This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on April 17, 2023.

Wraithbound

By Tim Akers – Baen Books – April 4, 2023

Review by Robin Marx

Wraithbound presents a world that is literally coming apart at the seams. Reality-warping elemental Chaos is only barely restrained by monumental, magically-infused barricades. The fortunate and affluent live deep within the Ordered Lands, while those less privileged are relegated to the outer borders, suffering the corrosive influence of the roiling Chaos just outside the walls. As the creators and maintainers of the so-called “orderwalls,” the mages of the Iron College have become a prominent pillar of society. Known as spiritbinders, these mages interweave a portion of their souls with an elemental spirit, gaining power over that spirit’s domain. Each spiritbinder dedicates themselves to a single element. Air, water, fire, and stone are some common choices, while others form pacts with more abstract entities, such as manifestations of law or life. Rumors also exist of renegade spiritbinders who entangle themselves with darker entities, such as demons or the souls of the deceased. With the continued survival of civilization at stake, the Iron College has established the justicars, a ruthless security force tasked with both policing the ranks of the spiritbinders and also hunting down unsanctioned “feral” mages operating outside the strictures of the College.

Young Rae Kelthannis finds his comfortable lifestyle turned upside down when his father, a minor weather-controlling stormbinder in the employ of Baron Hadroy, becomes entangled in a justicar-led purge of heretical magic. The Kelthannis family flee to the edge of civilization, eking out a meager life in the shadow of an orderwall. Despite the risk of justicar scrutiny, after a miserable decade of self-exile Rae gives in to the temptation to follow in his father’s footsteps. He attempts a spiritbinding of his own, using his father’s fractured sword as a focus for the magic. Instead of joining with a minor air elemental as intended, he finds his spirit entwined with something much more treacherous: a wrathful soul from the realm of the dead. This disastrous summoning has lethal consequences for Rae’s loved ones, and he immediately finds himself pursued by both justicars and an even more implacable foe: a brutal mage encased in a mechanical suit. To survive, Rae will have to come to grips with both his father’s hidden past and his dangerous new spiritbound partner.

Wraithbound is an epic fantasy where magic takes center stage. The various types of spiritbinding and their myriad manifestations are examined in intriguing detail, providing fun daydream fodder to readers and making this book an easy recommendation to fans of Brandon Sanderson’s intricate magic systems. Command of elements like fire and water are common enough in fantasy stories, but Rae’s tumultuous alliance with the wraith is both fresh and compelling. Rae is reckless and untrained, while the wraith bristles at being compelled into servitude. With the wraith seeking ever more control over his earthly host’s body, the reader is given the sense that Rae has caught a tiger by the tail. He requires his deathly companion’s dark assistance if he is to live to see another day, but the wraith’s agenda and Rae’s own are often at odds.

Wraithbound is also rich with layered mystery. Although it’s given away in the title, Rae doesn’t discover the true nature of his bound spirit until the halfway point of the book. The actual identity of the wraith isn’t revealed until much later. The role of Rae’s father in the magical catastrophe that has come to be known as the Hadroy Heresy and the ultimate goal of Rae’s pursuers are also crucial parts of the puzzle he must solve. I felt clever whenever one of my suppositions turned out to be correct, and absorbed even further into the narrative with every unexpected twist. Akers keeps the reader guessing.

Promoted as the first book in The Spiritbinder Saga, Wraithbound concludes with some tantalizing hints about the future direction of the series. However, prospective readers can rest assured that Wraithbound provides a self-contained tale with a proper ending, rather than merely a fraction of the story with an arbitrary or abrupt conclusion.

Much like Rae himself, the reader is whisked from one danger to the next, with very few pauses to rest. Rae’s perilous journey takes him far beyond the Ordered Lands and into the Chaos-infested wilderness, the skies, and even the shadowy land of the dead. Fast-paced and packed with cinematic magical duels, Wraithbound is an exhilarating ride from start to finish.

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This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on March 30, 2023.

