Cimmerian sighting: To read, or to re-read

I’ve never understood the claim that, once read, a book is bereft of value. I have seen this absurd belief posited on several occasions around the Web, and it continues to puzzle me. You mean to tell me that there’s no value in re-living the wondrous adventures of The Fellowship of the Ring? That it’s possible for someone to pick up every nuance and plot detail of the phonebook-sized A Song of Ice and Fire tomes the first time? That, once you’ve read Red Nails, you’ve sucked it dry of its magic, and you can safely close the cover on the tale of the wild, warring tribes of Xuchotl forever? For me, this one-book, one-read claim smacks of either arrogance (“I can assimilate any text with laser precision the first time, every time. Can’t you?”) or ignorance (“Yes, yes, I already know the One Ring was destroyed. Now I’ve moved on to bigger and better stories like The Sword of Shannara”).

But lately I find myself slightly (very, very slightly) sympathetic to this view, for the sole reason that I’m in the process of building a towering pile of books that I’ve never read, big enough to obscure the old favorites behind it. Here’s a sample from my bookshelf.

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

Top 10 fantasy fiction battles: The Battle of Unnumbered Tears

4. The Children of Hurin, J.R.R. Tolkien
Nirnaeth Arnoediad

Great was the triumph of Morgoth, and his design was accomplished in a manner after his own heart; for Men took the lives of Men, and betrayed the Eldar, and fear and hatred were aroused among those that should have been united against him.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

As much as I enjoy the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and the Battle of Five Armies, neither can compare in size, pathos, devastation, and sheer magnificence with the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, also known as the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, one of the six major battles of the First Age of Middle Earth. Imagine magnificent elf-lords in gleaming armor and high white helms, doughty dwarves blasted with dragon fire, Balrogs engaging in single combat, a battle of betrayal, of bravery and sacrifice, and of ultimate ruin. That is the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.

Though not quite as enormous as the War of Wrath, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears is massive in scope. This Wikipedia entry does a nice job of pulling together an order of battle that estimates 330,000-500,000 orcs in the hosts of Angband, the fortress of the dark lord Morgoth. Opposing them is a force of approximately 85,000-120,000 elves, men, and dwarves.

If these massive armies weren’t enough, Morgoth's forces are reinforced with balrogs, trolls, wolves, and the dragon Glaurung. That’s right—balrogs and a dragon are involved in the battle. The armies of elves, men, and dwarves include several great heroes of their age, such as are rarely seen in the Third Age of Middle Earth (the age in which The Lord of the Rings takes place) and of which songs are still sung.

Such a battle defies description: Even Tolkien, its creator, can’t do it justice. As he writes in The Children of Hurin:

Many songs are yet sung and many tales are yet told by the Elves of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, in which Fingon fell and the flower of the Eldar withered. If all were now retold a man’s life would not suffice for the hearing.

I’d be willing to sit at the feet of Tolkien's shade and listen to a full recounting of the battle, but I have only one life to give to the endeavor. Alas, as it now stands, our only description of the battle are eight pages in The Children of Hurin and a brief section of The Silmarillion. Still, what is told and/or hinted at is enough to easily earn the battle a place in my Top 10 Fantasy Fiction Battles.

As befits its name, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears results in perhaps the most devastating loss on the battlefield for the forces of good in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium—utter defeat of the Noldor elves, the death of Fingon, their king, and the capture and eventual torture of the great human hero Hurin. It’s an antidote for critics who accuse Tolkien of being soft on war, and a teller of easy, child-friendly tales in which the forces of good always prevail. This opinion (and I've seen it espoused in more than one place) is horseshit.

The battle rages for at least six days, from what I can gather from the text, and is like a great, slowly unfolding tragedy. The forces of good are well-prepared, confident, and hold the high ground, and when Turgon and his 10,000-strong army issues uncalled for from Gondolin, Fingon’s heart is filled with hope of final victory. “The day has come! Behold, people of the Eldar and Fathers of Men, the day has come!” he says.

But a black night is in store. The Captain of Morgoth sends out heralds with tokens of parley, and bring with them Gelmir, a lord of Nargothrond, an elven lord whom Morgoth had blinded in captivity. The heralds cruelly hew off his arms and legs in plain sight of the elves and leave him to die. As fate would have it, Gelmir’s brother Gwindor sees this act of butchery and charges the heralds in a blind rage, slaughtering them. His forces continue the attack all the way through the gates of Angband, penetrating so far and with such wrath that Morgoth himself, hearing Gwindor and his men beating upon his door, trembles on his throne. But Gwindor is trapped at the doors and captured, and all his folk slain there.

