Adrian Collins's Blog, page 239

One of Michael R. Fletcher's Hassebrands

As a part of developing his Manifest Delusions world for Beyond Redemption, Michael R. Fletcher wrote a series of short stories. We were luck enough to snag one for issue #6 (due out 15 Jan '16). It features a hassebrand, an early version of the character Gehirn would become.

I then gave the story to Jason Deem, who came up with the following piece for the cover of issue #6, named, aptly, Hassebrand. 

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GdM #6 goes up on the 1st of January 2016.

If you'd like to see more of Jason's work, head on over to his website. If you'd like to purchase his work for your own book or website, keep and eye out for his upcoming page on the GdM marketplace.

When the Heavens Fall: Grimdark for the High Fantasy Lover

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When the Heavens Fall
By Marc Turner
Review by Matthew Cropley

 

Can traditional high fantasy be grimdark? Apparently, yes.

Marc Turner’s debut novel When the Heavens Fall showed me that fantasy can be saturated with magic without losing any of the grit. It manages to deliver an old-school quest narrative without succumbing to the clichés and stagnation that drove me away from classic fantasy and in to the loving embrace of grimdark.

Mayot Mencada, a necromancer, has stolen the Book of Lost Souls and unleashed death magic to blight the land. This focus of power attracts all manner of gods, monsters, and mortals, some hoping to claim the power for themselves and others simply seeking to destroy it. Luker, a pragmatic magical warrior, only hopes to find some sign of his old master, who disappeared tracking Mayot down. Romany, the self-indulgent high-priestess of a shadowy god called the Spider, seeks to manipulate Mayot to her own ends. Ebon, a prince tormented by spirits, only wants to save his kingdom. Finally, Parolla, a young woman cursed with a darkly magical lineage, seeks to use the Book of Lost Souls as a gateway into the underworld itself. Each of these four separate strands hurtles together, telling different sides of a story that comes together in an explosive climax.

On the surface the plot may sound like the same sort of thing we’ve all heard a thousand times, and yet, Turner manages to put a spin on it that kept me interested until the very end. The world is dark, the morality ambiguous, and the characters grey. High fantasy is given a grimdark twist and the best of both is brought to the table. Turner’s magical world let me recapture the sense of wonder that drew me to fantasy as a child without sacrificing maturity, which is no mean feat.

Luker, Romany, Ebon and Parolla all feel like real, flawed people and they’re easy to connect to. Each of them, barring Ebon, is involved for selfish reasons, and a lot of innocents get hurt along the way. Even Ebon, with his seemingly heroic motivations, is a tortured and troubled man just trying to do what he believes is right. Each main character is supported by a well-developed secondary cast, many of whom become highly memorable, such as Jenna, a hard-drinking, hard-fighting assassin who presents surprisingly vulnerability at times. The point of view switches frequently but I found that there was no character I ever wanted to skip over. Each brings something new to the table and provides a different insight into the world Turner has created.

Magic seeps out of every crack. Living gods bicker, monsters lurk, and every detail leaves you feeling as if absolutely anything could happen next, yet everything feels like part of a coherent whole. Even the deities are decidedly human and there are multiple layers to everything that’s going on. The book focuses on necromancy, and while this is used a lot in fantasy Turner managed to give it an original spin. In his world, the undead aren’t shambling monsters, but rather entirely normal people with all of their mental faculties, except for the fact that they are utterly controlled by the necromancer. This makes for some interesting confrontations with friends who have died only to be enslaved as undead, all too aware of what they’re being forced to do but powerless to stop it.

The world has a living, breathing history that manages to convey itself without becoming irrelevant. Intriguing little titbits are snuck in as natural extensions of the plot, coloured by the views and voices of the characters. There are very few, if any, annoying exposition dumps, which I found to be a blessing. With warriors, mages, monsters, ancient civilisations and warring gods, it feels like Dungeons and Dragons, or a series like the Belgariad, but all grown up. The book managed to both make me realise how horrifying a magical world would be, while somehow simultaneously making me want to live there.

Despite the mountain of positives, it took a long time for the plot to really take off. For the first quarter we spend time with our four protagonists getting to know them and their worlds, and while it’s all quite compelling it didn’t keep me obsessively turning the pages like some books do from page one. I found myself asking “is this all going to pay off at the end?”

It does. By the time I’d finished the whole book, every character arc or plot point brought up early on had reached a climax, and I retroactively appreciated everything. Despite When the Heavens Fall being the first instalment in The Chronicles of the Exile, the book is a self-contained story and the climax is as satisfying as you could ask for.

