting, why did you choose a post-Roman period rather than a historical period when the druids were in their pomp?

SAM: Well, I thought it would be interesting to look at Britain when the Romans had left, and the changes that took place when the security they’d provided for the native tribes was gone. If I’d gone further back to a time when the druids were most powerful, it would have meant a big Roman presence and, to be honest, that market is completely saturated now. I wanted to do something a little different. So, going forward to a time when the druids were struggling to maintain, or rebuild, some kind of a foothold after the Romans had driven them underground, and the Saxons and Dalriadans and Picts were all trying to take lands and wealth from the rest of the tribes, seemed like an interesting idea. Especially since Christianity was on the rise. Of course, setting it in the fifth century also allowed me to use some Roman elements, like the centurion, so, best of both worlds really!

At one point I thought about making the druids more of a connected brother/sisterhood, almost like the Bene Gesserit in the Dune novels (the early ones of which are incredible) but…That would have been far too ambitious and would be more suited to a period when, as you say, the druids were in their pomp, like Julius Caesar’s time. By the early fifth century their network had been pretty much destroyed by the Romans which, thankfully, saved me from trying to create that kind of immensely detailed backdrop!

JVB: What do you love most about historical fiction nowadays, what do you hate most about historical fiction nowadays?

SAM: I love the fact that there’s so much available, and with the rise of Kindle it’s easier to get and cheaper too. Twenty years ago, all you could really find in the library or the book shops were novels about the Romans. There wasn’t even all that much Viking fiction! Nowadays, you can find all sorts of stuff, from Glyn Iliffe’s excellent Greek mythology books, to Matthew Harffy’s Saxon tales, Gordon Doherty’s Hittite novels and the excellent Audible productions of Rebecca Gable’s medieval stories. There’s everything you could want, all periods, and it’s easily accessible and fairly cheap. I think it’s fantastic.

As for hating anything? I can’t really say. There’s certain periods, and themes, that I personally don’t like – time-slip romance stuff for example, where a semi-nude medieval Scotsman in a kilt (who looks nothing like the Scotsmen in my town, by the way!) interacts with a modern female time-traveller. But I certainly don’t HATE it, I just don’t read it myself, you know? Good luck to anyone who enjoys that stuff, we all have our own tastes in things and I bet, for example, most people would bloody hate the music I listen to when I’m writing.

JVB: Your characters in the Bellicus chronicles are very deep and textured. They are also fallible and things also don’t go to plan, which is a true grimdark trait. They’re often also conflicted and grey. Can you talk us through the inspiration behind your characters?

SAM: Well, I have some rules for my books and one of them is to make the characters somewhat realistic. Even real villains have SOME redeeming qualities, you know, serial killers like the Golden State Killer, who are unquestionably the devil incarnate but have a spouse and children who love them and have no idea what they get up to at night. So, you can’t write realistic villains if you’re only ever going to bring out their dark side. I was quite proud of how I wrote the Sheriff in my Forest Lord books – I made him a dangerous foe but not like the cartoon villains of many previous incarnations in Robin Hood stories. He wanted to stop the “goodies” but not in some crazed, sociopathic way. And it’s the same for more heroic figures – they should have bad sides or weaknesses too, as we all have. It’s important to show those things, but I do like to have something of a line between each side. I just find it more satisfying as a writer and a reader to root for the “good guys”.

Now, with all that said, there was one “baddie” in my Forest Lord books who was pretty much psychopathic. I decided that, just once, I would give my heroes someone to fight who would stop at nothing to cause them pain. I think it made for an exciting, satisfying story but I wouldn’t make a habit out of it. It seems too easy somehow. People are more grey in real life, but we all, whether it’s someone living a thousand years ago or a thousand years in the future (probably) are driven by similar things like love, acquisition of wealth/power/status, loyalty, religion, lust, nostalgia, and so on. If you keep that in mind when creating characters, it helps.

