Cimmerian sighting: Heroic Visions takes a rather dim view of Howard

This past weekend I landed a major score at a local used bookstore, a haul that included no fewer than four works of swords and sorcery, a Weird Tales anthology, and a Year’s Best Fantasy collection. Needless to say I’ve got some good reading ahead of me. (Don’t ask me where this book store is: I won’t divulge my secrets until I’ve plundered the rest of its treasures).

Unfortunately, my excitement was dimmed upon discovering that the first book I opened, the Jessica Amanda Salmonson-edited Heroic Visions (1983, Ace Fantasy), begins with an essay that both exalts the S&S genre while managing to simultaneously land a swiping, drive-by broadsword blow on none other than Robert E. Howard.

Here’s the offending paragraph by Salmonson:

Heroic fantasy, in recent decades, has seemed too often to be epitomized by Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, and this is a sad state of affairs. The millennia-old heritage of magical and heroic tales does not begin or culminate in the rather simplistic fictions of the pulp era or the current, slavish imitations thereof. Howard’s work is admirable; he was surprisingly well-read, and invested his stories with the hodge-podge of an amateur historian or Harold Lamb fan, creating something primal, evocative, intriguing. Stylistically, he was weak. The dozen-score imitators of Howard have tended to capture the weakness of his style, but not the primal thread of his limited though worthwhile heroic vision—his, shall we say, pathos. Without denying Howard’s genius or even qualifying it, it must be recognized that glorifying his rudimentary sword and sorcery as “ideal” heroic fantasy is akin to assuming Doc Smith’s old-fashioned space opera is “ideal” science fiction. No area of fantasy should be so stagnant and devoid of stylistic and conceptual growth or variety.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: The Demons before Carce

5. The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison
The Demons Before Carce

Now came the Lord Juss with a great rout of men armed on his great horse with his sword dripping with blood, and the battle sprang up into yet more noise and fury, and great man-slaying befell, and many able men of Witchland fell in that stour and the Demons had almost put them from the bridge-gate.

—The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison

In a past review of The Worm Ouroboros, I noted that E.R. Eddison’s cornerstone work of fantasy is about the endless cycle of war (a worm eating its own tail and all that). As such, it offers a banquet of combat from which I had trouble selecting a single battle for my top 10 list. In the end I went with the last great engagement of the book, “The Demons Before Carce.”

In this battle the Demons (the forces of good), scattered and on the run, have marshaled their strength, fought back, and taken the war all the way to Carce, the Witches’ capitol city. All the great heroes of both sides are arrayed for final battle (and what wonderful names they are): For the Witches, Corinius, Counst Escobrine of Tzeusha, the Red Folio, Corsus, King Erp of Ellien, Axtacus lord of Permio, Olis of Tecapan, and the Lord Corund, among many others. They total 5,200 men or more. For the Demons, Lord Brandoch Daha leads a great company of horse, along with Lord Juss, Lord Spitfire, and the Lord Gro. On the Demon’s right, Lord Goldry Bluszco streams his standard, leading to battle the heavy spearmen of Mardardale and Throwater. With him is King Gaslark and his army of Goblinland.

The Worm Ouroboros is unrepentant in its love of battle. In Eddison’s universe war brings out the best in men. Even the “bad guys” (the Witches) shine like angels in gleaming plate-armor in the defense of Carce, fighting gloriously until the end. It’s impossible to not admire their feats-of-arms, even as we wish for their ultimate defeat.

The battle itself delivers on the promise of Eddison’s beautiful build-up and careful marshalling of the armies. The initial clash of troops is “like the bursting of a thundercloud.” Much like the forces of Troy when backed up the great walls of their city, the Witches fight fiercer than the Demons and gain the upper hand:

But like a great sea-cliff patient for ages under the storm-winds' furies, that not one night's loud wind and charging breakers can wear away, nor yet a thousand thousand nights, the embattled strength of Witchland met their onset, mixed with them, flung them back, and stood unremoved.

The Demons Before Carce appears to have influenced George R.R. Martin’s Battle of the Bywater. The two battles are parallel in many ways: Both include a battle before the gates of a large city and a combined engagement on land and sea. Just as at Bywater, fire plays a role in the outcome of The Demons Before Carce as the Demons’ ships, led by the young Hesper Golthring, are burned by the Witches, and the majority of Golthring’s soldiers are burned or drowned. Hesper himself, attempting to crawl away from the carnage, is stabbed with a dagger and dies. “The smoke of the burning ships was like incense in the nostrils of the King [Gorice] watching these things from his tower above the water-gate,” writes Eddison. In A Clash of Kings, Stannis Baratheon’s ships are burned in the harbor as Lord Joffrey and Cersei watch the carnage from above in the Red Keep.