Something particularly noteworthy is Turner’s treatment of gender. Half the point of view characters are women, and it never feels as if they’re playing second fiddle to the men. Each woman is a three-dimensional, well-developed character in their own right. I enjoyed relationships such as Jenna’s friendship with Luker, which works great as a platonic friendship but with possibilities of something more underneath. For me, it didn’t even matter whether there was any romantic feeling as they have a beautifully written camaraderie that transcends love without shunning it. Platonic relationships across genders are something that I don’t think we see enough of and it was great to see one done so well.

Turner’s style has been rightly compared by many to Steven Erikson and Joe Abercrombie. He switches point of view frequently, but I never found myself wondering whose head I was in as each character has a distinctive voice. Turner’s writing is impressively economical and I felt as if every word I read propelled me forwards. He doesn’t get bogged down in unnecessary backstory or world-building, and everything introduced is relevant in some way to the main plot. Action is frequent and well-written, and Luker’s fight scenes were particularly fun to read since he has a telekinesis ability akin to the Force in Star Wars which, used creatively and blended with swordplay, makes for some thrilling combat. Most of the fight-scenes are about finding a creative solution to beat the opponent and they read more like chess-games rather than two people simply hitting each other, and as the plot progresses and the stakes get higher the fights become more desperate and captivating.

All up, it’s a good read that offers to scratch a different itch from most grimdark. If you want a novel that harkens back to classic fantasy without sacrificing any of the grit, Marc Turner’s When The Heavens Fall is for you.

I give When the Heavens Fall four grimdark lords out of five.

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To purchase When the Heavens Fall, use our purchase links below to support the author and Grimdark Magazine.

If you're an Aussie resident, support Galaxy Bookstore by clicking on the image below to make your paperback purchase.

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Issue #6 release delay (and other bits of good news)

The Bad
Issue #6 Pushed Back

Trying to release an issue on the 1st of Jan, right on the back end of the busiest time of year at our day jobs, Xmas, New Years, and the general crazy season can be a full on thing to accomplish, if we're being honest. Amongst all the madness, our visual designer has come down with something pretty nasty in the last week and was unable to finish the cover design based on Jason Deem's awesome depiction of Michael R. Fletcher's Hassebrand on time. Our hand has unfortunately been forced, and the release of issue #6 will be delayed to 15 Jan, 2016.

To those of you who were just itching to brush off your New Years Day hangovers like The Bloody Nine brushes off an axe wound and get stuck into this issue, we're sorry. Sometimes stuff just doesn't work out. We'll try to make it up to you with the good news!

 

The Good

Following the bad news, I have some good. In 2016 we're doing 2 things that we think are pretty fucking cool. Not quite a Ragnarok-bringing-out-Blackguards-2 level of coolness, but still pretty up there.

New issue covers

We will re-release of cover art for issues 1, 2, and 3, with a completely new piece of cover art for issue 1. Interesting story; the chainmail style cover art for issue #1 is not how we'd planned it to look. Our wonderful designer put that together from scratch ON PUBLICATION DAY after the artist we'd commissioned for the issue had to pull out the night before (after a deadline extension).

Anyhow, check out this new cover art by Jason Deem for issue #1, based on Mark Lawrence's Red Kent from his short story Bad Seed. Hopefully it'll take a little sting out of the delayed release of issue #6!

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Awesome, right? Even better, if you can produce a receipt for your purchases, I'll reissue the files at no cost to make sure your Kindle, iPhone / iPad, Nook, laptop, etc has all the newest artwork and branding. Just email me at adrian@grimdarkmagazine.com with the subject, "REISSUE" and include your receipt.

New versions will be available prior to 15 Jan.

GdM Marketplace

The second piece of awesome news is for you authors (especially the self-publishers) and webmasters out there. The GdM Marketplace will be opening up at the same time as the issue #6 release and will provide you with easy access to the professionals we trust with the creation of our magazine. We're starting with Jason Deem (cover art) and Mike Myers (editing), with more services to come. 

You've seen their work in action in our issues and on our blog, and very soon you'll be able to purchase their services directly through our web store.

Happy New years!

Thank you for all of your support this year. Every time you've purchased an issue, jumped in on a grimdark conversation, or shared something from our social media, you've helped spread the word about Grimdark Magazine and kept us all pushing to do bigger and better.

The team and I can't thank you enough, and we're looking forward to continuing our work and introducing you all to a project we're all pretty excited about, soon!