Back on the field, Fingon and the main body of the elves have followed Gwindor onto the battle-plain where they no longer have the advantage of high ground, and there begins the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, “all the sorrow of which no tale can contain,” Tolkien writes. The field is lost when Gothmog, a balrog and high-captain of Angband, meets King Fingon in combat on the field. Fingon fights Gothmog to a standstill until a second balrog comes behind him and casts a throng of steel around him. Gothmog hews Fingon’s white helm with a stroke of his black axe, killing the elven king. “Thus fell the King of the Noldor; and they beat him into the dust with their maces, and his banner, blue and silver, they trod into the mire of his blood.” In addition, the Easterlings turn traitor and fall upon the rear of the sons of Feanor, helping to turn the tide of battle in favor of Morgoth.

Fingon’s younger brother Turgon escapes back to Gondolin thanks to a brave, suicidal rear guard action by Hurin and his brother Huor. This is perhaps the most poignant pause in a battle filled with such moments. Says Huor to the elf-lord:

“This I say to you, lord, with the eyes of death: though we part here for ever, and I shall not look on your white walls again, from you and from me a new star shall arise. Farewell!”

The Men of Dol-lomin fight a terrific last stand, affecting Turgon’s escape, but there is no escape for the brothers. Huor falls with a venomed arrow in his eye, all his valiant men are slain about him in a heap, “and the Orcs hewed their heads and piled them as a mound of gold in the sunset.”

Then comes the ultimate end. If this passage doesn’t invoke a chill in your soul, Tolkien will never be for you:

Last of all Hurin stood alone. Then he cast aside his shield, and seized the axe of an orc-captain and wielded it two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time that he slew Hurin cried aloud: ‘Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive, by the command of Morgoth, who thought thus to do him more evil than by death. Therefore the Orcs grappled Hurin with their hands, which clung to him still, though he hewed off their arms; and ever their numbers were renewed, till he fell buried beneath them.

Unfortunately for Hurin, he is taken alive.

The enduring image of the battle is a great mound of corpses of men, elves, and dwarves that can be seen for miles off, and upon which no servant of Morgoth dares to trod. It later grows green and is the only verdant place in the desert of Anfauglith. Wives of the slain later find it and grieve upon it. Artist Ted Nasmith’s wonderful, grim painting “The Hill of the Slain” captures this image beautifully and terribly.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one other amazing sequence of the battle that is not included in The Children of Hurin, but which can be found in The Silmarillion: A battle of dwarves and dragons. Glaurung the dragon and his brood are wreaking havoc upon the Noldor, who break before the fire-spewing wyrm. But standing firm are the Dwarves of Belegost, who wear “great masks in battle hideous to look upon” and are thus able to withstand the flames. The dwarves surround Glaurung and hack at him with their axes. Glaurung in his rage turns and strikes down Azaghal, Lord of Belegost, and crawls over him, but with his dying stroke Azaghal drives a knife into his belly, so wounding him that he flees the field. The grief-stricken dwarves bear away their lord singing a dirge, and none dare to stay them, not even their foes. It’s an amazing image.

Cimmerian sighting: Evaluating Don Herron's hard look at Stephen King

Essayist/raconteur Don Herron is best known ‘round these parts for his outstanding Robert E. Howard criticism, which includes essays and editing duties in seminal works like The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph. Elsewhere he’s also regarded as an expert on the works of renowned mystery and noir writer Dashiell Hammett.

Based on this photo, he also wears a fedora and trenchcoat better than anyone.

But a lesser-known side of Herron’s resume includes his Stephen King criticism. I myself was unaware of Herron’s work as a reviewer of the king of horror until coming across his essay, “King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic” from Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King (1986, NAL/Plume).

Seeing as how I’m writing for The Cimmerian website, whose now defunct print journal was home for many Herron essays, this next statement may make me seem like a suck-up, but that’s fine, I’ll say it anyway: I think Herron’s essay is perhaps the best in Kingdom of Fear. This is no mean feat, given that some of the other contributors to the volume include horror immortals like Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Harlan Ellison.

Whether or not you agree with that assessment, it’s rather indisputable that Herron’s essay is the most provocative of the lot. I first started typing “equal parts criticism and praise,” but upon further review it’s decidedly tipped in favor of the negative. Considering that Kingdom of Fear was published in 1986—arguably the height of King’s creativity and popularity—Herron’s final analysis of King as a talented but flawed writer is rather ballsy. Herron pulls no punches, neither for King nor his legions of fans and admirers. For example, he rips Douglas Winter’s book Stephen King: The Art of Darkness for containing too much fan-worship and not enough honest appraisal. Writes Herron: “[It] strikes me as remarkable because Winter never once disagrees with a King dictum, he does not suggest that one of the novels under discussion might, just possibly, have a minor flaw or two. In this respect it is typical of most of the new criticism, where the critics, like the audience of teenage girls who buy so many of the King books, find everything to be just wonderful.”