JVB: The Druid, first instalment in the Bellicus chronicles, has to be one of the best historical novels I’ve read in a very long time, in terms of plot and suspense. Can you tell us a bit about your inspiration behind this historical fiction book? And maybe also a bit about the writers who most inspired you to write your own stories?

SAM: Thank you for the amazing compliment! I was inspired to write a story about a druid when I saw an old 1980’s TV show here in the UK, called Knightmare, being rerun. Merlin was in it, the stereotypical white-bearded old wizard and I thought, “Why is he always portrayed like that? He wasn’t always an old man, surely?” So that sparked off the whole idea of making my druid a shaven-headed, massive, young warrior. And when it came to giving him a sidekick I thought, well, how about a couple of wardogs? That’s a bit different, and it makes writing battle scenes interesting because it’s not the usual swordplay or headbutting or throat punching, now you have dogs attacking people too! Along with the headbutting and throat punches, obviously.

I should admit, Merlin does make a short appearance in The Druid and he has a long white beard but, hey, like the Robin Hood characters, people expect certain things. You don’t want to mess too much with a well-loved formula…

In terms of who influenced me, Bernard Cornwell is always the first name I mention. His King Arthur trilogy was just so good and made a huge impression on me when I first read it about twenty years ago. They were the pinnacle for me. Then there were guys like Ben Kane and Douglas Jackson and, more from a fantasy standpoint, David Gemmell. Wow, that guy could really write a great hero. Sometimes it’s good to break out of your preferred genre and read other things though. I surprised myself recently by listening to Jane Eyre on Audible and loving it! That led me to Rebecca and all of Daphne du Maurier’s work and then Wuthering Heights (which is certainly grim, dark and not much fun) and they inspired me to write my own Lucia which is very different to any of my other books.

JVB: Your next book is the third instalment of The Warrior Druid Of Britain Chronicles. Are you stopping at a trilogy or might the story of Bellicus go on? Any other historical periods or genres you’re next keen to visit with your writing?

SAM: Oh, the druid series will go on for more than three novels. I enjoy writing the characters so much, and Bellicus is still only in his late twenties, that I don’t see any reason to stop yet. There’s a lot to be done with a warrior-druid in this period and I really hope to explore it all, especially now with Arthur and Merlin coming into the story a bit more after being mere side characters in the first book.

Once The Northern Throne is finished my Roman slave-girl novel, Lucia, will be published in October on Kindle and in print, having been bought by Audible and exclusively available on that platform for the past year. Now that book is truly GRIM and DARK, being about a little girl who’s taken into slavery by the Romans and spends her whole life living and working in a villa in Britannia. I did a lot of research for that one and, honestly, it was hard trying to keep it light in places as the things those people suffered back then were horrific…But I was glad to finally give them a voice, because no-one at the time bothered to ask them how they felt or record anything like that, it simply didn’t matter to the people in power. I don’t think there’s another book like Lucia out there and I really hope it does well on Kindle.

After that, I’ll do another mystery novella with Tuck and John from my Forest Lord series, similar to Faces of Darkness last year which was loosely based on an unsolved mysterious stalking/death case from the 1980’s. Modern murder/unsolved cases translate well to a medieval setting I think and, again, those characters are a lot of fun to write so, although novellas don’t sell very well, I will do more because I enjoy writing them.

And then, phew, onto the next druid novel!

JVB: George R.R. Martin once famously categorised authors as ‘architects’ or ‘gardeners’. Architects plan everything ahead of time, whereas the gardeners sort of find out the story as it grows. Which camp do you fall into?

SAM: Definitely a gardener. You need SOME planning – some kind of foundation to build upon – but once that’s sorted, I like to let a book write itself as I go along, mostly. Personally, I would struggle to come up with a full novel’s worth of good plot ideas in one go – I get started writing and let chapter ideas pop into my head when I’m driving or in the shower or whatever. That way my brain doesn’t need to work too hard all at once! The way I write, a book is a snapshot of my personality over the course of six or seven months, rather than a few days.