Stay safe, tell your mates you love 'em, and enjoy bringing in 2016 with a bang!

The GdM team pick their grimdark favourites for 2015

2015 has been a pretty damned epic year for grimdark fiction. Our team has spent the last year reading about hundreds of gritty anti-heroes fighting their way through plenty of dark worlds. In our downtime, though, we still love to read and review works by those authors we idolise. In the team's view, these are the authors who've really hit it out of the park this year.

 

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Sean Grigsby | Beyond Redemption by Michael R. Fletcher 

Beyond Redemption is the grimdarkest book of 2015, and arguably, the decade. The characters are selfish, bloodthirsty, and fun as hell to read.

You can find our review of Beyond Redemption on our blog.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Galaxy Bookstore

 

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Tom Smith | The Liar's Key by Mark Lawrence 
The new grimdark book of the year for me was The Liar's Key by Mark Lawrence. Lawrence's writing just keeps getting better and better - clever wordsmithing, use of Norse mythology in what was already a unique setting and somehow making you enjoy a character as snarky and cowardly as Prince Jalan after coming off of ruthless Jorg. How can you top that? And then there is Snorri who is a total badass and probably the closest in toughness to Abercrombie's Logen Ninefingers I've see yet. Anyone who loves grimdark and hasn't read this series yet is doing themselves a disservice.

You can find our review for The Liar's Key in GdM #5.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Galaxy Bookstore

 

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Mike Myers | The Mechanical by Ian Tregellis 

The Mechanical is a grimdark orgy of sci-fi, steampunk, fantasy, and historical fiction. The year is 1926, and the Dutch control Europe with alchemically powered, sentient robot soldiers. The French have moved their government into exile in the New World and hope to uncover a secret that can help even the odds in the battle for Empire. Psychologically complex, sympathetic, fucked up characters fuck and kill each other, and only the robots seem sane in this tour de force SFF novel.

You can find our review for The Mechanical in GdM #5.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Galaxy Bookstore

 

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Matthew Cropley | Half The World by Joe Abercrombie 

The book has everything you’d expect from Abercrombie, with a large cast of interesting characters that undertake a year-long voyage. The story is told through the eyes of Thorn and Brand, two teenage warriors who couldn’t be more different. The changes they undergo throughout the journey are never what you’d expect, and the plot is always captivating. However, for me, the best part of the book was seeing the development of Father Yarvi, the protagonist from book one, who has become a ruthless manipulator that you like despite yourself. Much of the story is used to set up Half a War, the final book in the trilogy, which promises to give a hugely satisfying payoff to several interweaving stories. Lord Grimdark does it again.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Galaxy Bookstore

 

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Kristy Mika | The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson 

Because it gave me the 'holy wow's... I sat for a long time afterwards thinking "Shit. You've ruined my soul!", and cursed like a sailor at Dickinson, for being the true master of maniacal evil. I actually annoyed people reading it with child-like badgering of "where you up to?" and "have you finished yet?" interspersed with "hurry up! hurry up!" , so I wasn't the only person to have experienced it. I'm usually a very solitary reader, but this I needed to nut out with others so I could let it go! I haven't been so excited about a series in a long time, and yet I'm slightly scared of it. Will I get through it unscathed? The path it's on is so ominous, I don't know if I'm emotionally equipped to handle it! Explosive, diverse, progressive, brutal, beautiful.. Just 'holy wow!'

You can find Kristy's review of The Traitor Baru Cormorant on her blog.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Galaxy Bookstore

 

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Joe Price | Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski 

Though it may be on the lighter side of grimdark ever since I read The Last Wish on my brothers behest two years ago, it was inspiring to me, and with Swords of Destiny just coming out in the US, I have been avidly reading it since day one.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Amazon[image error]

 

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Jeff Suwak | Wild Hunt by LJ McDowall

The story is not perfect and, by virtue of its brevity, has a modest scope. But, I have found that it's stuck with me. The story is written by a Scotswoman and involves Scottish culture and language, which I found very intriguing. It also handles a rape scene central to the story in a challenging, some might say "shocking," way. I enjoyed the story while reading it, but have found that it left an out-sized impression on me. The stories that I still find myself thinking about months after reading them are the ones I enjoy most.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error]

 

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S.H. Mansouri | Blackguards from Ragnarock Publications 

Nearly all the stories in this anthology are good and grimdark fans will love the diversity of the pieces. My favorite stories were Irindai by Bradley P. Beaulieu and The Secret by Mark Lawrence. The world building, culture and characters of Irindai was beyond anything I've seen before in a short piece. A pit-fighting teenager who gets sucked into the world of a desert god, and an assassin with a secret and a lie that truly must love each target he erases. Best story-telling in the Grimdark subgenre I've read all year.