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

The Devil You Know: A review

Maybe if we cry together
Maybe if we cry as one
The tears that fall can kill
the fire
And keep everyone from
Atom and evil

--Heaven and Hell, Atom and Evil

I am one of those rare breeds who prefers the Ronnie James Dio-fronted Black Sabbath to the Ozzy Osbourne years (I acknowledge Black Sabbath's early greatness, but my favorite album remains Heaven and Hell). So it was with great anticipation of another Dio-Tony Iommi collaboration that I bought The Devil You Know.

After a couple play-throughs, The Devil You Know is what I would consider a slow burn--nothing jumps out at you at first listen, but it seems to get better with each subsequent spin. Still, I can't shake the feeling that, after waiting for 14 or so years since the last Black Sabbath album (1995's Cross Purposes), and 17 years since the last Ronnie James Dio-fronted Sabbath album (1992's Dehumanizer), I wanted something that immediately grabbed me by the throat. Sadly, there's no pulse-pounding Neon Knights to be found.

There is at least one bona-fide awesome song on this album, Bible Black. If you've ever heard Sign of the Southern Cross or Children of the Sea, Bible Black is in that same epic vein--a slow, melodic, acoustic intro, followed by an explosion of sound and Dio lauching into the song with his inimitable voice. My other favorites on the album are shaping up to be Atom and Evil (both a biblical allusion and a warning about unchecked nuclear proliferation), Follow the Tears, and Neverwhere.

The rest of the songs are solid if rather unspectacular, though I hope that changes with subsequent listens. As of now, the only ones that I'd rate as sub-par are Rock and Roll Angel and Eating the Cannibals.

Dio's voice doesn't have quite its old range and power anymore, but at 66 years old he's still pretty damned amazing. And if he's lost a little off his fastball he sounds arguably more evil and "metal" than ever, if that makes sense. The guy is a metal god, as is Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler, who pound out some awesome riffs on the album. The sound of the album is dark and bass-heavy, about what you'd expect. Iommi also launches into a couple memorable guitar solos (remember those?)

It's worth noting that the title of album and its artwork are a clever play on words and images--Black Sabbath is of course known for its use of satanic lyrics, but the band itself is the "devil" all metal fans know and love so well. The cover art (see below post) is exceptional, and appears to fuse both traditional Black Sabbath imagery and the Dio Sabbath/solo years. I might be reading into the image too much, but I can't help but feel that the long-horned demon bears more than a passing resemblance to the devil creature on Holy Diver and a handful of Dio's other solo albums.

The Devil You Know: I've got it in my greedy hands

Today I did something rather out of the ordinary in my all too ordinary life--I bought a CD on its first day of release: The new Black Sabbath (scratch that, Heaven and Hell) album, The Devil You Know.

I know, I'm a damned lunatic. Stand back.

It's way too early for me to post an honest review and frankly, I haven't given my full attention to the album yet. But my initial impression is that it's got a good, dark, bass-heavy sound, decent if not soaring vocals by Dio, and at least one early leader: a great song named "Bible Black."

More on this to come.

Slaughterhouse-Five: A review

And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

During World War II, author Kurt Vonnegut was taken prisoner by the Germans and held captive in the city of Dresden, which was later reduced to flaming rubble during a harrowing fire-bombing by American forces. According to Vonnegut, the city was a gorgeous center of art, architecture, and fine civilian life; its value as a military target was negligible. “What I’ve said about the firebombing of Dresden is that not one person got out of a concentration camp a microsecond earlier, not one German deserted his defensive position a microsecond earlier,” Vonnegut said.

Somewhere between 25,000 and 120,000 civilians (the upper figure is an early estimate, which has since been revised downward to 25,000-40,000) were killed in the inferno of incendiary and high explosive bombs. As such, Dresden remains a controversial, dark chapter of America’s involvement in the war.

Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s look back on this dreadful event. It’s not a traditional biography, but a modified account of his own experiences as seen through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim, a tall, awkward, disconnected dreamer who is drafted into the army and thrust into combat. Pilgrim is a pathetic soul with the appearance of a “filthy flamingo,” involved in tragic events beyond his control.

Captured during the Battle of the Bulge, Pilgrim and 100 other soldiers are shipped to Dresden to serve as prison-labor. At night they sleep in a storage-cave beneath a slaughterhouse amidst the butchered carcasses of animals, and it’s this arrangement that allows them to survive the attack. After the firebombing, they emerge the next morning to find the once-beautiful Dresden so utterly destroyed that it resembles the surface of the moon.