Old Moon Quarterly: Issue 3, Winter 2023

By Old Moon Publishing – March 13, 2023

Review by Robin Marx

An intriguing newcomer to the small press dark fantasy fiction scene, Old Moon Quarterly has recently released its third volume. The magazine bills itself as a showcase for weird fantasy fiction and sword & sorcery, citing the works of Clark Ashton Smith, Karl Edward Wagner, and Tanith Lee as touchstones. The first volume debuted in July 2022, followed up by the second in November of the same year. While each issue to date has featured four stories, the page count has grown slightly with each installment. Volume 3 of Old Moon Quarterly boasts striking sepia-toned cover artwork by Daniel Vega, showing an (Elric of Melnibone-inspired?) armored warrior confronted by a twisted, multi-headed monster. There are no interior illustrations or advertisements, and the text is presented in a single column layout.

After a brief Introduction comparing Arthurian romances to modern day fantasy adventures, the fiction section of Old Moon Quarterly Volume 3 opens strongly with “Evil Honey” by James Enge. Nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 2010 for his debut novel Blood of Ambrose, James Enge is likely the most widely recognizable author printed in Old Moon Quarterly to date. Like Blood of Ambrose and several short stories from the pages of Black Gate Magazine, Tales From The Magician’s Skull, and elsewhere, “Evil Honey” features Enge’s wandering wizard Morlock Ambrosius, also known as Morlock the Maker. In “Evil Honey” Morlock finds himself magically compelled by the god of bees to come up with a non-lethal way of dealing with an aggressive hive tainted through the consumption of toxic pollen. Shrunk down to bee size by the god, Morlock infiltrates the hive. While the premise seems like something out of a children’s story, Enge plays it mostly straight. Touches of whimsy are overshadowed by the viciousness of the warped bee society, consumed by fear and the desperate need for a common enemy. While “Evil Honey” works fine as a piece of fantasy fiction, one could also view it through a more allegorical lens as a critique of modern nations and their self-destructive, eternal War on Terror. One hopes that there’s a happier solution for the issues dominating post-9/11 America than what Morlock comes up with for the corrupted hive. Setting potential symbolism aside, “Evil Honey” is a fascinating adventure tale and Enge’s moody, sardonic Morlock is always a treat.

The second story is by German writer T. R. Siebert and entitled “Knife, Lace, Prayer.” Where “Evil Honey” was intensely local—even miniature—in scope, this tale is epic to the extreme. It involves a “girl who used to be a beast” journeying across the devastated landscapes of the Ashlands on a mission to slay god. Her world is literally coming apart at the seams, with the god in the process of remaking it into something new. Enraged by the destruction of all she knew and loved, the nameless beast/girl vows revenge. But to find her divine target she must first enlist a guide: a disillusioned paladin named Edmund. While initially I was put off by the vagueness of some of the prose and frequent flashbacks to the girl’s former life as a holy guardian beast, by the end of the story I found myself completely won over. Not only is the story ambitious despite its brief page count, its conclusion is immensely satisfying.

“Singing the Long Retreat,” by R. K. Duncan, is told through the eyes of Fatima, a warrior woman of the Prepared, a cavalry unit tasked with holding off an invading army while the rest of Fatima’s people make their escape. The odds are overwhelming and, as the name suggests, the Prepared are resigned to their own deaths. Songs and poems are evidently important to Fatima’s people, and she sings throughout the battle that ensues, improvising lyrics to raise the morale of her comrades and intimidate their foes. Nearly the entire story is one extended battle scene. The general ebb and flow of combat is narrated as well as individual acts of self-sacrificing heroism, all punctuated by Fatima’s verses. While it reminded this reviewer of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the lack of any conclusive resolution robs the story of much of its inspirational power. “Singing the Long Retreat” seems more an exercise in creating a mood than relating a plot. While I did not enjoy it as much as the other contributions in this Old Moon Quarterly volume, the overall quality of the prose remained high.

The final story is “The Feast of Saint Ottmer,” by Graham Thomas Wilcox, an assistant editor of Old Moon Quarterly. The Arthurian romance touched upon in this volume’s Introduction returns here, in this tale of knighthood and honor. Told in the first person, this novella centers on the youthful knight Hieronymous and his role in the siege of a keep at Kienhorst. The graf of Kienhorst was responsible for the death of Hieronymous’s father, and honor demands retribution. The situation is complicated by the participation in the siege of a contingent of knights called the Order of the Dragon. Fearsome in aspect and more battle-tested by far than Hieronymous, he finds himself longing to be counted among their number. But the darkly alluring nun that commands the Order demands Hieronymous murder the enemy graf, rather than ransom him alive as chivalric convention requires. Throughout the bloody conflict to follow Hieronymous finds himself torn between the obligations of familial duty and the pursuit of martial prowess, the opposing teachings of his father and his grandfather. Drenched in gory, gothic, grimdark flavor, “The Feast of Saint Ottmer” is operatic, even bombastic. One could fairly describe this story as overwritten (some dialogue is in Latin, with accompanying footnotes!), but the ornate prose effectively conjures a darkly vibrant atmosphere. It overshoots Arthurian romance, ending up closer to the opening scenes of Vlad Dracula as armored warrior in the Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). Over-the-top fun, “The Feast of Saint Ottmer” even edged out James Enge’s “Evil Honey” as the highlight of the issue for me.