You can find our review of Blackguards on our blog.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Amazon[image error]

 

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Adrian Collins | A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall

This book hit all the right grimdark notes and provided a cracking start to the author's works under the pseudonym Alex Marshall. I especially liked the way drugs in society and sexuality were melded into the author's world. The Devils, the Villains, and princess's grab for power, all written in a Joe Abercrombie / Luke Scull style of prose really hit the mark for me. I'm eagerly awaiting the second in this series. Though long overdue, keep an eye out for our review in late 2015 / early 2016.

Purchase links: Kindle[image error] | Galaxy Bookstore

 

That'll do it for 2015! There are plenty more authors out there kicking arse. It's a bit of a bugger that I haven't hit the lofty heights of 50 books a year that I used to be able to hit pre-GdM, but them's the breaks. Keep reading, keep reviewing, and keep supporting the people creating these awesome gritty worlds.

Adrian.

GdM closed to submissions for the holidays

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Our submissions team have been working their collective hides off for a year and a half without break to find the best in short grimdark fiction to put in front of you. I reckon they've earned a break, don't you?

From the 20th of December 2015 to the 10th of January 2015 (AEST), inclusive, the GdM submissions inbox will be closed.

We'll spend a little time catching up on the entries already in there, but -- if we're being completely honest here -- a fair bit more time having a breather, recharging the batteries, and either living it up in our singlets, pluggas, and footy shorts with an ice cold frothy under the burning sun, or wrapped up to the eyeballs in scarves with a steaming mug of mulled wine to fight off the cold (depending on which GdMer you talk to), hanging with our family and mates over the holiday season.

Any entries received during this period won't be read and the emails deleted; sorry folks. You'll get an automated response to let you know that your submission won't be read, and will be deleted without being read, and that'll be it. The only exception will be submission queries. Responses to submission enquiries will be slow during this period. Please have patience with us.

To all of you: I wish you a safe and fun holiday season. Tell your mates you love 'em, enjoy each beer as if it's your last, and remember the world isn't black and white, it's seven billion shades of grey*.

Adrian and the GdM team.

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*take that E.L. James you narrow-minded bugger.

Creating a Grim Dark World - Guest Post by Duncan Lay

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Creating a Grim Dark World
Guest post by Duncan Lay, author of The Last Quarrel.

Somewhere between the incredible detail of JRR Tolkien’s worlds and the slapdash efforts of films such as 10,000BC, which famously had snow turning to jungle turning to desert, lies a happy place. A place where an author can create a believable world. Although, of course, it doesn’t have to be a happy place. In fact it’s better by far if it’s grim, gritty and downright dirty. Because that’s far more interesting than happy.

Because creating a world can be one of the most difficult things for an author to achieve. How much time and effort do you put into your world creation, knowing that you have a word limit and every 1000 words spent on describing some political system is 1000 less you can spend on your characters, your plot and of course the action.

My first tactic is to pick up Horrible Histories. This is a hilarious series of history books aimed at kids but with all sorts of gems in there to make your world believable. Now, of course you don’t have to copy this slavishly. But it is a great starting point, seeing how different cultures coped with different eras and climate and conditions.

It allows you to give your world those touches that make it convincing.

For instance, while I can appreciate an undeniably beautiful piece of prose describing some elven forest sanctuary, I am far more interested in gritty reality of human life and little facts such as, in winter, people used to bring their animals into the house. You stabled the goats down one end and the cows down the other – women had to piss with the cows and men with the goats. To do otherwise was considered rude!

Thatched roofs sound pretty but they had to be covered with thick moss and other filth to prevent them catching alight.

Dung was as good as gold in many societies. Both human and animal couldn’t go to waste. You could use it for fertiliser, to create a wall coating, to bleach clothes – it was the WD40 of its time.

Roads weren’t paved. Only the Romans had time to make roads and the only reason they did that was to move soldiers quickly from one end of the province to another. So roads are usually dirt, which turns to mud in the rain and, if used to drive animals, is going to be stinking with dung.

Battles weren’t always fought under sunny skies. My latest series has one in the middle of the torrential downpour and another in a snowstorm. The elements can kill you just as well as a man with a sword. Only maybe not as quickly…

Food was plentiful from late spring to mid-autumn but winter and the early part of spring especially were hard. Food had to be dried, or salted. And every part of an animal was eaten. Even a cow’s udder, pressed flat between hot stones, made a meal.