A part of me feels guilty for reviewing Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five on a science fiction/fantasy Web site. The connections of this classic anti-war novel to the science fiction genre are tenuous, but it attains this designation (in some circles) due to the presence of the Tralfamadorians, a race of aliens that capture Pilgrim and bring him back to their planet for examination. During his months on Tralfamadore, Pilgrim is placed in a sort of zoo, his body and mind laid bare to the curious aliens.

The Tralfamadorians may be simply the imagination of an unwell, traumatized mind. Pilgrim is emotionally unbalanced, suffers a head injury after the war, and reads voraciously of the novels of science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, one of whose novels concerns an alien abduction that sounds suspiciously like Pilgrim’s own experiences on Trafalmadore. But the Tralfamadorians—real or not—allow Vonnegut to explore the concept of time and our place in it, which is the larger theme of the novel. The Tralfamadorians can see in four dimensions and have no concept of time; life just is, and human existence is a series of events and happenings with no beginnings and ends. Events simply occur; wars are fought, we are powerless to stop them and it’s ridiculous to think we can. Free will is a farce.

Pilgrim’s time among the Tralfamadorians allows him to experience his life in this fourth dimension, moving his mind back and forth to the past and future, seemingly at will. He is able to see his own death, and relive events from his childhood, his marriage, and his career as an optometrist. But Pilgrim’s wandering, time-traveling mind returns again and again to the terrible events of Dresden, an experience so powerful that his mind is unable to make sense of it. It just is, and all he can do with the rest of life is to try and look upon the good times in his life, the moments of joy, and not linger too long over the blackened, shrunken bodies of Dresden, or a fellow American and friend executed for salvaging a teapot from the ruins.

Actor Ethan Hawke (of Dead Poets Society and Hamlet fame) serves as the narrator and does a nice job reading with an understated, dispassionate voice that perfectly fits the tone of the novel. This Blackstone Audio production also includes an unexpected and enlightening 10-minute interview with Vonnegut on the final disc. Here Vonnegut reveals that Pilgrim’s character was based on a real person, Edward Crone, an American who died in Dresden. “He just didn’t understand the war at all, what was going on, and of course there was nothing to understand—he was right,” Vonnegut says.

This review also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Cimmerian sighting: Of Wolf Larsen and embracing the Howardian hero

“He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God’s thunderbolts,” Wolf Larsen was saying. “Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten. A third of God’s angels he had led with him, and straightway he incited man to rebel against God, and gained for himself and hell the major portion of all the generations of man. Why was he beaten out of heaven? Because he was less brave than God? less proud? less aspiring? No! A thousand times no! God was more powerful, as he said, Whom thunder hath made greater. But Lucifer was a free spirit. To serve was to suffocate. He preferred suffering in freedom to all the happiness of a comfortable servility. He did not care to serve God. He cared to serve nothing. He was no figure-head. He stood on his own legs. He was an individual.”

—Jack London, The Sea Wolf

Occasionally when I read Robert E. Howard I wonder: What is it that attracts me to his writing? Is it his great, galloping storytelling? Yes—if pressed, I would say that this is Howard’s finest trait as a writer. Is it the swords and sorcery trappings of Howard’s Conan and Kull stories? Yes—I’ve always felt an attraction to arms and armor, lost civilizations, and monsters and magic, which is probably why I favor these characters above Howard’s others. Is it is his disdain for civilization? Yes, this too—as an office worker in 21st century America, I have my frustrating, bad days where I feel an apathy or outright disgust for “the system.”

But do I also read Robert E. Howard for wish-fulfillment, for the vicarious thrill of stepping into the personas of Howard’s self-sufficient, strong, warlike heroes? Yes, I do. When reading stories like “The Shadow Kingdom” or “The Phoenix on the Sword,” I admit to imagining myself as a larger-than-life barbarian-king from an impossibly ancient era, living by the simple, violent code, “By this axe, I rule.”

I actually arrived at this realization not while reading Howard, but while re-reading one of his favorite authors and literary influences—Jack London, and specifically London’s The Sea Wolf. In this book we’re introduced to Wolf Larsen, the brutal, iron fisted captain of the sealing schooner Ghost. London spends considerable pages trying to convince the reader of Larsen’s despicable nature. Larsen is more beast than man: He rules with an iron fist, crushing his crew brutally underfoot, particularly those who dare to exhibit a will of their own. He doesn’t truck with weakness, or morality (in Larsen’s eyes, these qualities are one and the same). He forbids his crew to go to the aid of a young crewmate, frozen with fear in the rigging (“The man’s mine, and I’ll make soup of him and eat it if I want to,” Larsen says). He scoffs at the idea of an immortal soul.

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