Finally, Old Moon Quarterly volume 3 concludes with a book review for Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles, a movie-themed horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow. Assistant editor Graham Thomas Wilcox returns to examine stories by Gemma Files, Laird Barron, and John Langan in detail. The cinematic horror of the anthology under review contrasts with the fantasy fiction included in this volume, but given the dark tenor of most of the stories here it’s easy to imagine a considerable overlap in readership.

Old Moon Quarterly may be new to the marketplace, but the high quality fiction and affordable cover price make it well worth checking out. Many ambitious fiction magazines struggle with the demands of monthly or bimonthly schedules, but the measured release pace and competitive author rates of Old Moon Quarterly will hopefully allow a steady stream of polished dark fantasy tales for years to come.

#ReviewArchive #BookReview #SwordAndSorcery #Fantasy #DarkFantasy #Grimdark #OldMoonQuarterly #GrimdarkMagazine #GdM

This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on February 17, 2023.

Conan – Blood of the Serpent

By S. M. Stirling – Titan Books – December 13, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

Conan – Blood of the Serpent marks the long-awaited return of the fantasy genre’s most famous barbarian hero to long-form prose. First introduced to the world by Robert E. Howard in a 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine, the Conan stories have had a tumultuous publication history. After Howard’s 1936 suicide, hardback releases by Gnome Press in the 1950s and enduring support in the pages of fanzines like Amra kept the barbarian from disappearing into obscurity. Editors L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter further popularized Conan in the 1960s with a series of paperback novels that blended Howard’s original material, “posthumous collaborations” based in part on unpublished fragments and outlines, and stories created whole cloth by de Camp and Carter. While the publishers and contributors involved shifted multiple times in the decades to follow, paperbacks featuring Conan the Cimmerian were a ubiquitous presence on bookstore shelves until the late 90s, when releases slowed to a trickle. Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium was released as late as 2003, but the recent trend has been to reject pastiche and return to Howard’s original texts, excised of the occasionally controversial embellishments and expansions of later authors. Some fans argue that the original Howard work is all we need, but others still yearn to see Conan set out on new adventures. The past few years have shown a tentative few steps back in that direction with the 2019 publication of two novellas—one by John C. Hocking and one by Scott Oden—serialized as part of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan comic book series. Oden was also commissioned to write a short story for inclusion with the Conan Unconquered (2019) video game. Perhaps signaling the start of a greater revival, Conan – Blood of the Serpent is the first original full-length novel to feature Conan in nearly twenty years.

Positioned as a prequel to the 1936 Howard novella Red Nails, Conan – Blood of the Serpent opens with the titular barbarian languishing in Sukhmet, a backwater village in Stygia, the Hyborian Age’s antediluvian precursor to ancient Egypt. Employed as a scout in Zarallo’s Free Companions, a multi-ethnic mercenary band hired by the Stygians to guard against Darfari raiders, Conan seems to spend as much time riding herd on drunk and idle sell-swords as dealing with foreign threats. The monotony of garrison life is shaken up, however, when he encounters a new addition to the band: Valeria. Formerly of the Red Brotherhood, the blonde and blue-eyed pirate’s beauty is matched only by her lethality. Conan is instantly smitten. Fiercely independent and all too accustomed to advances from her compatriots, Valeria is unimpressed. Conan isn’t the only one pursuing Valeria; while Conan is content to bide his time and prove his merits, an arrogant Stygian commander named Khafset proves himself less willing to take no for an answer. His fixation turns to murderous hatred, forcing Valeria and Conan to embark on a desperate journey across untamed lands, contending with threats both terrestrial and supernatural. Together and apart, Conan and Valeria carve a bloody swath across deserts and jungles, their footsteps dogged by the evil magic of the serpent-worshiping Stygian priesthood.

