The Eyes of the Dragon--a review

After writing his magnum opus IT, Stephen King briefly stepped away from the genre that defined his career. The result was The Eyes of the Dragon (1987), a fantasy novel. King said that he wrote The Eyes of the Dragon for his daughter Naomi (for whom the book is dedicated, along with King’s friend Ben Straub) who reportedly never liked her father’s terrifying tales.

While that may be true, I also think that King may have thought he had said all that he had to say about horror and was looking to explore other genres. He may also have simply exhausted himself with the tome-like IT and needed to try his hand at something short and simple. Compared with most King novels, The Eyes of the Dragon is a chapbook (it’s nine compact discs in the Penguin Audio version, 380 pages in paperback including illustrations).

In brief, The Eyes of the Dragon is a story about the inheritance of the kingship of the fictional realm of Delain. Roland, the old king, fathers two sons late in life, Peter and Thomas. Peter, the eldest, is slated to inherit the throne. Peter possesses all the qualities you would want in a monarch—he’s smart, just, honest, and brave. Thomas on the other hand is a near clone of his father—an average thinker, prone to vacillations, reluctant to make important decisions. Roland’s adviser is Flagg, a shadowy wizard who has served the kings of Delain for centuries, perhaps longer. Flagg is actually a demonic figure who wants to see Delain in ruins and the world thrown into a dark age of bloody anarchy. He devises a plot to poison Roland, framing the murder so that the blame falls on Peter. When the dust settles, Thomas, only 12 years old, unfit to rule and terrified with his new responsibility, is put on the throne. Flagg knows that Thomas will be a puppet in his hands and the instrument through which he can finally see his centuries-long evil plans come to fruition. Peter is sentenced to life in a prison in the tower of the Needle, a small cell high above the city.

King has professed a love for the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien (The Stand is a semi-homage to The Lord of the Rings, and The Dark Tower series draws its inspiration from that book as well). The Eyes of the Dragon shares a lot in common with The Hobbit. Roland’s ancient heirloom is the arrow Foe-Hammer, one of the names given to Gandalf’s sword Glamdring. It’s also an allusion to the black arrow Bard uses to bring down the dragon Smaug. King tells the tale using an omniscient narrator who speaks with a pleasant, conversational voice, and seems to be relaying the tale years later and from some other time and place. This authorial voice is another hallmark of The Hobbit, written initially for Tolkien’s children and meant to be read aloud.

In general I liked The Eyes of the Dragon very much. As with all of King’s stories it’s wonderfully told with a compelling narrative. It feels like a fairy tale with an edge, in which the events will likely work out for the good in the end but with blood spilled and hearts broken along the way.

Peter is a great character and is easy to root for. Despite his unjust sentence and the fact that he knows he will likely never leave the Needle alive, he refuses to succumb to despair. Peter is a born leader with a carriage of command. Guards who initially spit in his soup or try to bully him, believing that as a convicted murderer he will be humbled and easy prey, are cowed by his regal bearing. His captors begin to question whether he indeed murdered his father. Peter has truth on his side and maintains his innocence with a quiet certitude that inspires awe. After his first week in the Needle he makes up his mind to live, and to not relinquish his kingship. Though he’s been convicted and stripped of his regalia and title he is in all respects still the uncrowned King of Delain.

If you’re a fan of King’s world and works you’ll recognize the name of Flagg, who is also the main villain of The Stand and The Dark Tower. While menacing in The Eyes of the Dragon, I found Flagg not as terrifying as he is portrayed in The Stand. Perhaps it’s because he’s less mysterious here and more of a prototypical evil dark wizard. He only reaches the truly insane level of depravity and malice I came to associate with Flagg of The Stand at the very end of the novel.

The Eyes of the Dragon is a moral tale and uses the fantasy trope of pitting opposing sides of good and evil against each other (Peter is almost stainlessly pure, while Flagg is an unredeemable monster who wants to see Delain thrown into a 1,000-year reign of anarchy and blood-soaked chaos). In between are characters with shades of gray, and just like The Lord of the Rings the outcome is decided by a few average folk who have to make difficult choices that run at odds with their own best interests.