Having disposed of the Demons’ ships, the Witches throw the main of their forces at the Demons’ ground troops, resulting in terrible carnage:

In which struggle befell the most bloody fighting that was yet seen that day, and the stour of battle so asper and so mortal that it was hard to see how any man should come out from it with life, since not a man of either side would budge an inch but die there in his steps if he might not rather slay the foe before him. So the armies swayed for an hour like wrastlers locked, but in the end the Lord Corund had his way and held his ground before the bridge-gate.

The Demons’ forces begin to bend and break. Lord Juss, seeing the threat of rout and defeat, makes a bold and perhaps fatal decision to ride his 800 cavalry into a gap in the Witches’ army to attempt to force a break. The language here is beautiful; J.R.R. Tolkien credited The Worm Ouroboros as an inspiration for his writing and you can see this heritage here, as Juss issues a Theoden-like battle cry before the latter’s great charge on the Pelennor Fields:

So it was from the beginning with all great captains: so with the Lord Juss in that hour when ruin swooped upon his armies. For two minutes' space he stood silent; then sent Bremery of Shaws galloping westward like one minded to break his neck with his orders to Lord Brandoch Daha, and Romenard eastward again to Spitfire. And Juss himself riding forward among his soldiers shouted among them in a voice that was like a trumpet thundering, that they should now make ready for the fiercest trial of all.

The plan works. Juss’ cavalry breaks through some initial resistance and sweeps through the gap, taking Corsus and Corinius’ forces in the rear, affecting a great slaughter:

There fell in this onset Axtacus lord of Permio, the kings of Ellien and Gilta, Gorius the son of Corsus, the Count of Tzeusha, and many other noblemen and men of mark. Of the Demons many were hurt and many slain, but none of great note save Kamerar of Stropardon, whose head Corinius swapt off clean with a blow of his battle-axe, and Trentmar whom Corsus smote full in the stomach with a javelin so that he fell down from his horse and was dead at once. Now was all the left and centre of the Witches' battle thrown into great confusion, and the allies most of all fallen into disorder and fain to yield themselves and pray for mercy.

Even as the Witches fall back with great loss, they do not break and run, but led by the valiant Corund fight bravely to the gates of Carce, step-by-costly-step. Juss, though a sworn, bitter enemy of the Witches, cannot help but admire their steadfast courage:

Juss said, "This is the greatest deed of arms that ever I in the days of my life did see, and I have so great an admiration and wonder in my heart for Corund that almost I would give him peace. But I have sworn now to have no peace with Witchland."

In the midst of the deadly melee, Corund and Juss square off like two prize-fighters. Corund smashes Juss’ shield and knocks him from his horse, but Juss recovers and drives his sword point through Corund’s mail shirt, a fatal blow. Corund, mortally wounded, retaliates with a great blow on Juss’ helm that knocks him unconscious.

Now pent up inside Carce and with the main of their army smashed, the Witches’ hopes for victory have fled. Corund is borne inside, unable to support his own weight. His next action is the stuff of fantasy legend: Weak and with his life-blood draining away from the terrible wound, he wills himself on to his throne, defiant and kingly to the end:

The Lady Prezmyra, when she perceived that his harness was all red with blood, and saw his wound, fell not down in a swoon as another might, but took his arm about her shoulder and so supported, with her step-sons to help her, that great frame which could no more support itself yet had till that hour borne up against the whole world’s strength in arms. Leeches came that she had called for, and a litter, and they brought him to the banquet hall. But after no long while those learned men confessed his hurt was deadly, and all their cunning nought. Whereupon, much disdaining to die in bed, not in the field fighting with his enemies, the Lord Corund caused himself, completely armed and weaponed, with the stains and dust of the battle yet upon him, to be set in his chair, there to await death.

Cimmerian sighting: The Tritonian Ring

Even the Gods so glorious must march at the last, down the dim dusty road to death the destroyer.

—L. Sprague de Camp, The Tritonian Ring

I hesitate to mention the name L. Sprague de Camp ‘round these parts, given the resentment held against him for his character-sullying, inaccurate portrayals of Robert E. Howard in his REH biography Dark Valley Destiny and elsewhere. But if you can look beyond his REH sins (and that’s a big if), de Camp the fiction author has a few gems to offer fans of sword-and-sorcery.

One of de Camp’s more highly-regarded S&S stories is the short novel The Tritonian Ring. Though an imperfect work and not in the same class as Howard’s best, upon recent re-read I found that The Tritonian Ring remains a cracking good read and worth picking up, if you can still find it these days. It’s pure story and possessed of a reckless momentum that lovers of S&S will appreciate.

