Greyhawk Adventures: Saga of Old City (1985)

The rapscallion known as Gord levels up his abilities as a thief during a series of quite random adventures across the lands of Oerth. Treasure. Betrayal. Mystery. Dexterity checks. Grab a can of Dr. Thunder and your dice bag, it's time to nerd out with another D&D novel, baby!

Despite being a massive geek for Dungeons & Dragons since around the age of seven and reading and then re-reading the original Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master Guide innumerable times, I'd never actually read a novel penned by Gary Gygax himself. I sought to rectify that by reaching for Saga of Old City, the first in a series of books featuring Gygax's own creation... Gord. Yes, Gord. Doesn't exactly have the same ring as a 'Conan' or 'Gray Mouser', but Gord is clearly Gygax's own attempt at creating an enduring fantasy pulp protagonist. Unfortunately, I don't think the esteemed godfather of D&D is able to stick the landing - at least not in this first offering.

The problems are evident right from the outset. The novel doesn't exactly open with anything grandiose or epic to get readers in the mood for dashing adventures. Instead, we're treated to our 'hero' being bullied and literally pissing himself in front of the other juveniles picking on him. Of course, Gord escapes and lives to fight another day, but doesn't exactly grow to be that much bigger in the intervening years that quickly pass by. I do find it slightly hilarious that instead of a muscle-bound hunk or a Merlin-esque wizard, Gygax went with a rascally manlet as his creation that would somehow make a stamp on the sword and sorcery genre.

Gord is framed as an underdog character we're meant to root for, but he's not exactly a Robin Hood type thief with a just cause that readers could easily rally behind, nor does he possess the unlimited vaults of charisma necessary to be a heel you can cheer for. Instead, Gord is a selfish jerk with a prevailing sense of avarice who participates in murders at various points in this novel and acts like a complete clown around women. Such was my disdain for Gord, I found myself actively rooting for his adversaries to kick his ass all over the pages of this book.

The other serious problem Saga of Old City suffers from is its structure. There is essentially no standard plot to this story other than 'Gord goes on a series of adventures'. This is written as a novel with standard chapter breaks, but it's really a collection of short stories cobbled together under the guise of a full-length novel. I don't have a problem with short stories, but the way Gygax has handled this is almost like a D&D campaign. You can clearly see where one adventure ends and another one abruptly begins, whisking Gord off in a completely different direction and ignoring any character development that may have occurred beforehand. A reader already attuned to tabletop role-playing games can also spot where Gord appears to 'level up', as his abilities and talents become more pronounced.

What does work here is Gygax's love for language and the flourishes of purple prose he employs from time to time, which fits in rather nicely for a pulp tale. Any author who can plausibly work the word 'lugubrious' into a sentence and still have it flow is a-okay in my book.

Still, I found Saga of Old City an absolute chore to finish, and I'm not exactly eager to take another trip with Gord on his adventures any time soon...

Rating:

Make a saving throw versus boredom.

El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (1934 - 1936; compilation 2010)

Before Conan, before Solomon Kane, there was Francis Xavier Gordon, otherwise known as "El Borak". Equally adept with the gun as he is the sword, Robert E. Howard's ass kicking Texan soldier of fortune battles ruthless Turk bandits, surly Afghan chieftains, and wily Russian despots across all corners of the Middle East. It's the kind of fiction that'll put hair on a man's chest, by God!

Full disclosure here: this review is likely going to be pure gushing rather than any kind of nuanced look at a particular book. The reason for this is simple: Robert E. Howard is one of my favorite writers and El Borak is my favorite of his characters - and that's saying something coming from a Conan superfan.

This Del Rey collection features all of the El Borak stories Howard dreamed up in the mid 1930's. As such, for brevity's sake I'm reviewing the entire collection as a whole rather than focusing on each individual story here.

I was initially attracted to the El Borak stories thanks to the promise of western style action in a completely different setting - the "eastern" as some have called it. Although the stories take place half a world away from the Old West, it's fair to say they have all of the same visceral, elemental aspects of a great western story: from the man versus nature survival segments to the blood and thunder of cacophonous battles to the hero who was once renowned as a gunfighter back home, it's all here.