In one of my Forest Lord books I had planned to kill off a certain person, mainly because I found his name irritating believe it or not, but, as I was sitting writing the scene the characters seemed to take on a life of their own and the whole thing changed. I ended up with another person getting shot by a crossbow bolt and I was as surprised as he was! It added a whole new element to the book so, although it messed up my plan, I went with it and I’m glad I did. Some things are just meant to be.

JVB: What can fans of Bellicus expect from The Northern Throne?

SAM: Well, going back to your earlier question about the characters being fallible, that comes to the fore much more in this book than it has in the previous druid stories. I won’t spoil it, but it certainly gives a certain person more of a human element. One of my beta readers didn’t like that part, and wanted me to change it, but my editor thought it was one of the best things about the whole book, and I agree, so it stayed in!

In general, The Northern Throne is a fleshing out of the situation in Northern Britain at the time, with the tribes vying for supremacy, while, in the background, the Saxons try to take control of the lands in the south as Arthur and Merlin try to hold them back. This is a darker book than Song of the Centurion, partially because it was written mostly during the COVID lockdown, and my feelings of fear and imprisonment translated to the novel without me planning it that way (a benefit of making it up as I go along rather than setting it down in stone before I even begin). As with all my books though, there’s a sense of hope throughout, and I think The Northern Throne is a satisfying, exciting read that really fleshes out the characters and leaves things wide open for the next in the series!

GdM reviews of historical fiction

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Review: The Worm at the Feast by Mark Brendan

I must admit, it took me about three or four attempts over the course of a week to trudge through the first four pages of The Worm at the Feast. Admittedly, I am glad that I could finally make it to the first line of dialogue because the story is great. Unfortunately, Brendan takes a Henry James approach to his description of the initial setting, with long drawn out descriptions and heavy-handed usage of five-dollar words.

If you ever wondered what every distinct detail of the laboratory and study of Henry Cornelius Agrippa looked like, Brendan lays it out for you in the first four pages. Before we ever meet his anti-hero, the necromancer Henrik Grubb, he gives us a good idea on how the man spends his time. From the engraved skull mortar and pestle to the two headed goat floating in a jar of formaldehyde, we get every, single, detail.

All that said, once I finally wrapped my head around the fact that this was a take on the classic Gothic Horror story, much in the vein of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with a heavy dose of Lovecraftian Horror, I could truly embrace the novella.

Brendan uses an embedded narrative to tell his tale, or should I say, the tale of Henrik Grubb as he dictates the story to his assistant, a mute boy named Jack. All the while, he rushes to finish his penultimate experiment as the villagers are literally banging at his door with torches, axes, and muskets.

He brought out the temper and mindset of most of his characters by their words rather than their actions. I enjoyed Brendan’s use of dialogue. With that and Brendan’s ability to shift gears in the narrative smoothy, upping the tension with a sense of immediacy, he could keep me on the edge of my seat throughout the story.

Without giving too much away in the story, Brendan somehow made it a pleasure to watch this despicable man murder his way to his goals. He captured all the aspects of Gothic and Lovecraftian Horror in the story as if he had a checklist sitting on his desk.  From Grubb’s nemesis, Master Van Hass, to graverobbing, to macabre experiments with human pineal glands, this story had it all.

Read The Worm at the Feast by Mark Brendan

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REVIEW: Bystander 27 by Rik Hoskin

Bystander 27 is a superhero novel told from the point-of-view of an everyday man. Jon Hayes is an ordinary Joe, or as ordinary as a Joe can be if he’s an ex-Navy Seal who’s seen action in South America and the Middle East. While Hayes might be a normal enough guy, the parallel New York City he resides in is populated with a roster of superpowered heroes and villains — “costumes” in the parlance of this alternate world — who regularly duke it out in confrontations across the city.

