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Chronicles of an Age of Darkness #8
The Werewolf and the Wormlord
This story features the adventures of Alfric Danborg, a banker by profession but a Yudonic knight by birth. In his travels he is required to face not only ogres, dragons, assassins and She Who Walks By Night but, worst of all, more senior bankers.
352 pages, Paperback
First published October 17, 1991
3 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
About the author
Hugh Cook
44 books67 followersHugh Cook was a cult author whose works blend fantasy and science fiction. He is best known for his epic series The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 24, 2011
The Wormlord, ruler of Wen Endex, is stepping down without an heir, offering his throne to anyone who can retrieve the saga swords. Alfric Danbrog, grandson of the Wormlord and son of Grendel Danbrog, the Wormlord's estranged son who's been accused of being a lycanthrope, is dragooned into the suicidal quest. Too bad he's a near-sighted banker...
The Short Review:
Dan, why is this so awesome? One word: Werehamster!
The Longer Review:
Much like in The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, Hugh Cook takes the traditional fantasy quest story and turns it on its ear. Alfric Danbrog, banker third class and possible werewolf, is far from the conventional hero. He's a coward, has a domineering wife, and lives in the shadow of his grandfather, the Wormlord. At the behest of his employer, The Bank, he goes on the quest for the three saga swords in an effort to be crowned king. But a lot of people don't want him finishing his quest...
So what? It'll probably become a coming of age story where the nebbish steps up and becomes the hero, right? Wrong! This is Hugh Cook we're talking about.
As I've mentioned before, Cook's fantasy word has a healthy quantity of advanced technology lying around that the people barely understand. Well, Alfric's employer, The Bank, understands one piece of technology all too well. The Bank is a multinational organization that takes advantage of Doors, wormholes that link various continents and empires, and rules the financial world of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness with an iron fist, manipulating events as they see fit. How cool is that?
As always, the Cookster did a great job balancing British humor, violence, and general weirdness. As always, Cook brings back a few old characters for brief appearances, like Justina Thrug of books 6 and 7, as well as mentions of others, like Aldarch III.
The Werewolf and the Wormlord feels like a Monty Python sketch at times, from the ridiculous business-speak at The Bank, to the vampires, to Alfric's interactions with the various monsters on his quest, to the cowardly Yudonic Knights who are afraid of the Hag that terrorizes the night, to Nappy the happy assassin. And the werehamster, of course. As in some of the previous books, the political machinations are insanely complex.
That's pretty much all I can say without spoiling too much.
Conclusion: Hugh Cook is the man. The Werewolf and the Wormlord is an easy five and my second favorite book in the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness so far.
The Short Review:
Dan, why is this so awesome? One word: Werehamster!
The Longer Review:
Much like in The Wordsmiths and the Warguild, Hugh Cook takes the traditional fantasy quest story and turns it on its ear. Alfric Danbrog, banker third class and possible werewolf, is far from the conventional hero. He's a coward, has a domineering wife, and lives in the shadow of his grandfather, the Wormlord. At the behest of his employer, The Bank, he goes on the quest for the three saga swords in an effort to be crowned king. But a lot of people don't want him finishing his quest...
So what? It'll probably become a coming of age story where the nebbish steps up and becomes the hero, right? Wrong! This is Hugh Cook we're talking about.
As I've mentioned before, Cook's fantasy word has a healthy quantity of advanced technology lying around that the people barely understand. Well, Alfric's employer, The Bank, understands one piece of technology all too well. The Bank is a multinational organization that takes advantage of Doors, wormholes that link various continents and empires, and rules the financial world of the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness with an iron fist, manipulating events as they see fit. How cool is that?
As always, the Cookster did a great job balancing British humor, violence, and general weirdness. As always, Cook brings back a few old characters for brief appearances, like Justina Thrug of books 6 and 7, as well as mentions of others, like Aldarch III.
The Werewolf and the Wormlord feels like a Monty Python sketch at times, from the ridiculous business-speak at The Bank, to the vampires, to Alfric's interactions with the various monsters on his quest, to the cowardly Yudonic Knights who are afraid of the Hag that terrorizes the night, to Nappy the happy assassin. And the werehamster, of course. As in some of the previous books, the political machinations are insanely complex.