Though de Camp greatly admired Howard’s writings and Conan in particular, latching on to Howard’s tales and reissuing edited stories and pastiches of the Cimmerian with fellow writer and S&S aficionado Lin Carter, The Tritonian Ring is a deliberate attempt by de Camp’s to break from The Hyborian Age and its larger-than-life heroes. According to this Wikipedia article, de Camp intended Poseidonis to be “The Hyborian Age done right” (i.e., a pre-cataclysmic age of earth that may have logically occurred, based on de Camp’s conception of the science of geology). It’s also an overbold claim sure to irk Howard fans.

It’s unfortunate de Camp again steps in it (and on Howard) with his attempted Howard one-upmanship, as the setting of The Tritonian Ring is among its charms, and differs in a few significant ways from The Hyborian Age—but “done right” is another matter altogether. Despite de Camp’s best efforts and ambitions, the world of The Tritonian Ring is in no ways a superior imaginative work than The Hyborian Age, and as a work of art, it pales next to tales like “Beyond the Black River” and “Red Nails.”

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site http://www.thecimmerian.com/?p=3770.

Stripped-down version of Desperation rates as middling King

I had high hopes for Stephen King’s Desperation (small band of people held captive in a demon-haunted mining town, breaking loose to battle possessed corpses, scorpions, and wolves—what’s not to like?), but alas, it failed to deliver on its intriguing premise. I’d give it an above average 3 ½ out of 5 stars. It contains some interesting ideas and is worth a read, but is not in the class of King’s best works.

Desperation contains some effective action sequences and the usual dollop of King-ian gross-out horror scenes, though there’s little actual frightening stuff in here. The book walks a hazy middle ground between a straight-up horror story and an examination of the nature of faith and the personage of God, and at least (for me) never really succeeds with either objective.

The basic problem I had with Desperation is that it contains no memorable or even particularly likeable personalities. The closest we get to a main character is John Edward Marinville, a pretty obvious stand-in for King himself (Johnny is a graying popular writer and member of the Baby Boomer generation whose career is starting to flag, and embarks on a cross-country motorcycle trip to attempt to find inspiration for his next novel. Which is apparently identical to how King arrived at the idea for Desperation). But after his introduction Johnny gets placed on the back burner as King juggles a bunch of other introductions, and we don’t learn what makes him tick until the book is nearly through.

I will give King some benefit of the doubt as the Penguin audio book I listened to for this review was abridged, and King’s original text is cruelly slashed. It’s apparent that some character development was left on the Penguin cutting room floor. The audio version is (somewhat) saved by narrator Kathy Bates of Misery fame, who does a fine job as the reader.

The rest of the characters are your standard cast of interchangables, save for David Carver, an 11-year-old boy who is able to communicate directly with God. King was certainly ambitious with Desperation: Like he did with The Stand, King inserts God directly into this book. He also spends some time exploring the nature of God through David’s struggle to reconcile a being that is supposedly all-knowing and all good, but is also cruel and demands borderline unbearable sacrifices of his worshippers here on earth. In the cruelest act of all, King writes, sometimes God lets His broken and suffering people live.

Opposing our band of heroes is the demon Tak, an evil spirit penned up in a 19th century mine—the China Pit—located on the outskirts of the small, secluded town of Desperation, Nevada. Tak is freed when a modern-day mining company accidentally unearths the ancient shaft. There’s an old legend in Desperation that a group of Chinese miners were buried alive in the mine after the shaft caved in, and the white miners outside sealed them in, alive, after deciding a rescue was too risky. In another weakness of the book, it’s not apparent whether the Chinese had stumbled onto Tak, or whether he was summoned by the curses of the dying, vengeful workers trapped inside.

Tak has the ability to inhabit the bodies of his victims, and he uses his hosts to embark on a murderous rampage that wipes out nearly the entire population of Desperation. Last of all Tak takes possession of Collie Entragian, the hulking town sheriff, and using his body and his cruiser rides up and down Highway 50 snaring unwitting hostages one by one.

Entragian/Tak locks his hostages in the Desperation town jail for use as human hosts (demon-possessed bodies wear out rather quickly and gruesomely, we learn). But spurred on by a vision from God, David manages to squirm through the bars of his cell and free the group. The rest of the book follows David as he accepts God’s command to defeat Tak. But first he has to overcome the group’s skepticism of God and his own shaken faith, which is cruelly tested again and again.