The superhero mythology in Bystander 27 leans more toward the tongue-in-cheek and goofy variety than the visceral and brooding type. Think Spiderman, not Watchmen. Villains such as Morgan Le Fey summon faeries and transform swathes of New York into medieval landscapes; heroes such as Captain Light fight off flying saucers and invading aliens. Physics and logic are mere afterthoughts. Jon’s world is what you might call “deep cartoon” territory.

It’s always going to be a big ask to write a novel where the protagonist is an everyday man in a world dominated by superpowered stars. How do you make this average guy relevant in a world where the heavy hitters can rip holes in the fabric of space and time?

This novel tackles the problem by loosely structuring itself as a mystery: something is fishy with the whole superhero/supervillain caper, and it’ll take an average guy – a bystander – to crack it open. Jon’s impetus for investigating is born when his wife dies as a consequence of a battle between two top-tier “costumes”. During the battle, Hayes’ pregnant wife is summarily flattened by a helicopter knocked out of the sky by the villain Jade Shade in a confrontation with Captain Light.

Haunted by her death, Hayes channels his grief into an obsession with the “costumes” who routinely devastate the boroughs of his city. His obsession leads him to trawl through reams of video footage capturing “costumes” in action, and during one of these sessions he finds, impossibly, the faces of himself, his wife, and a version of his unborn daughter in one of the crowds. What does this mean? Is someone meddling with time, with the fabric of reality? Is there a deeper conspiracy at work?

I definitely got undertones of Garth Ennis’ The Boys, in that we have an average man being inducted into the shady world of the superpowered, although The Boys is much darker and cynical in its worldview. Hayes is also very much a loner in his feud with the “costumes”; he doesn’t have a mentor like Butcher to initiate him into a life of lawless mayhem. In fact there is only a skeletal supporting cast of characters in the novel. Jon has no close friends to speak of with his social interactions being limited to generally brusque and businesslike exchanges.

Oddly—and perhaps subversively—there is no single arch-antagonist spanning the whole narrative of the novel. Jon is fighting the system as a whole, or the system as he perceives it, which is one where costumed heroes and villains duke it out with no regard for the common citizens, the little people like him and his dead wife. That said, he certainly engages in his share of fisticuffs with assorted foes, but these are set-piece confrontations and not a struggle against a larger, hidden foe.

There is much to like about the novel. The flashy battles between “costumes” where Jon is a bit player or mere spectator, or the fights between Jon and “costumes” he’s targeted, are well-written, action-packed and genuinely entertaining. There’s an inherent blockbuster thrill to scenes that showcase ludicrous catastrophe and off-the-wall escapades that are only possible in a world where people can bend time, fly, and wrench helicopters out of the sky.

That said, Jon’s motivation never feels sufficiently robust to carry him through the novel. What he actually wants, his purpose, often seems nebulous, even towards the climax. He doesn’t want revenge, he doesn’t want to find a way to return his dead wife to the living, and solving the mystery of the faces in the crowd doesn’t unflaggingly motivate him, either. The mystery aspect rubs shoulders somewhat uneasily with Jon’s desire to confront Captain Light over the death of his wife.

His introverted character is part and parcel of who he is in the novel, but this enforced isolation limits his development somewhat and makes him a difficult guy to get behind and cheer for.

If you’re a superhero comic book fan Bystander 27 is definitely worth a look, with the caveat that the novel is cut from a different mould to the classic hero vs villain superhero tale. However, those not so enamoured with superheroes may find Hayes’ escapades a little too unrelatable.

Read Bystander 27 by Rik Hoskin

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REVIEW: The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind by Jackson Ford

Jackson Ford’s story The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is a fun and irreverent as the title suggests. I laughed, cheered, and booed in equal measure while reading it. 

My favorite protagonist type is snarky. I enjoy a good bit of snark and a well-placed quip. It takes quite a bit of skill on the part of an author to produce a perfectly timed bon mot and have the restraint to know when to use it. I also enjoy it when people lose their shit and are fed up with your antics. This describes Teagan, the main protagonist of this story, in a nutshell. Teagan is like most young women living in Los Angeles. She works a job she puts up with and has weird semi-sorta friendships with those she works. She also has an overbearing boss and big dreams. 