That's pretty much all I can say without spoiling too much.
Conclusion: Hugh Cook is the man. The Werewolf and the Wormlord is an easy five and my second favorite book in the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness so far.
October 26, 2022
Another incredible entry in Hugh Cook’s series and one of my all time favorites. Plenty of politics, action, and scheming for any casual or hardcore fantasy fan or lover of literature in general. It’s a shame Cook passed so soon - he had planned over 20 books in this series and I would have devoured them all gladly.
October 29, 2024
I really liked this one! We are back baby!
The great benefit of this book is that it is over quickly, therefore, all of its good ideas ring out clearly, like pealing bells, spreading their immediate effect from one end of the text to the other, while its bad ideas, (if it can be said to have any), are rapidly quenched and forgotten. (As opposed to 'Wishstone and Wonderworkers', where a compilation of complex storytelling techniques and character elements combined to somewhat clog the book up, or 'Walrus and War-Wolf', which, excellent as it is, its paratactic and rapidly moving episodic plot, while each element was individually fun, did lead to a vague sense of fatigue and displacement).
Furthermore, we are blessed with a sustained close-third-person tracking shot of a questing hero who is sent to do some things, and, while the plot beyond them, the themes, ideas and the sustained world, are revealed in increasing complexity, the hero does indeed do the actual things, and with some alacrity and drive. One always knows roughly where one _is_ in Werewolf and Wormlord. That is; either on the way to the thing, doing the thing, or having done the thing.
Furthermore we have a reasonably complex and sane protagonist! Not an egregious piece of shit like Sean Sarazin from 'Wicked and Witless', nor a likeable but slow-witted dufus like Togura Poulaan in ''Wordsmiths and Warguild', but a sane, intelligent, competant, not necessarily very pleasant but heroic and decent enough in a pinch Banker/Yudonic Knight, Alfric Danbog. A professional man in a childless bad marriage, (his fault), a complex relationship with his mildly estranged parents
a carefully hidden case of werewolfism and a Storied Fate awaiting him.
We also have a much less agonising and neurotic synthesis between the heroic and the ironic, and between the epic and political. Many Cook-Books are torn between Cooks joy and pleasure in epic fantastic storytelling and his clenched modernist cynicism, political realism, grasp of psychology and mild (relatively) liberal neurosis about the Heroic Idea he clearly loves in his heart.
So far, so; 90's fantasy writer. They all handle the inner conflict in different ways. In various books Cook has given us; flawed but noble heroes, subtly heroic women in misogynist worlds, brave doofus, bugs bunny in human form, utter tool, brave and conniving enormous woman and now banker. All of these have different relationships to the Heroic ideal, ranging from attempts at actual fulfilment in a dark world, observation of it, undermining its pretensions from the position of Other, Mania, utter unwitting moral failure and cleaning up the consequences after it.
since Cook is now writing a character who by his nature is split half way between the Heroic Ideal and cold observation of it, he can write his own ambivalence directly into the story and now its character work!
Alfric Danbrog was raised as a sweaty heroic murdering Yudonic Knight to fight monsters and do quests, (or at least talk about doing that), and also as the heir to the disinherited heir to the throne, (and also as a werewolf), but broke from his family and sought life in the mysterious Bank, a little enclave of the commercial, cosmopolitan, international, abstract and disembodied in the otherwise dark, wet and muddy Galsh Ebrek.
...........
"on went the night, full of the wind of words. Of ring-prowed ships; of men in bearskin gloves manning such ships, the masts and the sails of the same sheeted with ice; of swords adorned with coiled gold; of steeds with plaited manes, brave beasts which outran the wind; fell monsters encountered and defeated on a murky moor; horns heartening heroes as men graced with deathless courage met their end in contest with onswarming hordes of heartless reptiles; war-arrows embedded in corpses strewn upon steep rocky screens, discarded at the foot of precipitous crags, lying derelict in waters bloody and disturbed.