Moreover, it is simply remarkable how well the reader can envision the mountains, gorges, and baking desert plains of the Middle Eastern setting given the fact that Robert E. Howard never ventured anywhere near that part of the world during his lifetime. Howard conjured his Middle East from nothing more than guidebooks he acquired for his personal library. His other characters may have gained more mainstream popularity over the years, but Howard's El Borak tales are the true heavyweights of his writing career, giving the reader a glimpse at some of the very best writing the Texan author was capable of producing.

If I had to pick one of the short stories as a favorite it might be "The Lost Valley of Iskander", which sees Gordon stumbling upon a lost city of Greeks living in a secluded part of Afghanistan. It's arguably the closest any of these particular stories gets to the fantastical, but it features a nice mélange of mystery and survival alongside a grandiose final battle. Howard even works some of his beloved boxing pastime into this story when Gordon has to compete in a meaty bare knuckle brawl with the giant leader of the Greeks for macho supremacy.

This particular compilation uses artwork from Tim Bradstreet with actor Thomas Jane modeling as El Borak. The artwork is a fantastic addition to these stories and makes me pine for an El Borak movie starring Tom Jane we never got to see...

I would be remiss in pointing out that this particular compilation also features stories with two other American adventurers: Kirby O'Donnell and Steve Clarney. While these stories are just as enthralling as the El Borak oeuvre, Howard simply didn't write enough of them in his lifetime for these characters to get their own volumes, so the publishers have (wisely, in my opinion) included them alongside Gordon's adventures. Despite sharing a similar premise of an American in the far east searching for treasure or adventure, both O'Donnell and Clarney have their own personalities. Clarney in particular seems to have more of a wiseass style that readers didn't often see in Howard protagonists. Don't sleep on these stories just because Gordon is out of the picture, they're still fun reads.

Rating:

All guns blazing!

Doctor Who: Dancing the Code (1995)

The Doctor and Jo, along with some of the UNIT regulars, a terrorist, and an annoying journalist (is there any other kind?) are drawn into the clutches of a civil war in a north African hellhole, but this is no ordinary war, kids! Instead of standard munitions, chemical warfare, or playing Nickelback records on full-blast until their enemy's ears bleed, one side has decided to utilize GIANT ALIEN BUGS long burrowed into the planet. Is this Doctor Who meets Starship Troopers, or is this a more Lovecraftian take on 'be careful what the hell you wake up from deep slumbers'? Only YOU can decide! Reverse the polarity!

Long before the wankery and wokery of the revived skinwalker series of Doctor Who starting in 2005, there were the "wilderness years" - the now-halcyon period of time after the series had gone into semi-permanent hiatus starting in 1989. From this quasi-cancellation sprung a number of creative outlets in which to give fans new Who adventures: comics, audio dramas, direct-to-VHS atrocities, PC games, and of course, original novels. The first several years of novels were published by Virgin Books, which gave us both 'The New Adventures', which starred the then-current seventh incarnation of the Doctor, and 'The Missing Adventures', which featured stories about past Doctors wedged into any convenient gap the author could find between television episodes.

As great as it was for a young fan such as myself to receive new content based on the series while it was off-the-air, one of the recurring bugbears of the Virgin era of Who novels was their insistence on cramming in edgelord content that seemed woefully out of step with the spirit of Doctor Who. There's been many a treatise on why this happened across all corners of Who fandom over the years, so I won't tread old ground in this individual review, suffice it to say when I was a kid entering that brooding age of adolescence I found some of the edgy Doctor Who novels to be wicked fun, but as a more mature adult with a deeper appreciation and understanding of the classic series I find the novels that take forays into the grimdark to be misguided at best, tedious at worst.