All of these things are factually true. 

Except that Teagan works for a clandestine operation founded by the government that uses her abilities, namely moving sh*t with her mind, to acquire information and stick it to the bad guys. Whomever the current bad guy is, though she never kills anyone, she tries to do as much good as she can. Her weird relationships are with her coworkers, who have almost as strange backstories as she does. And her boss is a terrifying governmental agent and who will put her in a cage if Teagan steps out of line. A literal cage. 

But Teagan has big dreams of owning a restaurant and eating the best food. As you can probably tell, Teagan is a cool character. Very much a normal maladjusted twentyish woman except for that one small thing. A long time ago, Teagan got tinkered with, and something extraordinary happened; she acquired the ability to move items with her mind. Nothing huge, she isn’t moving buildings. But up to three hundred pounds and ten feet from her, Teagan can reach out and grasp inorganic objects with her mind. How or why is not important, she just can. She is an X-Men character who drinks a lot of coffee and swears a lot. 

In the first chapter of the book Teagan is plummeting from the top of a skyscraper; she has ten seconds to live. Her day gets worse from there. 

“Superheroes in comics and in movies pull off that secret-identity shit all the time. But this isn’t a movie, or a comic, and I am definitely not a superhero. Secret Identity? I can barely pull of the identity that I have. I won’t do that to Nic. I won’t put him in that situation.”

As I mentioned, the story starts with a plummet off of a very tall building with a screaming coworker in her arms. Things have gone pear-shaped very quickly on a job, and the only thing Teagan could think to do was to throw them off the 82nd floor of a building and hope for the best. Her teammate has agoraphobia; this does not engender team unity between them. Most of her team considers her a strange liability. Especially the woman who is screaming in Teagan’s arms because she believes she is about to die. 

They survive. 

But later, while Teagan is out getting some most excellent takeout, a dead body is found with a piece of rebar wrapped neatly around his neck. Using her powers in such a way is verboten. The murderer would have to be a person with telekinesis, and Teagan is the only person who has that? Right? Well, Teagan has 22 hours to find out who did it and prove her innocence, or it is back to government labs in Waco, Texas, for the rest of her days. 

“The state hadn’t helped. The state – states plural, actually simply didn’t care. He was bounced from office to office, and the trail ran cold within weeks.”

There is a compelling sense of urgency in this novel. 22 Hours feels like we are living Teagan’s experiences in real-time. That sense of urgency drives the plot beats from one moment to the next. It also causes Teagan to make poor choices because, at this point, Teagan is a woman at the end of her rope. She is out of telekinetic juice, out of coffee, and out of time. 

This story is told from the perspective of two people, mostly alternating chapter by chapter. We have Teagan, the main protagonist, and a harried good guy, and then we have Jake, the antagonist. Jake is, in most ways, a complete opposite of Teagan. They have similar backstories. Teagan was orphaned in her teens and was picked up by a government agency who then experimented on her for five years. Jake has power but never showed anyone. He was also orphaned, but at a much younger age. He bounced from home to home in the system until he aged out, stole a car, and left.

Where Teagan has kindness in her heart, Jake feels damaged. It is sad in a way. It feels like Jake could have been a good person, had the circumstances been different, but he is missing that moral core that guides good choices. We occasionally see it when he questions his own decisions, “Wait I don’t want to kill anyone…” But he pushes through that in a singular focus on his goals. In that, I liked that Jake wasn’t a cookie-cutter character. He had more depth to him than the typical bad guy. Their two stories swirl around each other for most of the book—their actions directly affecting each other, but never quite meeting until the story plays out.