This is the sort of detail that can be brought in, piece by piece, to give richness to a world.

Characters can experience these things and, by doing so, you can show not just what the world is like but also how people could really live there.

I don’t do fantasy with a cast of singing elves and dancing dwarves. I like humans and so our history gives us a pretty good starting point for believable worlds. After all, people really have lived that way, so you don’t have to spend 5000 words explaining some aspect of your world. Instead, give people a taste of it and let their imaginations fill in the gaps. That is what fantasy is for.

I believe that giving fantasy a bedrock of reality only adds to its appeal. You can enjoy the fantasy aspects more if you accept that the world, the way of life and above all the characters are seemingly real. Fantasy asks the reader to suspend their disbelief when they turn the first page. Offering truth in there makes them more willing to go along for the journey.

Part of this pseudo-reality world is due to me wanting to dispense with too much world building and take the reader directly into the guts of the story and the characters. Sometimes literally …

As an example of successful fantasy, I like to highlight The Walking Dead. It’s a world that is completely alien to us yet we recognise it. It therefore allows us to gloss over inconsistencies (why are all the zombies dressed smart casual? Why are most zombies just infected with one bite, when a horde would want to devour healthy people? Why don’t the living need haircuts or food?) and get into the action.

Best of all, it demonstrates perfectly what Joss Whedon (Serenity, The Avengers) calls Interior and Exterior action. Exterior action, in this case, is the zombie apocalypse. Interior action is the effect this has on the characters and their relationships with each other. That is what makes a story interesting, when each zombie attack changes the dynamics between the group.

That is what I like to spend my time on, that is what I like to strive for.

By using a recognisably human world, from a reasonably recognisable human era, it allows me to set my stories in a gritty, realistic background, where I can offer fine detail about their lives and then let the reader fill in any blanks from their imagination.

Because if you can get the reader to picture things in their mind, then they are hooked on the story and the characters – and that is the whole point of what I do.

Yes, the world makes sense, it has order – it has to do these things. But that has to be secondary to the characters and the story.

Pretty looks good on TV and movie sets. Dirty works better in books.

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Duncan Lay is the fantasy author of the trilogy "The Dragon Sword Histories" — The Wounded Guardian, The Radiant Child, and The Risen Queen. He is also a layout designer and headline writer at the Sunday Telegraph. You can find Duncan over at http://www.duncanlay.com/.

You can check out the five episodes of The Bloody Quarrel on Kindle, below.

If you'd prefer hard copy, head on over to Galaxy Bookstore to pick up the first trilogy in one gritty volume. Click on Galaxy Bookstore's logo below to head straight over to their Sydney-based store!

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For more information on Duncan's publisher, Momentum, or to purchase on iBooks, use the below links:

Momentum: http://www.momentumbooks.com.au/books/the-bloody-quarrel-episode-1/ 
iBooks: http://itunes.apple.com/book/the-bloody-quarrel-episode/isbn9781760301545 

 

 

Mike Fletcher announces the winners of the Beyond Redemption Giveaway!

Mike was generous enough to give GdM a few copies of Beyond Redemption and 88 in exchange for our followers to spill their biggest delusions. You've thrown down, he's picked up, and we've got three winners! Over to Mike for the announcement.

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I must admit, I expected this to be easier. At first I thought, “I’ll just pick the most entertaining.”
And then I read them and thought, “I’ll pick the one I most relate to.”
Then I thought I should go with the scariest.

Since I’m supposed to pick three, I can do all of that.

Wrychard Wrycthen clings to sanity with a mad desperation I can both understand and appreciate and is the winner of Beyond Redemption.

Travis and celtic_ronin both win copies of 88, a nasty slice of cyberpunk.

Email me at mike@michaelrfletcher.com and let me know your preferred format (EPUB/MOBI/PDF).

Thanks to everyone for entering!

Cheers!

Mike Fletcher

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Wrychard Wrycthen, Travis, and celtic_ronin have all picked up a freebie! Mike's asked that you drop him an email so he can shoot the prizes through to you personally. You can either email him at mike@michaelrfletcher.com, or let me know your email and I'll send him the details. Thanks everyone for getting involved!