As a new Conan adventure, Conan – Blood of the Serpent is largely successful. Numerous authors have shown that Conan can be a deceptively tricky character to portray with any accuracy. Decades of inconsistency and, for lack of a better term, “flanderization” across various forms of media have led to a multitude of Conans that sometimes wildly diverge from his depiction in the original tales. Too often the result is a brutish, monosyllabic, meat-headed jock rather than the cunning, pantherish figure created by Howard. In Conan – Blood of the Serpent S. M. Stirling demonstrates a nuanced grasp of the character. His Conan is appropriately deadly in combat and takes the direct approach when need be, but he’s also just as likely to use clever strategy or stealth to deal with obstacles. In The Phoenix on the Sword, the very first Conan short story, Howard described the character as possessing “gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth.” While so many depictions of Conan give us the former, grim-faced and dour, Stirling goes out on a limb a little and shows us some of that mirth, in a way we don’t often get to see. His Conan is downright jovial at times. Throughout the novel, Stirling displays a reassuring understanding of Conan’s character.

While Stirling delivers an entertaining Conan story, what he does NOT do is emulate Robert E. Howard’s style. I suspect this will be the most controversial aspect of the book for longtime Conan fans, as the most celebrated pastiche novels (i.e., the ones still talked about today, as opposed to lesser efforts) sought to pair an authentic-feeling Conan with prose that feels like something Howard would have written. And Stirling doesn’t do that, he simply declines. The book is written in a thoroughly modern style, and Stirling doesn’t go out of his way to pepper the text with Howard’s favorite expressions. Where Howard’s Conan tends to express his reflections and feelings through his actions and remarks, Stirling gives him the degree of interiority that contemporary readers are accustomed to, complete with italicized thoughts.

Not only is Conan – Blood of the Serpent a prequel to Howard’s Red Nails as advertised, I was surprised to discover that the final pages of the novel lead directly into the novella in question, with zero gap in the narrative. Titan Books wisely included Red Nails in this volume, and frankly the book would have felt incomplete otherwise. It’s a laudable move, as it allows newcomers to read a modern fantasy novel paired with one of the very best of the original Conan stories, but it also makes the contrasts between each writer’s style particularly stark. Both authors give the reader numerous scenes of intense combat against both man and beast (Stirling’s Conan slaughters a veritable zoo’s worth of African wildlife), but I was surprised to find it was Howard that went further in graphic detail when describing bloody swordplay. Also, perhaps inevitably due to the long-form novel format, Stirling struggles to maintain the propulsive, breakneck pacing seen in Howard’s short stories and novellas. Parts of Conan – Blood of the Serpent feel padded by comparison. The novel begins with not one but TWO tavern brawl scenes, whereas Howard would have cut to the literal chase and started his tale at the point in the narrative Stirling only reaches after a hundred pages. On the other hand, the extra space gives Stirling more breathing room for characterization. He has the space to directly show us aspects of Conan’s character (his mastery of wilderness survival, for example) that are generally mentioned in passing in Howard’s own work. Non-white characters are also given more dimension, while Howard tended to rely on the stock archetypes his pulp audience would have been familiar with.

Conan – Blood of the Serpent is blatantly a Conan novel written by S. M. Stirling, and not something that could be mistaken as a lost Howard tale. This is all die-hard Conan fans need to know. If Howard’s distinctive blood and thunder authorial style is a requirement for a prospective reader to enjoy a Conan story, this book may be skipped. But newcomers to Conan and existing fans who love the character and are open to other voices are encouraged to take a look. This volume delivers an engaging and approachable new adventure along with one of the very best of the classic stories. Regardless of whether or not future novel plots are directly connected to the events of the original stories, I would love to see Titan Books continue to package new stories with the classics.

#ReviewArchive #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #ConanTheBarbarian #ConanBloodOfSerpents #SMStirling #GrimdarkMagazine #GdM

This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on January 27, 2023.

Frolic on the Amaranthyn

By Chase A. Folmar – Sable Star Press – April 6, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

After an act of brigandry goes awry, the seductive thief Emrasarie and the hulking swordsman Uralant the Untamable find themselves at the mercy of the masked sorcerer Zelaeus. Their lives at his disposal, he compels the pair to board Numynaris’s Ark in search of forbidden arcane secrets. An enigmatic relic left by an ancient and cruel race, the colossal vessel drifts along the mist-shrouded Amaranthyn river, playing host to a hallucinatory bacchanal: the titular Frolic on the Amaranthyn. Emrasarie and Uralant soon learn that the ethereal beauty of the Ark and its Frolic conceals a deeper rot.

