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Review: Saint Dorian and the Witch, by Michael Raship

Review: Saint Dorian and the Witch, by Michael Raship

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Saint Dorian and the Witch by Michael Raship

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

Saint Dorian and the Witch is a splendid piece of fantasy, a personal journey and a love story set in a world torn apart by quarreling gods and religious fanaticism.

Bartholomew is a young monk, living in a monastery on the outer edge of an Empire that seems to take a great deal of inspiration from the landscapes and cultures of South Asia. The Empire is a very orderly place, ruled by an emperor and subordinate local kings, all supported by the powerful monastic order in which Bartholomew has been raised. Everyone reveres the great god Ael, the Lord of Destiny who maintains the rigid order of the world. Sometimes Ael sends a special servant, a “saint,” into the world to carry out some holy mission. The history of the Empire is full of tales of these saints, their special powers, and their epic struggles against chaos.

Bartholomew is a young man, but he has a special talent: he is a Librarian, someone who can not only read all of the sacred texts, but who can recite them from memory. Unfortunately, the more he studies the sacred texts, the less he believes in them, and the more he feels that there is something missing in the world under Ael’s dominion.

One day Bartholomew begins to dream of a new saint, one not yet recognized by the Empire and the monastic order. This new saint seems to promise the serenity that Bartholomew’s status as a monk and Librarian can no longer provide. Caught up in his new devotion, he leaves his monastery on a quest to join Saint Dorian in the heartland of the Empire. Along the way he meets Ruth, a young witch with her own special talent for spell-casting and magic.

What follows is a gorgeous tale woven around multiple themes: quests for spiritual fulfillment, the perils of religious fanaticism, the clash between order and chaos, the value of love and compassion, and the abiding power of stories. I found myself constantly surprised by the tale, constantly turning the page to see what might happen next.

Mechanically, the novel is very well put together. The prose style is impeccably clean, with a minimum of distractions and no copy-editing errors that I could catch. One thing that may throw some readers is that, for all the excellence of the world-building, the story is largely driven by the logic of myth. Things happen in the story because they’re dramatically appropriate, not always because they make coldly rational sense . . . but then, that appears to be part of the point.

I loved Saint Dorian and the Witch, quite a bit more than I expected when I began it. I came to the end of this book wishing for more. Very strongly recommended.

Review: The Craftsman and the Wizard, by Joel Newlon

Review: The Craftsman and the Wizard, by Joel Newlon

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The Craftsman and the Wizard by Joel Newlon

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Craftsman and the Wizard is a flawed but entertaining story, a high-fantasy novel with the trappings of an old Norse tale, but which is firmly rooted in the present day.

The village of Two Rivers has a terrible problem. Ever since one of the farmers disturbed an ancient runestone in the middle of his fields, the village has been haunted by a draugr, the revenant of an old burial mound. The monster has been taking children from the farms all around, binding them beneath the earth and leaving their families to mourn.

Two unlikely heroes, and later a third, come on quest to help Two Rivers. The dwarven smith Dvalinn is called to answer an ancient debt, bringing all his skills as a warrior and craftsman. The apprentice wizard Asmund is called by a series of terrible dreams. Later, a woodcutter girl named Kolga joins Asmund, at first out of a yearning for adventure, later out of love.

Most of the story follows first Dvalinn, then Asmund and Kolga, as they make their way separately toward the stricken village. The two sets of heroes move independently – they know nothing about each other and don’t interact until the very end of the story.

The two plot threads have very different flavor and feel, almost as if the heroes are moving through two completely separate worlds. Dvalinn’s scenes are more entwined with Norse myth, involving epic battles against supernatural foes. Asmund and Kolga seem to be moving through a more generic fantasy world, facing down human bigotry and corruption. In fact, some of Asmund’s scenes turn into rather unsubtle political satire, of a kind that would only make sense in today’s world.

In fact, this dichotomy is what I had the most trouble with while reading The Craftsman and the Wizard. It was as if the novel didn’t know what it wanted to be. One moment I might be lost in a truly audacious scene built out of deep myth, the next I would find myself plodding through a scene about a cowardly warrior or a pathetic mad king. I kept getting pulled out of the story as a result.

Still, Joel Newlon has done a good job with this story. His prose is clean, with only a few copy-editing errors (and one consistently irritating misspelling). The story has plenty of emotional heft, especially when it focuses on the heroes and their motivations. I found myself caring about the characters and their struggles, turning the pages to see how the plot threads would resolve. The conclusion was entirely satisfying. Recommended.

Review: The Drowning Land, by David M. Donachie

Review: The Drowning Land, by David M. Donachie

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The Drowning Land by David M. Donachie

Overall Rating: **** (4 stars)

The Drowning Land is a piece of prehistorical fiction, set in northern Europe a little over eight thousand years ago. It’s an adventure story, a romance, and a disaster novel all rolled into one, set in a land that literally sank beneath the sea in the distant past. The result is an interesting and entertaining read.

This review is based on an advance review copy (ARC) shared with me by the author. The final published version may differ slightly from what I’ve read.

Edan is a young member of a Mesolithic tribe, dark-skinned and blue-eyed people, who live in what he thinks of as “the Summer Lands.” Edan’s tribe have lived there from time out of mind, migrating between the coast and the highlands every year in response to the seasons. Their lives are driven by ancient tradition, but they may soon be faced with a crisis that tradition will never help them solve. For the Summer Lands are sinking beneath the waters of the sea, and many are afraid they will soon vanish altogether.