Of this sang the song-singers; and they sang also of the undisturbed valour of men who died without complaint though they were pierced to the vitals by deadly-barbed boar-spears; and of the outlandish grief which doomed the hero Hroblar to an uncouth death when his hand-meshed battle corslet animated itself and ate through his flesh to the bone.
And they sang - there was no stopping it, though Alfric would have been content to see all of creation come to an end rather than endure any more of this stuff - of the weapon-smiths of old and the weapons of their making.
Ah, the weapons!
Iron agleam in moonlight. Deathblades tempered in the blood of warfare. Ripple-patterned damascene slicing through the flesh of alien creatures ravenous for blood. The fighting fangs of heroes. Twist-patterned steel which has dared the hearts of heroes. Swords which lopped hands, which chopped feet, which shortened legs at the knees, which gouged out hearts and vivisected horses, which dissected the aorta and tasted the filth of the lower bowl.
Of such the poets sang, much to the delight of the company of heroes.
Of swords they sang, and of armour.
Bucklers proof against a baslisks breath. Meshed mail. Gaunt helms topped with boars and dragons.
And the journeying, the endless trekking and marching and climbing endured by the thousands of heroes of legend, all of it to be described a footstep at a time, complete with descriptions of the texture of the mud through which they walked, and the very length of the leeches which there battened upon their flesh.*
Earth was their way. Mud was their way. Ice was their way. Toes and hamstrings. Shins and shoulders. Corpses stretched lifeless. Lordless men manning the bulwark battlements. Heroes doomed to perish from the fiercest of griefs, dying encumbered by battle-harness, fighting in death in honour of their battle-vows, vaunting their boasts with the blood of their lungs on their lips."
......
He even has two names! And has little conniptions when people do or don't give him the right name in the right context
Since Cooks protagonist is already questioning, rejecting yet also sometimes, embodying, the Heroic Ideal, Cook himself can relax a little and can allow himself to actually fulfil some of the core emotional axies of the story.
In a classic Cookism we have at least one hyper-surreal dream sequence and sex-dream with Witches. (I was about to say that this Cook protagonist is slightly unusual in that they are less insanely horny than most of the Young-Hero protagonists and even Justina Thrug, but I forgot that the crazed fever dream actually included a werewolf summoning and ritual Witch-sex, (this is never explained). Still he is *marginally* less horny than *many* Cook heroes and heroines.)
Apsects feel Prachetty; Dappy, the milk-faced middle aged man assassin who terrifies Yudonic knights and who does a lot of charity work on the side, and the whole Were-Hampster scene - not exactly out of place but perhaps unusually Prachetty for a Cook-Book
We also have the continued story of Justina Thrug. Having survived her escape from Untulchilamon, her Rise to Power in Wen Endex(?) takes place in the background of this book, also the tiny dragons which were created by the Demon in the last book have managed to breed and become a whole new species, and are consistently charming.
CANCER WHAT THE HELL
With Cook it’s always hard to tell what or how much of his protagonists Energy is His energy
sometimes it _feels_ like he is writing out his own psycho-social meanderings, semi-mystical moments, dream visions, political musings etc .
Towards the end of the book, one of the characters reveals that he has cancer and will soo die
It’s particularly horrible.
Cook did in fact get cancer and die.
though according to Wikipedia, he died over 15 years after the publication of 'Werewolf and Wormlord'
What the hell? Did he already know?
The great benefit of this book is that it is over quickly, therefore, all of its good ideas ring out clearly, like pealing bells, spreading their immediate effect from one end of the text to the other, while its bad ideas, (if it can be said to have any), are rapidly quenched and forgotten. (As opposed to 'Wishstone and Wonderworkers', where a compilation of complex storytelling techniques and character elements combined to somewhat clog the book up, or 'Walrus and War-Wolf', which, excellent as it is, its paratactic and rapidly moving episodic plot, while each element was individually fun, did lead to a vague sense of fatigue and displacement).
Furthermore, we are blessed with a sustained close-third-person tracking shot of a questing hero who is sent to do some things, and, while the plot beyond them, the themes, ideas and the sustained world, are revealed in increasing complexity, the hero does indeed do the actual things, and with some alacrity and drive. One always knows roughly where one _is_ in Werewolf and Wormlord. That is; either on the way to the thing, doing the thing, or having done the thing.