But The Eyes of the Dragon is not without a few flaws. In my opinion King is far more comfortable and convincing when he’s writing about our world and in particular his Maine birthplace. Fictional small towns like Derry and Castle Rock feel real because King knows their environs and peoples. In contrast, the kingdom of Delain is unremarkable and without character (it’s a typical monarchy with kings and a servant class, whose technology is roughly high medieval). Any truly fantastic elements are at a minimum: Flagg is the only person who has access to magic and his spells are more alchemy than spellcraft. The only monster we see is a single smallish dragon in a flashback sequence whose head is mounted on the wall of Roland’s sitting room (from this trophy we get the title of the novel).

There are some holes in the plot, too. For someone who is incredibly ancient, powerful, and brilliantly evil, how does Flagg let Peter live for more than five years, letting him patiently spin his escape plot from the top of the Needle? Flagg recognizes Peter almost from birth as a formidable threat: Why wouldn’t he poison him, or pay the guards to murder him, or simply do it himself? When Flagg finally does catch on to Peter’s escape plan and comes racing up the stairs of the Needle swinging his monstrous double-bladed axe like a medieval version of Jack Torrance, I wondered why he had chosen to wait so long.

The second plot hole is Peter’s method of escape. I won’t spoil it here, but it seemed unrealistic that one of the omnipresent guards (who frequently pop their heads into the window on Peter’s cell door) wouldn’t have caught him in the act at some point during his five-plus years of imprisonment.

Still, a few problems aside, The Eyes of the Dragon is, like most of King’s material, a great read and highly recommended. Bronson Pinchot does a wonderful job as narrator and in particular delivers a wonderfully-voiced Flagg, delivering his lines with a whispering malice.

This review also appears on SFFaudio.com.

Ronnie James Dio passes

I've just learned that heavy metal legend Ronnie James Dio passed away today at age 67. Terrible news. Back in March I had written a post about Dio's battle with stomach cancer, one which he appeared to be winning.

First Frank Frazetta, now this. What a terrible week. Another light has gone out of the world.

I will post something later this week.

A final Frazetta tribute

This week over at The Cimmerian I join my fellow bloggers in praising the life and art of the late, great Frank Frazetta. It's my second post commemorating Frazetta's passing but my first for The Cimmerian audience, and in it I praise his ability to capture strength and muscular power in his drawings.

If you're interested, you can read the post here.

Remembering Frank Frazetta

Today I join a host of fantasy fans pausing for a moment to mourn and remember the life and works of brilliant fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, who passed away from a reported stroke at the age of 82.

A few months back I watched a highly recommended biography on Frazetta's life and work, Frazetta: Painting with Fire, in which a claim was made that Frazetta should be considered one of the greatest painters of the 20th century. Not fantasy painters, mind you, but among all painters, across all genres.

I'll admit that I reacted with a healthy dose of skepticism upon hearing that claim. But as the images in the film unfolded my resistance faded, and by film's end I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I love Edward Hopper and Winslow Homer, but--and I'm not sentimentalizing or expressing undue affectation here--I think Frazetta was every bit as talented as those guys. Heretical as it may seem, I believe that Frazetta could have painted works like Nighthawks or Eight Bells had he chosen to do so. He simply elected to work in a fantasy medium.

Frazetta was an artist who could sell books by his covers alone. On my bookshelf are the complete line of Lancer/Ace Conan books, as well as Joy Chant's Red Moon and Black Mountain and several Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books. I bought them long ago simply for their evocative Frazetta-illustrated covers. Only later did I discover that they were pretty good books by pretty good authors, too.

I have Frank to thank for that. He showed us glimpses of other worlds and larger-than-life heroes with an inimitable savage style, blending darkness and light and brilliant splashes of color to create muscular warriors and wondrous vistas. May he rest in peace.

Rediscovering the real Robert E. Howard in Collected Letters

We know a lot more about Robert E. Howard these days, and in particular we know a lot more truths about the man from Cross Plains than ever before. For this, we have many sources to thank, including the recent excellent work done by Rusty Burke in his A Short Biography and Mark Finn’s biographical work Blood and Thunder: The Life and Art of Robert E. Howard. There’s also plenty of places to find important critical analysis of Howard’s works, including collections of essays like The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph.

But if you want to get a look inside Howard’s mind—how he thought, what he believed in passionately, and what he raged about—I can’t recommend The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard highly enough. Editor Rob Roehm deserves our utmost praise for putting together this three volume collection, available for purchase from The Robert E. Howard Foundation.

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

A King-sized project begins

Writer Adam Christopher has embarked on a very ambitious project—reading and reviewing all of Stephen King’s books in the order in which they were published. He started a Web site dedicated to the task a couple weeks ago entitled Stephen’s Lot.