But this is already a very long introduction to get us to tonight's feature presentation: Dancing the Code by Paul Leonard, one from the Missing Adventures series featuring the Third Doctor and his assistant Jo Grant. It's a novel that I want to love because it has a genuinely interesting and different take on the usual alien invasion plots that were quite commonplace during the Third Doctor's reign. The story also gives us a vastly different setting in the north African desert than we could ever hope to see in the same heavily budgeted television series as it was in the early 1970's, in addition to action set pieces that I'm sure any fan of the Third Doctor would love to see. (The Doctor piloting a jet? Sign me up.) The author also provides characters from UNIT, such as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and Captain Mike Yates, some actual soldiering to do instead of relegating them to third wheel butt-monkeys as is so often the case in later-era UNIT stories.

Unfortunately, Dancing the Code is dragged down by the aforementioned creep of edginess that blighted so much of Who's Virgin years. This novel is, in a word, gory. Not that I have a problem with the bloody or grotesque crossing over into science-fiction, but it was always handled delicately in Doctor Who, primarily because it was still considered a family show. There were frightening things shown on the screen from time to time, but there was always a line and the producers, directors, and designers of classic Who never crossed it. Dancing the Code on the other hand has bucketloads of random NPC's getting brutally murdered at every turn. Paul Leonard seems to gleefully flaunt the Virgin-era trope of attempting to shock the reader by introducing a completely superfluous character to us and giving the reader just a tiny bit of insight into their life before something suddenly jumps out at them and rips them apart a page or two later, complete with the hackneyed "the last thought through his head was..." line that never seems to hit home because we simply don't care about these characters. But then there's also really gnarly and joyless things like Jo having to watch a little girl in a desert camp die after a bombing because part of a bicycle lodged through her chest, or doomed characters essentially melting into stinking goo in front of others.

Again, there's a time and place for mature, boundary pushing, revolting R-rated stuff, but I don't believe Doctor Who is the proper venue for it at all.

There was definitely some good that came out of the Virgin Missing Adventures, but Dancing the Code is one you can safely skip.

Rating:

Not what the Doctor ordered.

Kill Me Tender (2000)

A killer has the diehards of the Elvis Presley fan club All Shook Up and the only man for the job is the King himself. Elvis skips out on recording sessions to become a private investigator and locks horns with an early impersonator, sings in random gospel choirs, cheats on Priscilla, and ponders the calorie count of one too many peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

I love Elvis. He's on my personal Mount Rushmore of rock icons. The voice, the style, the unbridled spirit of rock and goddamn roll - it's always going to move me. I'm even listening to Elvis as I type this review. So with that being said, you'd think I'd be more amenable to Elvis in fiction. I mean, he pops up everywhere, from films like Bubba Ho-Tep or True Romance to Douglas Adams and Kim Newman books. It seems like every creative mind with a kooky story idea wants to somehow shoehorn Elvis into the narrative... and I can't exactly blame them. Even now as we get ever closer to 50 years since his death, the King is still a hot selling ticket.

And I admit, I was lured in by the premise of Kill Me Tender. Elvis solving a murder mystery sounds like the perfect kind of goofy-ass yarn that's right up my alley. But turning over the last page left me with A Mess of Blues. I felt Way Down. Just like a Puppet on a String. I almost wanted to start Crying in the Chapel. Doncha' Think It's Time that I stopped wedging all of these Elvis song titles into the review as puns and just got on with it?

I think my biggest problem with this novel is the characterization of Elvis here is... it's as if author Daniel Klein watched a marathon of Elvis movies and decided "Ya know, I'm gonna write my novel just like one of his films... only cheesier!" This is one of the most cornball depictions of Elvis I've ever come across. The real life Elvis had his share of very human flaws. He was possessive and jealous, had a foul temper at times, and of course, he had demons that came in a pill bottle plaguing him repeatedly throughout his life. I understand not wanting to depict all of the man's foibles in a piece of fiction, especially if you're aiming for more lighthearted fare, but this version of Elvis becomes so hokey and fake it really does come across like some kind of kitschy novelization of a lost Elvis movie. The only thing missing is a goofy name for the main character like Rusty Wells or Lucky Jackson.

