Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: Dragons of Autumn Twilight

When I first read Dragons of Autumn Twilight, back in Middle School, I hadn’t read much fantasy fiction, and I definitely hadn’t watched much anime. This year, I decided to revisit the Dragonlance trilogy, with what I know now about Fantasy fiction, with a more mature perspective as a reader, and having watched (according to MyAnimeList) 66.5 days worth of anime between when I discovered Anime in Middle School and now.

The first book, in a way, starts of in a cliched fashion, but in a very self-aware cliched fashion – Group of adventurers meet in a bar and are kicked out the door on the road to adventure. In this case, the adventurers are a band of heroes who have mostly known each other for years who left to travel the world because they suspected that there was some Weird Shit going on, and returned with the answer “I dunno, but there’s some Weird Shit going on.”

The heroes are Flint Fireforge (Dwarfy Dwarf), Tanis Half-Elven (Ranger With Dice Lice), Sturm Brightblade (Kinda Lawful Stupid Cavalier/Paladin), Tasslehoff Burrfoot (Kender Thief whose player wants to play the comic relief), Caramon Majere (Fighter with good Con, Str, and Cha but not great Int and Wis), and his brother Raistlin (Mage who rolled 18s for Int and Wis, and 8s for everything else).

They are kicked out the door with the arrival of two barbarians – Riverwind and Goldmoon. The two have obtained evidence that after the Gods had left the word of Krynn centuries before in a great Cataclysm, they are returning to the world. The existing theocratic governments consider this a threat to their power, and the forces of the Goddess of Evil want to cover this up because they don’t want people to know that the Goddess of Evil is quite back yet (or at least that there’s an alternative).

Re-reading the book, I found in my mental pictures of the characters that they easily fit into more anime-inspired portrayals. Much of the humor in the book comes from either characters doing something dumb and being “corrected” for doing it, or through characters getting into silly situations and reacting to them in a comedic manner. At several points through the book I found myself coming up with “omake” strips for the story, or thinking about how it would work as a sort of “Dragonlance Abridged” webcomic.

As an aside, if that doesn’t exist, then it totally should.

The writing is generally okay. It gets a little male-gazey at parts. Admittedly, this happens when the POV character is male, but on the other hand, you can have a male character describe a female character who they’re attracted to without getting into describing their boobs and thighs. On the other hand, Weis and Hickman have the best Dragon descriptions and internal narratives in the business. Each of the dragons we encounter in this story are absolutely terrifying, killing their victims that, to continue the anime comparison, would fit in nicely with a late 80s, early 90s OVA or film.

The characters are two dimensional, but not in a bad way. These don’t have the character depth as the characters from Game of Thrones, but they fit well into archetypes, and archetypes can sometimes work to help the reader know their way around a work. That said, it’s where the writers go with those archetypes in the second installment that really decides how the series goes. To use the Star Wars comparison, by the end of A New Hope, everyone is still fairly stock archetypes. It’s Empire Strikes Back where they go into new and interesting directions.

I definitely enjoyed reading the book – though I recognize that this is the literary equivalent of a popcorn movie – it’s not going to challenge your sensibilities, but you’ll have a fun time while you read it.

If you are interested in picking up the book, it’s available from Amazon.com as a paperback, Kindle book, unabridged audiobook, and as an annotated anthology with the other two books in the trilogy.

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: The Tomb (1984)

A while back I watched the film adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s novel The Keep, and that lead me to go on to read that book and move on to his Repairman Jack series. However, I had never gotten around to the first book in the Jack series, which was also part of the same series as The Keep – The Tomb – until recently.

It’s very interesting reading this book in the context of having read later Jack books before it, in addition to having read The Keep. The Keep is an work of supernatural horror that is played very straight, which lays the seeds of a larger supernatural conflict going on in the shadows. This book ties into that conflict, but not as directly. Glaeken, the first book’s protagonist, is not appearing in this story, nor is the antagonist of the first book. Instead, the supernatural horror of the first story is hinted at, through a setup that indirectly pays reference to The Keep, with a similar setup.

Additionally, the book has a very different from of protagonist. In The Keep, much of the cast was effectively powerless against the supernatural force that had been released from the titular Keep, until the arrival of Glaeken, the one person who knows what’s going on and how best to fight against it – a combination of Van Helsing and the more action based characters in Dracula. By comparison, Jack is closer to the protagonists of various airplane potboiler thriller novels like Jack Reacher, and he approaches problems in a similar fashion.