Christopher certainly has a massive task ahead of him. According to his Web site, King has written 56 books, including 46 novels, seven short story collections, and three works of non-fiction. Christopher also plans to intersperse his entries with reviews of film and television adaptations of King’s works and other King esoterica. To date he’s completed reviews of Under the Dome (which he’s calling Book #0—it’s King’s latest and out of order, hence the “zero” appellation), and has since reviewed Book #1, Carrie. Next up is ‘Salem’s Lot.

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

Thirty-five years of despair: The continuing relevance of Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories

I still remember many years ago reading the admonition that serves as the preface to Harlan Ellison’s Deathbird Stories (1975). I had never encountered a “buyer beware” message in a book and its three simple lines chilled me almost as much as the short stories that followed (what was I getting into? I remember thinking):

Caveat Lector
It is suggested that the reader not attempt to read this book at one sitting. The emotional content of these stories, taken without break, may be extremely upsetting. This note is intended most sincerely, and not as hyperbole.

I will vouch for the fact that Ellison’s warning is no cheap ploy, like a horror film declaring itself the most terrifying or gruesome ever to hook in a big gate. Rather, it lets the reader know that he or she is about to embark into a group of short stories whose combined effect is to deaden the spirit. This is the net effect of Deathbird Stories.

Written over a span of 10 years, the tales of Deathbird Stories are tied together by the concept that gods are real only as long as they have followers. “When belief in a god dies, the god dies,” writes Ellison. Old gods like Thor and Odin dissipated when Vikings took up the cross; Apollo was reduced to rubble when his temple fell, Ellison says in the book’s introduction. I’m not sure whether this idea of religious belief preceding divine essence was Ellison’s creation, but it may be (Neil Gaiman’s much-hailed American Gods also employs this concept, but Deathbird Stories, published more than 25 years prior, did it first and better). All I know is that 35 years later, its stories still resonate, and disturb.

Deathbird Stories is hard to pigeonhole (no pun intended): It’s probably closest to horror with a good deal of science fiction and fantasy elements thrown in. Story after story drives home the point that mankind has drifted away from belief in a benevolent, all-knowing and all-loving God and transferred its faith to soulless pursuits and material possessions. Deathbird Stories is Ellison’s negation (or perhaps more accurately, execution) of the Christian God, who is replaced by numerous, squalid, selfish (small g) gods upon whose sordid altars we now worship: The gods of cars, of gambling, of the modern metropolis, of pollution, and many more debased pursuits. The monstrous, twisted forms (both literal and symbolic) of these new gods are a marvelous work of Ellison’s creation. Old creatures of myth—basilisks, gargoyles, dragons, minotaurs—all make appearances, too.

Some of my favorite stories include “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” about the god of the slot machine and the mind-numbing dead-end that is Las Vegas; “Along the Scenic Route,” a short but memorable tale about a freeway autoduel of the future with equal relevance to our current road-rage fueled obsession with the automobile; “Basilisk,” which artfully combines the Greek myth of a serpent-like creature with a lethal gaze with Mars, the hungry and (well-fed) God of War; and “The Deathbird,” a disturbing inversion of the Genesis story which features serpent as hero and Adam’s search for the truth on a dying, ash-choked earth of the future.

One story is quite different in tone than the rest of the collection, “On the Downhill Side.” Here the ghosts of a deceased man and woman meet on a midnight street in New Orleans; the god of love has given them one last chance to find love in each other’s arms (the man, Paul, loved too much in life, while Lizette is a virgin who was unable to commit herself to a relationship). A great sacrifice is needed to consummate their love, which does not culminate in a playing of harps or choir of angels singing, merely a compromise “forming one spirit that would neither love too much, nor too little.” Along with “The Deathbird,” “On the Downhill Side” is Ellison at his rawest and most exposed—one gets the feeling that this how he truly believes that love and religion operate.

Ellison has always been a polarizing figure, a man of very strong opinions that he’s not afraid to share (his rants are everywhere on Youtube). You may or may not buy his cynical views, but they’re impossible to ignore. Likewise no reader will ever cuddle up with Deathbird Stories. It’s a difficult, often painful read. But it makes us think, and it immerses its reader in the beauty of the written word and the limitless potential of the short story. Love him or hate him, Ellison is an immense talent, and 35 years on Deathbird Stories still deserves to be read and discussed.