A briskly-paced 101-page novella, Frolic on the Amaranthyn blends swashbuckling action with nightmarish horror elements in the tradition of Weird Tales magazine. While the ornate diction and cynical approach to sorcery and its practitioners immediately bring to mind Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance, the diametrically opposed protagonists and their heist mission recall Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The lush, phantasmagorical prose reminds the reader of Tanith Lee, late queen of dark fantasy.

Chase A. Folmar takes a broad strokes approach to both characterization and world building. The reader is not told much about the heroes or the world in which they live, just enough to serve the requirements of the story. We learn that Emrasarie is an orphan with a history of exploitation at the hands of men. She has light fingers and has learned to use her striking beauty to her advantage. Her partner Uralant, on the other hand, has a hot temper and the brawn to back it up. The setting of Frolic on the Amaranthyn has a vaguely ancient Greek feel, reinforced by Folmar’s choice in diction: this is a world in which autochthons are beholden to eupatrids, rather than one where commoners are ruled by nobles.

While character backgrounds and setting details are kept brief, Folmar revels in describing the present scene. Like Smith and Vance, he spices the text with obscure and evocative terminology. Colubrine, autolatry, myriapod, incarnadine, erubescent, inuculent, rufescent, amaurotic, etc. Nearly every page of Frolic on the Amaranthyn includes a term that would be at home in a Word-a-Day calendar. This style of prose unashamedly places flavor above accessibility, but during my first read-through of the book I resisted the temptation to reach for the dictionary. As with Smith and Vance, I elected instead to just relax and let the rhythm and musicality of the unfamiliar words wash over me. Later reviewing the book with dictionary at hand provided some additional nuance and specificity, but this extra research was not in any way required to comprehend or enjoy the book.

A world of dark beauty is presented through the poetic prose and exposition. We are reminded repeatedly that, though surface elements may be beautiful—such as the architecture and luxurious finery on display—like Zelaeus’ exquisite mask it often serves to hide a deeper corruption. For all the superficial aesthetic beauty, brutality is never far away. The upper classes subsist heavily on their inferiors, and are willing to use violence to maintain this status quo. Over the course of Frolic on the Amaranthyn, Emrasarie and Uralant learn that humanity is threatened by an even more malicious and insidious parasite.

Numerous dark fantasy and classic Sword & Sorcery elements are present in Frolic on the Amaranthyn, but the choice to have the protagonists be a romantic couple is an uncommon choice for the genre. They don’t fall in love over the course of the adventure, they’re not friends (with or without benefits), they are already dedicated to each other. This intense commitment comes into play during the course of the story, with both of them drawing strength from their bond and using it to overcome both physical trauma and mind-affecting enchantments. This aspect of the characters felt fresh and ripe for further exploration.

Frolic on the Amaranthyn delivers an exciting and fast-paced dark fantasy adventure with appealing protagonists in a distinctive setting. This reader was left hoping that Folmar will return to the duo and their intriguing world in the future.

#ReviewArchive #BookReview #Fantasy #SwordAndSorcery #DarkFantasy #FrolicOnTheAmaranthyn #ChaseAFolmar #GrimdarkMagazine #GdM

This review originally appeared at the Thews You Can Use Sword & Sorcery Newsletter on December 9, 2022.

Between Two Fires

By Christopher Buehlman – Ace Books – October 2, 2012

Review by Robin Marx

In fourteenth-century France, all hell is breaking loose. War and the Black Plague have ravaged the land. Survivors live in decimated villages, suspicious of their neighbors and outright hostile to outsiders. The wealthy barricade themselves in palatial manors, ignoring the devastation outside their fortified walls and feasting like there is no tomorrow. And indeed there may not be: the devout have concluded that God has turned his face from mankind, abandoning the earthly realm to the depredations of demons from the pit.