To put it another way – Glaeken in the film version of The Keep was played by Scott Glenn, who does a great job at playing a character who not only has a great physical presence, but also comes across that he knows more than what he’s telling at all times, and that he knows some crap – that he knows something about the nature of the universe that other people don’t know, and that he won’t tell people if he thinks they can’t handle it (and he thinks they can’t handle it). If The Tomb had gotten a film adaptation that was semi-contemporaneous with the book’s initial publication, the ideal casting for Repairman Jack would likely be someone like Kurt Russell or Bruce Willis – grounded tough guy actors who are good at playing characters who have seen some shit, and who are also good at selling the stuff that the stuff they’re facing is scary.

You’ll notice that I haven’t talked much about the story. That’s because there isn’t exactly a lot there. The premise is basic – Jack is hired by two different people for two jobs. One is from the stepmother of the woman Jack is in love with (Gia). Gia’s step-aunt is missing, and Jack has been asked to look for her, as the police haven’t had much success. The second is from an Indian diplomat, whose grandmother has been attacked, and her necklace stolen. Those two cases end up becoming intertwined, through a monstrous horror lurking in a ship docked in New York Harbor.

If, after that description, your response is “that sounds like an airport novel that would probably get turned into a movie” – that’s a fair assessment. It’s a suspense thriller with a few moments of dread, but no real sense of terror. The main monsters of the story spend much of the time off camera, and most of the times when they attack or kill people also happens off camera. It makes it hard to truly buy them as a threat when you don’t see them succeed.

That said, Jack is an interesting character, and the fact that I checked out this book from the library instead of having bought a paperback new when it first came out helps some. This is absolutely the quintessential airplane horror-thriller novel. It’s something that will get you through a long flight, but if you accidentally left the book on the plane, you wouldn’t feel bad about it.

The Tomb is available on paperback, Kindle e-book, and an Audible audiobook from Amazon.com

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: Log Horizon Book 2 – The Knights of Camelot

When I reviewed the first Log Horizon book, I mentioned that were a few plot concepts that were set up in the next book in the series – a general malaise filling Akiba, along with the state of food in the world – and in turn a new discovery by Nyanta related to that. With the second installment of the series, the book dives further into that, and shifts genres somewhat. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: Empire of the Imagination

I don’t know if you know this, but I like tabletop RPGs. I really like tabletop RPGs. So, when I learned of the massive amount of scholarship going around RPGs and the history thereof, I got really excited. Though not the first book on the topic that I picked up (that being Of Dice And Men, which I reviewed in the fourth issue of my fanzine) this is one of the first, and one that warrants some discussion. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: Storm Front

Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series kicked off something of a new renaissance of Urban Fantasy. The genre had existed before – authors such as Emma Bull and Mercedes Lackey had written works in the genre, but what made Harry Dresden distinctive is how well it combined the Urban Fantasy genre with the hard-boiled detective novel. I had previously read Storm Front, and several of the later books, but hadn’t read any further books in a while. So, I figured now was as good a time as any to revisit the series beginning. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: Aetna Adrift

Disclosure: I received this book for free from the author for purposes of review.

When I received Aetna Adrift from the author, Erik Wecks, at OryCon last year, I saw that the book was a prequel to another series of books that he’d put out – his Pax Imperium series. Before I accepted the book, I asked if he considered the book to be a decent jumping point to this series. He said it was. I was a little unsure, but I accepted the book anyway. The good news is that the book is. It starts on a rough foot, but once it really gets going, it makes for an enjoyable read. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review:The Cloud Roads

Most fantasy novels that I’ve read work, generally, in the context of an existing society of our world. Tolkien took his cues from Nordic mythology and the Eddas. C.S. Lewis took a mixture of elements from various Mediterranean cultures and his own Christian views. Japanese period fantasy (as seen in anime, manga, live-action cinema, and books like the Kouga Ninja Scrolls) take cues from stories about youkai and oni, along with legends about the history of the Japanese Imperial family and the deities from which they draw lineage.

So, when reading The Cloud Roads, I was rather surprised to see very few connections to any real existing human cultures. However, the book also managed to execute on this without leaving me completely lost. Read more

Posted on by Alexander Case

Book Review: I, Strahd – The Memoirs of a Vampire (1995)

Gaming licensed fiction is hit and miss. For every Dragonlance Chronicles, you get a bunch of Darkwalker on Moonshaes. With the AD&D campaign setting of Ravenloft, which was born out of an adventure by Tracy & Laura Hickman, one would think that the novel focusing on the character from whom the setting was born would be written by the creator of that character – particularly when Tracy Hickman had gone on to co-create Dragonlance with Margaret Weis and would go on to co-write a bunch of New York Times bestselling novels. Instead, they went with a writer who also had also worked with TSR, and who had a strong track record writing gothic horror vampire fiction – P. N. Elrod. Read more