First Place

Wrychard Wrycthen
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My biggest delusion is that I apparently have no delusion. I perceive humanity as traveling through space on a giant, vegetation covered rock at speed, surrounded by billions of other filthy, lying animals that will betray them at any and every turn. Everything that can be made difficult and counter-intuitive is, seemingly for the sake of frustration itself. Everything was fundamentally pointed and constructed for hundreds if not thousands of years before anyone living had even been born to create a societal structure that keeps the rich as rich as possible and the poor as poor as possible. But again, maybe this is my delusion.

Second Place

Travis
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A little self-delusion goes a long way.

My delusion is believing that self-delusion actually helps us in life. Think of any big decision you’ve made or any goal you’ve set for yourself: asking your future wife(husband/partner) to marry you; deciding to have a kid; writing a novel—FINISHING a novel… Without some level of self-delusion of thinking you were worthy enough, smart enough, or talented enough to go after your dreams, would any of us have been able to make them happen?

Or perhaps my delusion is believing that a little self-delusion is a wonderful thing.

 

Third Place
celtic_ronin
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We are shale fossils from the Paleozoic era. She is a broad-leafed fern and I am a carnivorous thunder lizard who refuses to devour her. Years pass, tectonic plates shift, and we crumble into dust as we drift apart.

I want to impress her, so I steal all the starlight from the sky. You try too hard, she sighs, shaking the shale dust from her hair. She casts the glowing box aside.

A few people complain about the missing starlight. The police promise to look into the matter, but their hands are really tied, what with budget cuts and all.

Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark: A Tale of Delightful Despair

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Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark:
A Tale of Delightful Despair

by Jeff Suwak

Going by the shock and outrage routinely expressed by Games of Thrones fandom, one might be tempted to believe that George R.R. Martin invented gruesomeness, depravity, and moral ambiguity. Going by some of the critics and comments floating around the internet, one might be tempted to believe that the grimdark genre had ushered in some wholly new depravity in storytelling. Listening all of this banter and debate from the dark recesses of his cell at the Santa Fe Institute, author Cormac McCarthy laughs with insane, mocking glee (I have no proof that he actually does this; I just assume).

McCarthy had been treading bleak, nihilistic landscapes for longer than most of us have been alive. He describes things such as the consumption of human fetuses with casual mastery and disturbing vividness. He systematically destroys every bit of his reader’s hopes, not only in the turnout of the story but in the turnout of their own lives. And he manages to do all of this with language so intoxicatingly poetic, imagery so nightmarishly beautiful, that we thank him even while we despair under his existential abuses.

Of all McCarthy’s grim, dark catalog, 1973’s Outer Dark stands out as being singularly pertinent to the grimdark landscape. You want to talk about a prevailing sense of moroseness, darkness, and violence? Game of Thrones might leave you sharing a sense of indignant outrage around the water cooler on Monday morning, but McCarthy will leave you in full-blown catatonic despair.

Outer Dark is unique among McCarthy’s books for the fact that it takes place in a blatantly fantastic setting. Namely, it is a dark, twisted version of rural Appalachia that sets the stage for our tale of perverted Americana. This world is not as overtly mythical as books such as Manly Wade Wellman’s Who Fears the Devil? or as obviously magical as books like Orson Scott Card’s Tales of Alvin Maker. Yet, it is set in a reality that is not our own.

Perhaps because McCarthy is such a darling of serious academics, the fantastic elements in his books are often ignored or explained away as purely psychological devices. From the wampus cats and panthers of The Orchard Keeper to the black magic ritual of Suttree and the surreal encounters infusing the Border Trilogy, however, McCarthy’s work blends the real with the mythic so subtly and pervasively that I’d argue he can be read as a certified fantasist. That is a bold claim, though, and one that may bring hordes of chain-wielding English professors down upon my head, so I’ll let the larger argument die. In regard to Outer Dark, however, only the most stubbornly elitist critic can deny the otherworldliness of the book.

Outer Dark is similar to GoT in that the events of both tales are set in motion by an incestuous brother/sister relationships. Unlike GoT, however, the sibling-fornicators of Outer Dark come from the absolute bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Culla and Rinthy Holme are what city folk today might be tempted to call “backwards-ass hillbillies.”

Culla is consumed with shame at the baby he has produced with his sister, so he takes the child out to the woods to die. He doesn’t have the stomach to actually end the child’s life, so he just leaves it for the elements. The infant refuses to die and is picked up by a “small gnomic creature wreathed in a morass of grizzled hair” that we only ever know of as “the tinker.” Culla tells his sister that he buried the baby after it died in birth, but Rinthy doesn’t believe him. Eventually, she discovers the truth.