The middle of the book is a rather uninspired, drawn-out sequence of the group holed up in Desperation’s movie theatre. The book ends in a final showdown at the China Pit as the survivors attempt to seal the shaft. I wanted to see more of the inside of the mine, which seemed to have lots of potential as a set-piece, but the book ends rather abruptly.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a scene in which Johnny/King shouts out, “God forgive me, I hate critics!” before detonating a cache of explosives. I have to believe that King wrote the scene with a big grin on his face, and I certainly got a laugh out of it, even though I’m likely among the critics for which King has little use.

Note: This review also appears on SFFaudio.com: http://www.sffaudio.com/?p=5221

Cimmerian sighting: Bidding farewell to the heroic heart of Steve Tompkins

The news has begun to spread that Steve Tompkins of The Cimmerian passed away on March 23 after suffering a heart attack. As usual, real life has a lousy way of intruding on the fantastic.

I won’t sit here and tell you that Steve and I were friends. I’ve never met him face-to-face. But we had exchanged a dozen or so e-mails since he asked me in February to contribute weekly pieces to The Cimmerian. This news has hit me pretty hard and I feel like I’ve lost a comrade in arms, the trusted man to my left in the shield wall of those fighting to preserve Robert E. Howard’s legacy and promoting fantasy fiction as a whole. Steve’s shield was broader and he wielded a more skillful sword than most who answer the martial call of defending swords-and-sorcery and weird fiction.

Steve was a brilliant individual with an unquenchable passion for Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Edward Wagner, George R.R. Martin, Charles Saunders … the list goes on and on. He had a remarkable insight into the works of all these diverse authors, an amazing recollection of miscellanea and facts stored in the arsenal of his mind, and an uncanny ability to cite reference upon reference and work them, intelligently, into indefatigable essays. I’m not being self-deprecating when I say that Steve’s knowledge of the fantasy genre dwarfed my own.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Cimmerian sighting: Unearthing David Drake's "The Barrow Troll"

“You Northerners believe in trolls, so my brother tells me,” said the priest.

“Aye, long before the gold I’d heard of the Parma troll,” the berserker agreed. “Ox broad and stronger than ten men, shaggy as a denned bear.”

—David Drake, “The Barrow Troll”

One of my haunts for used books, Webhead Enterprises in Wakefield, MA, seems to house more than its fair share of exceptional short story collections (I’ve scored copies of Prime Evil, Dark Forces, and Revelations in Webhead, to name a few). It was there I purchased the excellent anthology Whispers, whose contents include “The Barrow Troll,” a terrific short story by David Drake.

“The Barrow Troll” was originally published in 1975 in Whispers magazine, a former periodical specializing in dark fantasy and horror. Drake, a former assistant editor for the magazine, wrote a nice piece about Whispers on his personal Web site.

Starting in 1977 editor Stuart David Schiff released the first of six best-of collections from the magazine in a book series also entitled Whispers. “The Barrow Troll” appears in the first of these anthologies.

In his introduction to the story, Schiff describes “The Barrow Troll” as “a brutal and shocking piece.” That about sums it up. It’s a wonderful fusion of horror and fantasy, probably my favorite entry in what is an almost-uniformly excellent collection (though Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” is also an absolute gem). Whispers’ table of contents reads like a who’s who of legendary horror/fantasy authors, as it includes stories by Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, Dennis Etchison, Hugh B. Cave, Richard Christian Matheson, Robert Aickman, Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman, and Ramsey Campbell, among others.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

More Battle of Five Armies goodness

While writing my recent post on J.R.R. Tolkien's Battle of Five Armies I spent some time googling for a few accompanying photos. In so doing I stumbled across a few related items that I felt compared to share. These include:

A Battle of Five Armies live-action role-playing event. I personally have never LARPed, nor really felt the urge to do so (except after several drinks). I'm not going to sit here and ridicule LARP, since I play tabletop RPGs and that would be more than a little hypocritical on my part. But something about LARP just rubs me as ... going too far. It's just not my thing.

But you know what? This event (to be held August 14-16, 2009) looks pretty cool. I'm impressed that five individual units, each with their own Web site and forum, have agreed to meet up and participate. I just might get in on this event. Put me in the vanguard of Dain's army, or let me play one of the bodyguard of Bolg. All that I need are a foam sword and cardboard armor and shield. And a few stiff drinks.

On second thought, I'd be willing to watch this, perhaps.

The Battle of Five Armies boardgame by Games Workshop. Now this is more my speed. Tell me that the cover of this game does not rock.

I'm not a big wargamer but I used to play Axis and Allies quite a bit, which come to think of it was a battle of five armies of sorts (albeit those of Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Russia, and the U.S.). But I would definitely be willing to take this game for a spin. These painted miniatures and terrain look pretty groovy, too.