This isn’t a piece of fantasy. The Summer Lands are, in fact, Doggerland – a region that once acted as a land bridge, connecting the British Isles to the continent of Europe. At one time, Doggerland may have been one of the richest countries inhabited by human beings. Yet as the climate shifted following the end of the last Ice Age, Doggerland was eventually submerged beneath the North Sea. Today, its remnants form the “Dogger Bank,” an underwater feature off the eastern shores of Britain.

At the beginning of the story, Edan and his tribe are already struggling to survive. Not only is the once-rich country being slowly poisoned by rising salt water, but other tribes are responding to the crisis by becoming fierce and aggressive. Edan’s people meet one such group, a band of renegades who have taken predatory wolves as their totem, led by a war-chieftain named Phelan. At first, the contact promises to be peaceful, but when Edan rescues a young woman from the other band and accidentally kills one of Phelan’s followers, the consequences are severe.

Edan and the young woman, Tara, are forced to flee together for their lives. Tara, it turns out, is a “troll,” not quite what Edan’s people would recognize as human. In fact, she is from a tribe that has significant Neanderthal ancestry. She is also a visionary, cursed with foreknowledge that the Summer Lands will be drowned within months, on a quest to see if the spirit world can be roused to prevent the disaster.

What follows is a small odyssey, as Edan and Tara travel from one end of the Summer Lands to the other, fleeing from Phelan’s people and the rising seas, visiting other tribes, and seeking a solution to the imminent end of their world. Along the way they both grow and change, and they fall in love. Their fate, and the fate of the entire Summer Lands, is bound up in the rest of the story.

Once I got past the first few chapters of The Drowning Land – which felt a little slow of pace – I found it a compelling story. Edan and Tara are sympathetic characters, and even villains like Phelan have depth to them. As a piece of historical fiction, the story is very thoroughly researched and plausible; Mr. Donachie has certainly done his homework. I was rather reminded of some of Jean Auel’s work.

The story shifts viewpoints with each new chapter, a technique I don’t always appreciate, although Mr. Donachie does take care to label each chapter so that the reader won’t be confused. The prose was also not quite as clean as I usually want to see, with a few typos, and occasional mis-paragraphing during dialogue. None of this rose above the level of a minor distraction, nor did it pull me out of the story.

On the whole, The Drowning Land should work well for anyone who’s interested in historical fantasy, or tales of human survival under punishing circumstances. Recommended.

Review: The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood by Rose Bailey

Review: The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood by Rose Bailey

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The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood by Rose Bailey

Overall Rating: ***** (5 stars)

The Adventures of Sasha Witchblood is a collection of dark fantasy stories, published in two (rather short) volumes: The Sugar House and Stars of the North. The author, Rose Bailey, has an extensive curriculum vitae in the tabletop and computer game industries. This collection draws inspiration from both the pulp-magazine fantasy of Robert E. Howard and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm . . . but it then turns both on their heads. The result is an oddly compelling set of stories.

Sasha Witchblood is an adventurer, a brute, and occasionally a murderer. She’s not quite human, marked by the blood of a famous ancestor who was more ogre than woman. Like one of her literary cousins, Conan the Cimmerian, Sasha gets into adventures, doing her best to survive them and make a little profit along the way. Again like Conan, Sasha is not a very sympathetic character – she’s too cynical and selfish for that. Although she does have a personal code that can be relied upon. Usually.

The world she lives in looks like something Robert E. Howard might have come up with as well. Ms. Bailey uses Howard’s frequent trick, borrowing from real-world history while putting her own speculative slant on it. The result is recognizable as a late-medieval Earth, but one that has been under siege by the forces of dark magic for a long time. Cities and kingdoms have been obliterated by monstrous hordes, by encroaching forests, or by never-ending winter. It’s a tough place, and only someone as case-hardened as Sasha seems likely to succeed in it.

What adventures does Sasha find herself in? The reader will probably recognize some of them: the story of Hansel and Gretel, the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the story of Sleeping Beauty, the story of Snow White. On the other hand, none of these stories are quite as the Brothers Grimm told them. We’re in the territory of the original folktales, which were often bloody and dark and decidedly not for children. It’s not always clear which character is the monster and which the hero, if indeed any of them can be called heroes.

The reader should be aware that these are not novels. Each story in the collection can stand on its own, and in fact they’re only roughly presented in the chronological order of Sasha’s career. There’s no overarching plotline to be resolved by the end of the second volume. Better to read these stories the way one might read Robert Howard’s tales, each a dark and disturbing glimpse into Sasha’s world.

Sasha’s stories are carefully composed and well written, with clean prose and very few copy-editing problems. These two volumes should work well for anyone who might enjoy a dark fantasy take on popular fairy tales, or a different slant on the fantasy of the pulp era, or both. Highly recommended.

Short Story Now Available: “Fragment”

Short Story Now Available: “Fragment”

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I’ve posted a new short story, “Fragment,” to the Free Articles and Fiction section of this blog.

“Fragment” is an odd little story, dressed up as a short scholarly article in the discipline of Assyriology, possibly appearing in a peer-reviewed journal from some other line of history.

“Fragment” will also be released to my patrons, free of charge.

Short Story Now Available: “Safe Haven”

Short Story Now Available: “Safe Haven”

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I’ve posted a new version of “Safe Haven,” one of my oldest short stories, to the Free Articles and Fiction section.

“Safe Haven” is a tale set soon after the Trojan War, in a world that isn’t quite the same as the one familiar to us from the poems of Homer. Aside from the links on the Free Articles and Fiction page and in the sidebar, here’s a direct link as well.

“Safe Haven” will also be released to my patrons, free of charge.