Some of the best parts of this novel are the interactions that Teagan has with her coworkers. As much as the 22-hour time limit affects Teagan’s future, it also very much affects the team as a whole. Her choices, and the information that she can find directly influences the rest of the coworkers’ lives. This incentivizes them to help her as much as possible, even if she annoys the hell out of them. It isn’t just Teagan who has a wild ride over the next 22-hours, it is Paul, Carlos, Annie, and Reggie who are going along with her. 

“…They tased me. After that they got smarter. Kept me dosed.”

The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind is fun and silly. Teagan makes stupid choices and shows her naivete, but damn, is this an engaging story. Teagan’s revelations over the 22 hours allowed her character to expand and be a bit more than just action. This growth is an essential and wise choice on the part of Jackson Ford. It made this story more than action and wise-cracking. It gave it some heart, some sorrow, and a little pluck. 

This is the perfect kind of book to kick back with after a long day and enjoy it. I highly recommend this because we readers want some psychokinesis fun and to cheer a character on. Teagan kicked a lot of ass, even when she was getting her ass kicked, and I am looking forward to the next book.

Read The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t With Her Mind by Jackson Ford

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REVIEW: The Complete Nemesis the Warlock, Volume 1 by Pat Mills

A xenophobic human empire in a dark future, led by an undead tyrant. A hyperspace transport system centred on Earth. An army of masked zealots, divided into arcane chapters and supported in battle by bipedal war machines. A future where Earth has long been devastated by nuclear war, its population dwelling in twisted, claustrophobic tunnels and transport routes. There is much that may seem familiar in Nemesis the Warlock.

This review will restrict itself in scope to the first omnibus edition of Nemesis the Warlock, collecting the first four books, published in 2015. These originally appeared in weekly issues of 2000 AD between 1980 and 1983. The sole writing credit goes to Pat Mills; the bulk of the art was by Kevin O’Neill, with Jesus Redondo and Bryan Talbot.

Termight – once Earth – is ruled by the despotic Grand Master, Torquemada. His intolerant rule is opposed by the illusive Nemesis, legend to the oppressed aliens and masses of this empire. Nemesis in time is revealed to the reader as a demonic alien, seemingly impervious to harm and possessed of supernatural powers. While he is certainly sympathetic next to Torquemada (whose sole virtue would appear to be perseverance), the effect of his black humour, Mephistophelean pacts and Chaos magic are continually unsettling. Anyone with a Great-Uncle Baal does not immediately suggest themselves as a paragon.

There is no beginning as such to the story. Nemesis’s conflict with Torquemada has seemingly lasted for some time. There is no secret origin story for him, even if we see some traces of Torquemada’s youth. Likewise, the history of Termight is only loosely sketched out. Exposition is light, as we might expect from a weekly serial. Characterisation is likewise broad; it is no mistake that the nakedly unpleasant Torquemada is named for an architect of the Spanish Inquisition. There is some joy however, not just in watching these adversaries spar, but in the reveal of their characters as circumstances press them.

The art assists in this. This is all in black and white, though a coloured ‘Deviant Edition’ exists elsewhere. O’Neill sets the tone of the serial – it is his detailed, scratchy artwork that best defines the look of Nemesis. We are treated to views of the grotesque – twisted yet sympathetic aliens, bullish humans in demonic masks, sinuous underground tunnels, Gothic starships. The grotesque never quite becomes the gruesome, as a thread of comedy runs through much of Nemesis the Warlock.

This is not ill-placed. The outlandish nature of some of the scenes in Nemesis demand occasional acknowledgement. Other elements will certainly seem out of place, such as a surprising new alien race, or the appearance as minor but persistent characters of other 2000 AD mainstays. This is perhaps as a result of reading something published as a serial in a collection. However, the strengths of Nemesis the Warlock persist: the detailed, ruined worlds, the gleeful malevolence and the driven, duelling figures at its centre.

Nemesis the Warlock deserves four stars; it should be high on the reading list of the grimdark aficionado – for reasons of context if for no other.

Read The Complete Nemesis the Warlock, Volume 1 by Pat Mills

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