The narrative begins with a fateful encounter between Thomas, a disgraced knight, and an orphaned girl hiding in a dilapidated farmhouse with the plague-ridden remains of her father. A scarred veteran who handled himself capably in battle yet still saw his title and holdings stripped from him through the machinations of a rival, Thomas has discarded the tenets of chivalry and turned to banditry. But when this strange, vulnerable girl turns up pleading for help, against his better instincts he allows himself to become her protector. He agrees to take her as far as the next town, but unpredictable circumstances and the girl’s prophetic and compelling visions of angels and demons spur them on a much longer journey, from the ruins of Normandy to Paris and beyond.

The odyssey that follows blends perilous and down-to-earth struggles to survive with surreal encounters with the supernatural. Billed as a medieval horror novel, much of the book adopts a decidedly “grimdark” tone, somewhat akin to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but set in the late Middle Ages. Most characters are—justifiably—paranoid or desperate, as any stranger could be a carrier of the plague or an opportunistic brigand intent on murder and thievery. However, this gritty and earthy atmosphere gives way to a much more phantasmagorical writing style whenever Thomas and his ward come into contact with the book’s numerous supernatural threats, some demonic in the traditional Biblical sense and others verging on Lovecraftian in nature. On those rare occasions when Thomas and the girl (whose name is not revealed to the reader until surprisingly far into the book) have a brush with the sublime, Buehlman adopts a much more lyrical tone. Throughout the book the author smoothly shifts gears between these disparate styles, masterfully punctuating each scene. I wasn’t shocked to learn, after finishing the book, that Buehlman is an award-winning poet.

Another aspect of the novel that benefits from the author’s expertise is the combat scenes. Buehlman has worked with fight choreographers, trained with swords and bows, and has worked as a combat performer at numerous Renaissance Faires. This experience, coupled with the assistance of multiple medieval weaponry experts cited in the book’s acknowledgements, lends the fights in the book a vivid and naturalistic feel. Combat as presented here is weighty, brutal, and never entered into lightly. It’s about as far from swashbuckling as you can get: combatants grow tired, bystanders interfere, and a chance loss of footing is just as likely to end one’s life as a well-placed blow.

While the prose styling and robust action stand out, the most appealing element is the humanity with which Buehlman treats his characters. The hesitant, growing bond between Thomas and the girl takes center stage, but the supporting cast are also rendered with care and patience. The people that the duo come into contact with are often frightened or suspicious, or seek to take advantage, but the reader is given insight into those characters’ doubts and fears, the dire circumstances that push them to act in the manner they do. For all but the most demonic members of the cast, when a supporting character betrays or acts against the interests of the protagonists, they’re usually given an achingly sympathetic and human reason for doing so. The world is blatantly and terrifyingly broken, and they’re all doing what they can to get by.

So much of Between Two Fires deals with questions of faith, but I hesitate to label this book a Christian apologia or parable. There are physical manifestations of Biblical angels and devils aplenty, but the focus remains firmly fixed on mankind. It is a moving humanist tale, demonstrating that no angel or savior can come to the rescue without people first learning to trust, cooperate, forgive, and even love one another under the grimmest of circumstances.

Recommended to fans of grimdark fantasy or dark historical fiction. It’s a grueling journey, but the oppressive onyx storm clouds overhead hide a platinum lining.

#ReviewArchive #BookReview #Fantasy #Grimdark #HistoricalFantasy #BetweenTwoFires #ChristopherBuehlman #ThewsYouCanUse

My first published book review, this originally appeared in New Edge Sword & Sorcery Magazine Issue #0, released on October 1, 2022. The digital edition of the complete issue is a free download.

The Obanaax: And Other Tales of Heroes and Horrors

By Kirk A. Johnson – Far Afield Press LLC – April 28, 2022

Review by Robin Marx

When Kirk A. Johnson encountered fantasy, it was love at first sight. The introduction to The Obanaax: And Other Tales of Heroes and Horrors, Johnson’s self-published debut collection, describes how as a child he was instantly transfixed by the Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of The Hobbit. Subsequent exposure to the 1950s Hercules movies and the stop-motion classics by Ray Harryhausen deepened his enthusiasm for the genre. He devoured comics like Conan the Barbarian and Warlord before moving on to more foundational works of fantasy, such as those by Robert E. Howard and the Dreamlands tales of H. P. Lovecraft.

The love affair soured as Johnson matured, however. The author reveals how, during his university years, he became increasingly disenchanted with fantasy and a great deal of entertainment media in general. Black characters tended to be stereotypical and treated unfairly if they were included at all. “The Vale of the Lost Women” (a notorious Conan story that remained unpublished during Howard’s lifetime) and the African adventures of Solomon Kane are cited as being particularly troubling.