So it is that Rinthy sets out on a journey down a dark road leading into a nameless country to get her baby back. Culla, meanwhile, strikes out blindly, trying to escape all the sins he’s committed. They travel through the same world, but their experiences are vastly different. Where Rinthy finds kindness and charity among the grotesque, carnivalesque company of the dark world, Culla finds nothing but scorn and threat. Everywhere he goes he is mistaken for a criminal and hunted.

Through this meandering tale run three demonic figures who seem to spawn from the countryside itself. This crew, ruthless and efficient murderers, seem to somehow be connected to Culla, though it’s never entirely certain to us to or him what that connection is. Whoever or whatever has sent them, the figures seem to have been called to destroy Culla.

As with most of McCarthy’s books, the true gold is not in the plot but in the ambience that the novel creates. A heavy, gloomy sense of despair hangs over the story, unerringly hopeless and yet infallibly beautiful in its own peculiar way. From the consumption of human flesh to a strangely unsettling account of a stampede of hogs, the book is like a window looking into a serial killer’s daydreams (but in a good way). Even seemingly innocuous things are described with a hellish slant. The woods are described as “trees beginning to close him in, malign and baleful shapes that reared like enormous androids provoked at the alien insubstantiality of this flesh colliding among them.” A swamp is “a faintly smoking garden of the dead that tended away to the earth’s curve.” From beginning to end, everything we encounter is ominous and twisted. The total reading experience is delightfully horrific, ecstatically repellant.

Spoiler alert: no justice or light awaits us in Outer Dark. People pray, but their prayers are never answered. Lives are cut down and forgotten. Evil seems to be self-justifying and self-perpetuating force. In short, the book takes us into a grim, dark universe devoid of hope or illumination—the kind of thoroughly despair-swollen place that, for some reason, I love spending my reading time in.

As a grimdark fan, this is a must read.

Sounds like something you'd like to check out? Use the buy links below for Kindle and paperback.

Review: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi

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The Water Knife
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Review by Jeremy Szal

An ARC of this book was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

According to William Gibson, the future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed. According to Paolo Bacigalupi, the future is right around the corner, and there’s very little left to distribute at all.

In the future portrayed in The Water Knife (2015), there’s only one form of currency that really matters: water. The American Southwest is parched dry, the bickering states of Nevada, California and Arizona all fighting for the dwindling commodity that is the Colorado River. The federal government still exists, but is unable to control the feuding states from tearing each other’s throats out. It’s a harsh landscape of dust and grime and blood, where the poor will do anything to scoop up a tiny sip of muddy water and the rich lounge next to their water fountains and sit in air-conditioned coffee shops. When you dig deep enough to the core, it’s possible to sum up The Water Knife in a single chilling sentence: 'Some people had to bleed so other people could drink.'

It should come as no surprise to anyone that Bacigalupi’s bleak future has a strong environmental bent, filtered through the lens of a very plausible future. His masterpiece of a debut, The Windup Girl (2010), revolved around similar topics, focusing on genebanks and GMOs in a 23rd century Thailand where corruption, greed and violence ran through the city like the Chao Phraya River, bleeding into everyone’s lives as they struggled to stay afloat.

But unlike The WindUp Girl, The Water Knife takes a sharp left and slowly rolls away from science-fiction territory. The novel takes place in the near future, and there are a smattering of gadgets and gizmos like military glass, but otherwise The Water Knife leans away from the science-fictional block and more into the realism zone. Or perhaps this is Bacigalupi’s intent to demonstrate just how close we are to this parched and waterless future. Realism and science-fiction are by no means mutually exclusive, as noted in almost all of his novels and short stories, including The Tamarisk Hunter (2006) where he first started building this universe. But it would be entirely possible to read The Water Knife and call it a near future analysis, and it certainly wouldn’t be unfair to classify the novel as a science thriller. I read this book while in the south-western United States, and a good chunk of it was consumed while driving from Los Angles to Las Vegas. I only needed to glance up from the page and peer out the window to see how plausible Bacigalupi’s waterless future really is. And that’s what makes it so terrifying.

In sketching up a future based on contemporary concerns, it’s easy to slide into the pit of polemic fiction. Bacigalupi did this in The Doubt Factory (2014), and he hasn’t managed to crawl out of it just yet. It’s easy to view The Water Knife as holding one big plaque of this is what we’ll become, especially when characters start referencing a real life nonfiction book titled Cadillac Desert (1986). Interestingly, they call it the Bible of water rights and how it served as a danger sign to us all those decades ago. This book and others like it pop up several times, even serving as a rather ironic and pivotal plot point that’s severely lacking subtly. Fiction has always been an excellent way of utilizing contemporary concerns and themes and finding new ways to address them, but Bacigalupi doesn’t employ the same nuance and tact in discussing these ideas as he did with The WindUp Girl and Ship Breaker (2010), and it comes across as very blunt and even didactic. I was hoping that Bacigalupi would hit the bullseye on the ending, but instead he performs rather poorly and left me scrambling ahead to the next chapter, only to find that the novel had ended.

But Bacigalupi makes up for this in his trio of characters. Angel Velasquez is the water knife after who the novel is named, protecting his boss, Catherine Case and making sure all water diverts to her and her interests. If you have money, you’ll have enough to drink. Otherwise you’ll get nothing but dust. The other two PoVs characters include Lucy, a journalist intent on sticking her head into the hornet’s nest, and Maria, a farm girl who does a deal with the devil.

These three characters live in a land of dust and violence, and they’ll do just about anything to not slip through the cracks, and this desperation inevitably comes back to bite them in ways that’ll make your skin crawl. But while none of them are sort of people you’d want to spend time with, Bacigalupi sculpts them with ingenuity and care, giving us a slow drip of a backstory as we slice our way through the novel. The time spent with the story and action is carefully balanced with the time spent inside their heads, allowing us to draw closer to their thoughts even when might not want to. Summoning sympathy for characters such as these is tough work, and Bacigalupi nails it perfectly. They are certainly not above questioning their own morality and gazing at the guilt that slowly gnaws away at them, something only the best grimdark novels are capable of achieving.

Credit must also be given to the superb writing. His depictions of a draught-ravaged south west will leave your throat parched and your skin itchy. A lot of liquid had to be consumed in order to keep reading, which is feat in itself. His clipped sentences and tight dialogue allow for an intense and thrilling read, every sentence teetering on a knife’s edge. His writing can’t be described as minimalist, but for the most part there are no lavish or long descriptions of anything other than the desert and its unforgiving Dust-Bowl state. In all fairness there’s not much that he can describe, a complete contrast to The WindUp Girl with the colours and spices and flavours of a rich-imagined Thailand simply oozing from the page. He’s not playing with the same tools, so he’s decided to switch tactics, and he’s fairly successful in doing so.

There’s a constant sense on impending doom on almost every paragraph, and you’re just waiting for the hammer to fall with every chapter. Unlike The WindUp Girl which jumped straight into the action and didn’t slow down from there, The Water Knife starts with a (literal) bang, but takes a while to really pick up the pace again. But when it does you’ll be hard pressed to put it down.

Bacigalupi is an exceptional writer of smart and science based science-fiction, which is why The Water Knife comes across as a mild disappointment. It’s a razor sharp novel set twenty minutes in the future with raw intensity, but when it comes to discussing the themes within it’s sometimes more likened to a brick through a window. Thankfully Bacigalupi is skilled enough to give us fantastic character and tight dialogue to carry his story forward. It’s nowhere near the lofty heights of his debut masterpiece, but The Water Knife is still a good novel that’s equal parts intriguing and terrifying, partly because one day we might not even regard it as fiction anymore.

I give The Water Knife three grimdark lords out of five.

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Purchase links:

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Paperback

 

Beyond Redemption Giveaway

Mike Fletcher, author of the brilliant Beyond Redemption and 88, wants you to get delusional!

What's the deal?

The Geisteskranken in Mike's Beyond Redemption (check out our review here) twist reality with the power of their delusions. 

Knowledge isn't an axiom, it's a force of nature. What the masses believe is. But insanity is a weapon, conviction a shield. Delusions give birth to foul new gods. Violent and dark, the world is filled with the Geisteskranken--men and women whose delusions manifest, twisting reality

You've got 100 words to answer "What's your biggest delusion and why?" Just pop it into the comments section below and then wait to see if Mike makes it rain books on you. There's no set requirement for comedy, morbidness, sci-fi, fantasy, honesty, etc, etc beyond the 100 word limit -- so go berserk, get inventive, and have fun with it!

Mike's favourite entry will nab an ebook copy of Beyond Redemption, while the next two favourites will be sent ebook copies of 88.

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How does my delusion win?

As your posts come through into the comments I'll approve them (give me 24hrs before chasing me if you feel the need) and they'll pop up below.

On the 30th of November 2016, Mike will pick his favourite responses from the comments section and we'll hand out a bunch of prizes to the top 3 entrants. It's that easy.

Now get delusional!