Furthermore we have a reasonably complex and sane protagonist! Not an egregious piece of shit like Sean Sarazin from 'Wicked and Witless', nor a likeable but slow-witted dufus like Togura Poulaan in ''Wordsmiths and Warguild', but a sane, intelligent, competant, not necessarily very pleasant but heroic and decent enough in a pinch Banker/Yudonic Knight, Alfric Danbog. A professional man in a childless bad marriage, (his fault), a complex relationship with his mildly estranged parents
a carefully hidden case of werewolfism and a Storied Fate awaiting him.
We also have a much less agonising and neurotic synthesis between the heroic and the ironic, and between the epic and political. Many Cook-Books are torn between Cooks joy and pleasure in epic fantastic storytelling and his clenched modernist cynicism, political realism, grasp of psychology and mild (relatively) liberal neurosis about the Heroic Idea he clearly loves in his heart.
So far, so; 90's fantasy writer. They all handle the inner conflict in different ways. In various books Cook has given us; flawed but noble heroes, subtly heroic women in misogynist worlds, brave doofus, bugs bunny in human form, utter tool, brave and conniving enormous woman and now banker. All of these have different relationships to the Heroic ideal, ranging from attempts at actual fulfilment in a dark world, observation of it, undermining its pretensions from the position of Other, Mania, utter unwitting moral failure and cleaning up the consequences after it.
since Cook is now writing a character who by his nature is split half way between the Heroic Ideal and cold observation of it, he can write his own ambivalence directly into the story and now its character work!
Alfric Danbrog was raised as a sweaty heroic murdering Yudonic Knight to fight monsters and do quests, (or at least talk about doing that), and also as the heir to the disinherited heir to the throne, (and also as a werewolf), but broke from his family and sought life in the mysterious Bank, a little enclave of the commercial, cosmopolitan, international, abstract and disembodied in the otherwise dark, wet and muddy Galsh Ebrek.
...........
"on went the night, full of the wind of words. Of ring-prowed ships; of men in bearskin gloves manning such ships, the masts and the sails of the same sheeted with ice; of swords adorned with coiled gold; of steeds with plaited manes, brave beasts which outran the wind; fell monsters encountered and defeated on a murky moor; horns heartening heroes as men graced with deathless courage met their end in contest with onswarming hordes of heartless reptiles; war-arrows embedded in corpses strewn upon steep rocky screens, discarded at the foot of precipitous crags, lying derelict in waters bloody and disturbed.
Of this sang the song-singers; and they sang also of the undisturbed valour of men who died without complaint though they were pierced to the vitals by deadly-barbed boar-spears; and of the outlandish grief which doomed the hero Hroblar to an uncouth death when his hand-meshed battle corslet animated itself and ate through his flesh to the bone.
And they sang - there was no stopping it, though Alfric would have been content to see all of creation come to an end rather than endure any more of this stuff - of the weapon-smiths of old and the weapons of their making.
Ah, the weapons!
Iron agleam in moonlight. Deathblades tempered in the blood of warfare. Ripple-patterned damascene slicing through the flesh of alien creatures ravenous for blood. The fighting fangs of heroes. Twist-patterned steel which has dared the hearts of heroes. Swords which lopped hands, which chopped feet, which shortened legs at the knees, which gouged out hearts and vivisected horses, which dissected the aorta and tasted the filth of the lower bowl.
Of such the poets sang, much to the delight of the company of heroes.
Of swords they sang, and of armour.
Bucklers proof against a baslisks breath. Meshed mail. Gaunt helms topped with boars and dragons.
And the journeying, the endless trekking and marching and climbing endured by the thousands of heroes of legend, all of it to be described a footstep at a time, complete with descriptions of the texture of the mud through which they walked, and the very length of the leeches which there battened upon their flesh.*
Earth was their way. Mud was their way. Ice was their way. Toes and hamstrings. Shins and shoulders. Corpses stretched lifeless. Lordless men manning the bulwark battlements. Heroes doomed to perish from the fiercest of griefs, dying encumbered by battle-harness, fighting in death in honour of their battle-vows, vaunting their boasts with the blood of their lungs on their lips."