Despite a sense of exclusion from fantasy, his interest lingered. Casual online research into Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser eventually led him to discover the late Charles R. Saunders’ groundbreaking Maasai-themed hero Imaro, marketed as a “Black Tarzan.”

This introduction to the sub-genre Saunders labeled Sword & Soul enthralled Johnson, inspiring him to create his own characters and world informed by the Africa of yore. Interactions with other active Sword & Soul creators like Milton Davis and P. Djeli Clark further challenged Johnson and influenced his work. His first published short story, “In the Wake of Mist,” appeared in 2011’s Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, edited by Davis. Published by Johnson’s own freshly-established Far Afield Press in April of 2022, The Obanaax collects four further energetic Sword & Soul adventures.

While the protagonists differ for each story, the tales all share a common setting: the continents of Mbor and Gaabar, in the remains of the fallen island empire of Xanjarnou. Given the coastal focus of the included map and the author’s own Trinidadian heritage, one might expect the stories to draw upon the culture of the Black diaspora in the Caribbean. Instead, Johnson sticks with a West African-inspired milieu. Whereas Johnson’s contemporary Davis adopts a mythologized version of Earth for his Changa tales, Johnson’s is a secondary world in which two moons rule the night sky and the spirits of the ancestral dead remain close to their descendants.

While the tribes of the savannahs are derided as unsophisticated yokels by pampered cityfolk, it is these so-called barbarians and similarly rugged mercenaries who act as the prime movers in the stories collected here.

The novella-length title story “The Obanaax” has as its heroine Wurri, a hardened nomad of the Asuah. She deals with treacherous grave robbers, a cursed bond-slave, and otherworldly threats in her quest to reclaim her people’s sacred artifact.

“The Oculus of Kii” focuses on barbarian warrior Sangara (who interestingly shares a name with the protagonist of “In the Wake of Mist,” from Griots). When a wrestling bout gone awry leaves him deeply indebted to his master, he’s dispatched on a deadly treasure hunt. Sangara is forced to contend with the spirits of the dead, masked cultists trespassing on their burial grounds, and the cult’s unholy patron.

“Cock and Bull,” the pinnacle of the book for this reviewer, features tribesman N’Gara, nicknamed “Clean” for his good looks. New to city life, N’Gara finds work as an enforcer for an avaricious merchant. He soon discovers that allegiances can be fluid in the “civilized” world. N’Gara is less of a bumpkin than he appears, however, and possesses an agenda of his own.

The book concludes with “For Wine and Roast,” a rousing tale of disparate mercenaries tasked with retrieving their merchant employer’s stolen pendant, a trinket of considerable magical might.

The evocative presentation of the setting was the highlight of this book. Johnson conjures a world in which nguimb-clad sell-swords rub shoulders with rich merchants in silken mbubb gowns, drinking sorghum beer from calabash bowls in daakaa drinking houses lit by gourd lanterns. Like Michael Moorcock, Johnson is able to give the reader just enough scaffolding to set a scene without overburdening them with excess exposition. The text is also generously spiced with terms from a variety of West African languages like Wolof, Malinke, and Songhay. A glossary is tucked away in the back matter, but usually context clues make the non-English terms’ meanings obvious.

The author also excels when his heroes are thrown into armed conflict, particularly with supernatural opponents. The action scenes are frenetic and viscerally described, and Johnson’s monsters run the gamut from oozing, tentacled horrors to all-too-solid masses of bulging muscle.

In the introduction Johnson acknowledges that he is still polishing his craft, and he runs into trouble when his plots become less straightforward. Some of the stories introduce twists late in the game; a seemingly implacable enemy may have a change of heart, or an ally might prove less steadfast than originally thought. At times these sudden developments are not as handled as elegantly as they could have been, and some additional foreshadowing or telegraphing could have helped these moments land with more dramatic impact.

For a self-published volume, the prose is largely typo-free, but it would have benefited from another editing pass. Commas occasionally appear in mystifying locations, or are conspicuous by their absence.

While this book is a promising debut, one gets the sense that Johnson’s best tales lie ahead, as his raw talent is honed by experience. That being said, Sword & Sorcery fans are fortunate that representation in the form of Saunders’ Imaro managed to coax this fresh talent back into the fantasy fold. Johnson is an author to watch.

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