I was also put off by some of what I can only see as progressive politics talking points the author wanted to jam into his book for headpats (and probably to increase the likelihood of getting it published), showing us that social justice is a disease that stretches back a lot further than the past several years. The author appears to be extra hellbent on having his fictional Elvis bump uglies with a black woman. We know now that Elvis just liked all the girls, period, and it likely didn't matter what color they were to him, but Mr. Klein definitely wants you to know that his Elvis is progressive and oh-so-modern cosmopolitan when it concerns interracial relationships in the early 1960's deep south. He also has Elvis interact with a black lesbian psychic, which made me roar with laughter for all the wrong reasons. Honestly, I'm surprised Netflix didn't pick this trash up for their latest Elvis cash-in over Agent Elvis. You could adapt most of it for today's ESG-obsessed woke television standards with little to no changes.

I'll at least give the author credit for the whodunnit aspect of Kill Me Tender, as that's one of the most important things in a murder mystery. There are a number of viable suspects to be the killer and there are cryptic clues abound in the form of creepy records being delivered to Graceland to taunt Elvis. There's at least the bones of a satisfying mystery novel here, but everything else is T-R-O-U-B-L-E. (Yes, I said I would cease with the song titles. I'm very sorry.)

Rating:

Elvis has left the bookshop.

The Wizard's Stone (2023)

Apprentice wizard Odo is tasked with transporting some precious cargo to a king's court in a faraway land. Odo's protector becomes Inoch, a brutish mercenary captain with grey morals, a crossbow, and an itchy trigger finger. Together, Odo, Inoch, and his band of ragtag mercenaries face down bandits, brigands, and foul creatures with low enough THAC0 scores to ruin anyone's day.

And here I thought you just don't get fantasy like this anymore. The Wizard's Stone is a tight novel at only about 290 pages which doesn't go in for the worst excesses of door-stopper fantasy books yet author Herman P. Hunter indulges in just enough of the deep, descriptive, and dare I say, flowery prose that pulp era stories were known for that the reader can still manage to get lost in its pages. It's as much a coming of age story as it is a road trip from Hell story set in an oftentimes dark and dangerous fantasy world. The only thing missing here was a mysterious dungeon synth soundtrack to accompany the novel.

The main thrust of this novel is the dynamic between Odo and Inoch, two characters who are nothing alike but are teamed together through circumstance and must quickly learn to rely on one another in order to survive the harsh journey they find themselves on. Initially, these seem like two characters who shouldn't co-exist together at all; one a naïve kid who knows little about how the world outside his cloistered upbringing really is and the other a no-nonsense killer who's entire credo is to acquire gold and live long enough to spend it. Inoch's band of mercenaries, while technically side characters, are just as intriguing as the mercenary captain and the author wisely spends a little bit of time developing and expanding their characters so that when shit starts to hit the fan, the reader actually cares about them being placed in potentially lethal peril. This was one of those novels where I was casting an imagined film version of the story in my head as I was reading and for some reason I kept picturing Inoch as Kurt Russell in Escape From New York... only as a D&D character.

Speaking of D&D, the author's own byline acknowledges the Dungeons and Dragons influence in his writing, and as an old-school D&D nerd myself, one thing I found endearing about the magic in The Wizard's Stone was when I could spot exactly which spell Odo was casting from the magic-user spell list in the old Player's Handbook through Hunter's own creative descriptions. There were more than a few times reading where I would say to myself "Oh, there's Odo casting a Magic Missile again." or "Holy crap, Odo knows Shocking Grasp?!" Fun times.

Mild spoilers ahead, so skip this paragraph if you're sensitive to that kind of thing... perhaps the only minor quibble I have with this novel are a few moments of obvious trope adherence. For instance, you kinda knew the end was near for one particular character when they started talking about their potential plans for life after the adventuring days were over like the cop in the movie that's two days from retirement. These moments aren't really enough to detract from my overall enjoyment of the novel, but your mileage may vary here.

If you're starved for some hard-hitting pulpy fantasy in an era of large publishing houses only putting out crap from the pronoun politics brigade that no one reads anyway, it's a safe bet you'll devour The Wizard's Stone in short order. I'm very much looking forward to seeing where this author goes next.

Rating:

Dr. Recommended!

Voima (1995)

Three younglings - Roric, Valmar, and Karin - find themselves embroiled in a conflict between groups of immortal entities vying for control over the realm. They leap to the world of immortals. Then back to the world of mortals. Then back to the world of immortals. Then back to the world of mortals. In between, two stupid kings have a dick measuring contest and a dragon appears for some reason. But mostly it's leaping back and forth between the two realms. And so Roric, Valmar, and Karin finds themselves leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that their next leap - will be the leap home... 

Wait a minute, I think I got a wire crossed in this intro...

Voima is certainly an interesting one. At the outset I was wondering if this could be an underrated, somewhat forgotten gem of 1990's fantasy, but by the halfway point I realized the book fell off a cliff somewhere along the way and never recovered. Towards the end I was flipping pages as fast as I could just to get it over and done with.

The "voima" the title of the novel alludes to is basically author C. Dale Brittain's version of the Force from the Star Wars universe. It's the magically delicious energy that controls the flow of everything and if you're strong in the ways of "voima" then you're probably a bad mamma-jamma. Got that? Cool. Next we have this group of immortals called the Wanderers who are kinda-sorta revered as gods but, as we come to find out, are mostly lame and aren't really the ruling deities the chumps of the mortal world seem to the think they are. We're supposed to care about the Wanderers being overthrown by another group of immortals for... reasons, I guess.

Then we have the main characters from the mortal realm, who, yes, are meant to be youngsters, but inherit all of the most insufferable traits of perpetually immature youths to the point of being unbearable, made worse by the fact that they're more or less the only characters to be truly featured for the first 200 pages or so. I found the forbidden romance between Roric and Karin in particular to be one of the more unsatisfying aspects of Voima. These two characters are so deeply "in love" they'll go into weepy hysterics at the thought of not being together instead of gritting their teeth and persevering like heroic characters are generally supposed to do. It got to a point where I was actively rooting for these two to suffer some horrific fate to deny them their happily-ever-after... sadly, this was not to be. The plot contrivances to keep these two characters together almost made me launch the book across the room at one point: the two dopey kings mentioned in the intro above travel hundreds of miles with their retinues in tow to capture Roric, only for the kid to simply wander off and escape from their watchful eye a few pages later to rejoin Karin, who had also managed a completely improbable escape from her own delicate situation.

And for a fantasy novel, Voima is extremely light on any kind of world-building or atmosphere. Supposedly great distances between kingdoms are traveled in the space of a page or paragraph, and towards the final stretch of the story the jumps between mortal and immortal realms became almost comical, nevermind the fact that these gates between worlds that have been hidden for eons are found almost immediately by a trio of irritating nosey kids who just fell off the back of the Mystery Machine. I will also point out the occasional appearances from fantasy creatures straight out of the D&D bestiary were random and without any real pay-off. All things an author probably shouldn't do when they're aiming for epic fantasy.

Rating:

The voima is weak in this one...

Role of Honour (1984)

After receiving a surprise inheritance from a rich relative he never knew he had, secret agent 007 resigns from the service, spends way too much money on an old Bentley, then wines and dines babes in Monte Carlo. But it's all just a cunning ruse to gain the trust of the baddies. Bond is soon training at a terrorist camp and channeling his inner computer nerd to play wargames with the villains... all in the name of taking down their dastardly schemes from within. Bentleys, blimps, QBasic..? Da-da-DA-DA!

So here we are barreling on ahead with the John Gardner 007 re-read marathon, and I feel as if Role of Honour is a return to form over the Scooby-Doo style shenanigans of Icebreaker. As I said early on in this series of reviews, John Gardner's Bond novels definitely feel like products of the 80's, and this particular novel is painfully dated in many ways, especially where it concerns computing and programming languages, but if you can accept it as a snapshot in time of the early 80's computer craze then you'll have fun. I admit to chortling out loud several times as Bond is being taught the inner workings of the "highly sophisticated" QBasic computer language by an improbably hot American agent who specializes in such "advanced" technology.

Still, I found myself turning the pages of Role of Honour fairly quickly. It's a book that has that sweet spot of literary Bond that I'm looking for: a decent amount of espionage, some action, at least a small serving of travelogue feel, and the main character drinking like a diabetic fish and smoking like it's going out of style. But let's get to the really good news here... the Saab is gone! Bond is back in a Bentley, baby! Albeit a custom job that seems to be capable of withstanding multiple head-on collisions with goons on the roadways, but who cares? Our suave secret agent man is traveling in style again, and that's what we're all here to see.

An interesting twist in Role of Honour is Gardner trying his hand at a small cabal of villains for Bond to contend with instead of one main antagonist. The plot certainly sets itself up for the reader to believe there's only one major villain, but as the book rolls along it becomes evident Bond has several players, and indeed an entire organization, that needs to be dealt with.

Something I haven't really addressed with these Gardner reviews yet is how much the film series seemed to acquire... shall we say, inspiration from his books? It's often bandied about on various Bond fan sites that the filmmakers weren't legally allowed to use the Gardner books, but clearly that didn't stop them from cribbing important set pieces here and there. For instance, Role of Honour features a lot of computer jargon and a climax that takes place on a blimp... which is totally not featured in A View to a Kill, right? As a fan, I've never been bothered by the idea of the films taking a cue from continuation novels instead of being strictly adherent to Ian Fleming's ideas. What bothers me more is EON Productions' insistence that they weren't copying the test answers by looking over at John Gardner's desk, because the examples are too numerous to be mere coincidences.

Rating:

Dr. Recommended!

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse (2008)

Mortimer Tate is a former insurance salesman who holed up in a cave while the world went to shit. When he emerges nine years later, the land he once knew has changed forever. Armed with several cases of whiskey that survived the apocalypse, Mortimer embarks on an epic journey to the fabled ruins of Atlanta to find his ex-wife and a damn good cup of coffee.

Just to give you an idea of the level of sleaze author Victor Gischler has on offer here, after a modestly violent introduction, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse really gets the action going with the main character tied up, forced to watch his future love interest being raped, then receiving a very unwanted golden shower from said rapist... and this might not even be the most fucked up part of the novel. What we have here is the most edgelord version of a Fallout video game you could possibly imagine. And I'm here for it.

There was a period of time in the mid-oughts when Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse was published where everything in the post-apocalyptic genre had to be dour, grimdark, and serious. For me, that got old in a hurry. While this novel definitely pushes the boundaries of darkness and violence to extreme levels, there is an undercurrent of irreverent humor that helps the piece stand out from the overabundance of Cormac McCarthy clones out there. The material never ventures into full slapstick mode, but you can't help but laugh sometimes at Gischler's Texas Chainsaw Massacre style redneck cannibals populating his version of a post-apocalyptic southern United States, or the women in bikinis who are improbably armed to the teeth popping caps in fools. It's a completely absurd and violent cartoon version of the end of the world, but there is just enough grit and realism to keep the story from careening out of control.

It helps that the main character is just your average joe everyman kind of guy. He's not especially strong, he's not the best shot, he's got some brains but he's not necessarily a genius... Mortimer is a great foil for the more colorful characters shaped by the apocalypse that he encounters and eventually travels with. There is some light commentary on what the fall of the United States could mean to your regular nine to fiver closing in on middle-age and still clinging to the vestiges of the American Dream like Mortimer, but again, Gischler knew he wasn't going to be competing for overwrought literary awards with this one and quickly moves on to the next gunfight before anything can get too introspective.

As a final thought, some have argued this book is sexist. And they're probably right. But who cares? It's a good time. Have some fun in your escapism for a change.

Rating:

Dr. Recommended!