Stratofanatic's Emporium

. . . was awful. So, having heard that Netflix was doing this adaptation, I read the first book of Andrzej Sapkowski's series, which the bookstore had, and ordered the rest. The Last Wish (1993) was pretty good --straight-up sword and sorcery, mostly, but a cool interweaving of fairy tales, some fine writing, a few surprisingly moving parts. I especially liked the first short story, "The Witcher." But this Netflix adaptation. Some people complained on Twitter that the plot was bewildering. Thanks to having read The Last Wish , I managed to piece together what was going on The real problems were twofold. First, the acting . Mainly, none of the male actors did it, or even tried doing it. Henry Cavill, who plays Geralt of Rivia, joins Jamie Dornan (the guy from the Fifty Shades of Grey movies) and Joel Kinnaman ( Altered Carbon ) as physically amazing-looking male actors with the expressive range of wooden spoons.** Cavill is especially bad, though, because the director...

And while I'm on a roll, I'll tackle this 2013 book from my reading list two years ago, written by Elspeth Cooper (great name!) for her Wild Hunt series. Like The Summoner , I just couldn't bring myself to read more than half the book, although I did try twice to do so. This book, though, was something I discovered from a website, Fantasy-Faction.com , which listed Songs of the Earth as having a really cool, new, innovative system of magic. Alas, not so much. Beyond the fact that the bland hero can "hear" music coming out of the earth itself, the magic is mostly standard "magic power"-type stuff -- nothing truly environmental or anthropocentric, more's the pity. Otherwise, everything about the plot (something about a clumsily-handled intolerant Church) was as bland as the hero himself. A few commentators on Goodreads praised the book's secondary characters, but I never quite got that far myself. So, there's that.

In this book, the first volume (2001) in Canavan's Black Magician trilogy, let us return to GoodReads again: it's a " cute little start to what seems to be a simple and inoffensive fantasy trilogy" ( Jen3n ) and  "fairly gentle book that lacks threat and (for much of it) tension" ( Mark Lawrence ). Both remarks are 100% on the mark with this one. Compared to the last two books of epic fantasy I mentioned in this blog, though, The Magician's Guild arises up to the level of competent-if-undistinguished , at least. The good guy protagonists, Rothen and Ceryni, are both basically, well, "good guys." Not much depth to them. The main female lead, Sonea, is another typical fantasy tomboy girl who, in this instance, is also ridiculously mistrustful. The bad guy, Fergun, is not quite the mustache-twirler as in the last two books, but it's close -- only a bare slight twist at the end gestures to some possible complexity. But, overall, the...

Unlike Gail Z. Martin's The Summoner (see last entry), I actually finished this book (2005), the first in Karen Miller's Kingmaker, Kingbreaker series. This one I discovered not through C. Palmer-Patel's book on heroic epic fantasy but through an essay by Edward James on the fantasy trilogy. Alas, even though I finished this book, curtesy of some hardcore skimming, it was just as awful and poorly written. THE GOOD Miller has a gift for dialect. She gives the main character, Asher, a pretty cool working class accent. Words like "slumskumbledy" are just hilarious. The cover's pretty cool  . . . although, note, see how I'm trying to pad out this list with comments about the cover) THE BAD As with The Summoner , "the bad" is everything else. The main villain, when he comes 5/6 of the way through the book, is another one of those cardboard mustache-twirlers. (Seriously, some archetypal villains such as Stephen R. Donaldson's Lor...

For someone who studies fantasy, particularly epic fantasy, I realize that I don't particularly read a lot of epic fantasy. At least stuff written after the year 2000, anyway. So, after reading C. Palmer-Patel's  The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy (Routledge, 2020), a worthwhile structuralist account of the genre, I made the concerted effort to read Gail Z. Martin's The Summoner (2007), the first book in her Chronicles of the Necromancer series. Considering that this book is about -- wait for it -- a necromancer , it was a natural starting point for Palmer-Patel's chapter on the heroic epic hero's confrontation with death. I'll divide this quick review into the good and the bad . THE GOOD It's epic fantasy mixed with ghost stories!  The cover of the book is sweet . Um, vampires? I think there's vampires, at least according to GoodReads, since I didn't bother reading much past 200 pages. ...