......
He even has two names! And has little conniptions when people do or don't give him the right name in the right context
Since Cooks protagonist is already questioning, rejecting yet also sometimes, embodying, the Heroic Ideal, Cook himself can relax a little and can allow himself to actually fulfil some of the core emotional axies of the story.
In a classic Cookism we have at least one hyper-surreal dream sequence and sex-dream with Witches. (I was about to say that this Cook protagonist is slightly unusual in that they are less insanely horny than most of the Young-Hero protagonists and even Justina Thrug, but I forgot that the crazed fever dream actually included a werewolf summoning and ritual Witch-sex, (this is never explained). Still he is *marginally* less horny than *many* Cook heroes and heroines.)
Apsects feel Prachetty; Dappy, the milk-faced middle aged man assassin who terrifies Yudonic knights and who does a lot of charity work on the side, and the whole Were-Hampster scene - not exactly out of place but perhaps unusually Prachetty for a Cook-Book
We also have the continued story of Justina Thrug. Having survived her escape from Untulchilamon, her Rise to Power in Wen Endex(?) takes place in the background of this book, also the tiny dragons which were created by the Demon in the last book have managed to breed and become a whole new species, and are consistently charming.
CANCER WHAT THE HELL
With Cook it’s always hard to tell what or how much of his protagonists Energy is His energy
sometimes it _feels_ like he is writing out his own psycho-social meanderings, semi-mystical moments, dream visions, political musings etc .
Towards the end of the book, one of the characters reveals that he has cancer and will soo die
It’s particularly horrible.
Cook did in fact get cancer and die.
though according to Wikipedia, he died over 15 years after the publication of 'Werewolf and Wormlord'
What the hell? Did he already know?
September 29, 2016
I'm cheating and using this reveiw for all Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness.
Take almost every fantasy cliche and trope you can think of and give it to Eddings or Jordan and you get 'The Belgariad' or 'The Wheel of Time'- entertaining enough but otherwise souless pap. Give them however to Hugh Cook and you get your tiny mind blown. He turns everything on its head like no other author before or after him. Wizards, magic bottles, monsters and heroes are used in such a fresh imaginative way that you are glued to the story page by page. Humour pervades every book to a varying degree and one of the great disappointments in life is that he never finished the whole set as he saw them- though luckily each book can be read as a stand alone novel, rewarding fans with nods, winks and links akimbo, otherwise complete reads in themselves.
I cannot recommend these books enough- even if you are not a fantasy fan; believe me these books will nothing like you expect and I think represent a truly unique literary experience
Take almost every fantasy cliche and trope you can think of and give it to Eddings or Jordan and you get 'The Belgariad' or 'The Wheel of Time'- entertaining enough but otherwise souless pap. Give them however to Hugh Cook and you get your tiny mind blown. He turns everything on its head like no other author before or after him. Wizards, magic bottles, monsters and heroes are used in such a fresh imaginative way that you are glued to the story page by page. Humour pervades every book to a varying degree and one of the great disappointments in life is that he never finished the whole set as he saw them- though luckily each book can be read as a stand alone novel, rewarding fans with nods, winks and links akimbo, otherwise complete reads in themselves.
I cannot recommend these books enough- even if you are not a fantasy fan; believe me these books will nothing like you expect and I think represent a truly unique literary experience
September 4, 2021
I think this was the first book that I read out of the entire series and really enjoyed it. It must have been quite a story because I then hunted down and read another 7 books from the same author!
February 23, 2020
The eighth volume in the Chronicles of an Age of Darkness, though like all books in this series it is a stand alone tale. This story features the adventures of Alfric Danborg, a banker by profession but a Yudonic knight by birth. In his travels he is required to face not only ogres, dragons, assassins and She Who Walks By Night but, worst of all, more senior bankers. Intelligent and creative. Not the greatest of the Chronicles but a fun read nonetheless with obvious nods to Beowulf.
August 16, 2022
Another weird and convoluted tale from Hugh Cook. This time the protagonist is a knight, banker and were wolf who is plotting to become king, but is outmanoevred politically by his enemies. Great fun. as ever.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews