{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy Edited by Robert Silverberg Part 2 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review

Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy

Edited by Robert Silverberg

Part 2

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in these reviews. 

Last week, I reviewed the first installment of Legends. This week I'm reviewing Legends II. 

The two Legends short fantasy novel collections, edited by Robert Silverberg, have an intriguing concept. In the introduction, Silverberg says that these masters of the genre became famous through the series their particular stories are set in. Seemed like a great initiation into already popular series from the crème de la crème of fantasy writing. I'll say upfront that all 11 stories in each collection, even the ones I couldn't really get into, were well written and engaging. I have no trouble believing that those who are fans of the individual series represented here will love these bonus offerings. That said, having not read any of them previously, or recently, I found myself mainly feeling helplessly lost. 

Originally, both collections came out as massive volumes with eleven short novels each. 

Legends II (hardcover published in 2003; trade paperback in 2004 with 784 pages) contains:

1.   Robin Hobb: "Homecoming" (The Realm of the Elderlings)          

2. George R. R. Martin: "The Sworn Sword" (A Song of Ice and Fire)             

3. Orson Scott Card: "The Yazoo Queen" (The Tales of Alvin Maker)            

4.    Diana Gabaldon: "Lord John and the Succubus" (Outlander)        

5.    Robert Silverberg: "The Book of Changes" (Majipoor)      

6. Tad Williams: "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World" (Otherland)           

7.     Anne McCaffrey: "Beyond Between" (Dragonriders of Pern)        

8.     Raymond E. Feist: "The Messenger" (The Riftwar Saga)  

9.     Elizabeth Haydon: "Threshold" (Symphony of Ages)        

10.  Neil Gaiman: "The Monarch of the Glen" (American Gods)            

11.  Terry Brooks: "Indomitable" (Shannara)   

The order above is how the stories are featured in the full collection. 

In 2004, the stories were divided up across two volumes with new subtitles:

·       Volume 1: Shadows, Gods, and Demons with Gaiman, McCaffrey, Williams, Hobb, Silverberg, and Feist.

·       Volume 2: Dragon, Sword, and King with Brooks, Martin, Gabaldon, Card, and Haydon.

 

Let's get to the reviews. As I've said before in my Rogues Anthology review, rather than insult some perfectly good writers and stories I just didn't happen to connect with--though I'm certain others will, I'll mainly go in-depth with reviews of the particular stories I actually liked in the second collection. 

From Legends II: 

1)   1) The first story in this full collection, "Homecoming" by Robin Hobb is part of her Realm of the Elderlings Series. The short description of this tale is that a group of exiles are forced to learn survival in a ghost-inhabited hellscape--or perish. Within the story, the narrator effectively summed up the intrigue that ran all through the tale--that some of those involved had started out as lords and ladies, others pickpockets and whores; being stranded and unable to leave this place, they begin to recognize they're equals in their desperation and dependency on one another just to get by day by day. The introduction of an elaborate city built beneath the bog provides striking evidence of a culture long dead but nowhere near gone. I enjoyed this story so much, I was very sorry when it came to an end. I wanted to know more about the lost civilization buried beneath the "Rain Wilds" swamp as well as more about the main character and her family who begin to build a new life for themselves in this harsh landscape. While I'm not a hundred percent sure how this particular offering fits in the three related trilogies the author has written (maybe, hopefully, telling the story of the lost civilization?), I do know I want to dive into them as soon as I possibly can. "Homecoming" is brilliantly unique, to say the least. I will mention that several scenes that described the buried city reminded me of the setting in Susanna's Clarke's extraordinary Piranesi novel (published in 2020), a favorite of mine. 

2    2) The second story in the Legends II collection, "The Sworn Sword" by George R. R. Martin, is the second in his "Dunk and Egg" series, grounded within the setting of A Song of Ice and Fire about a hundred years before the events of that series. I started reading this within the anthology but my copy of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms containing all the currently available stories in the series came, so I jumped over to that trilogy collection, reading "The Sworn Sword" in almost no time and unable to keep myself from going on to the third story instead of returning to Legends II. I plan to fully review this trilogy in a separate blog post, but I will say I absolutely loved this story in which, a year or so after the events of "The Hedge Knight", Dunk and Egg find themselves sworn to the service of an aging, has-been lord with secrets the old man hasn't bothered to reveal to his "employees". When the water on the land of this lord is stolen with a dam built by a neighboring house, Dunk and Egg go to the thief who's been painted as black as night by their lord. But things aren't at all what they seem. This series is absolute must-read, as is the one it's set in is. 

3    3) "The Happiest Dead Boy in the World" by Tad Williams is the sixth story included in Legends II featuring characters from his Otherland series. This tale started out as a hoot with the protagonist Orlando kicking back in style in Tolkien's Rivendell while inside an artificial universe on the worldwide computer network Otherland. For those who haven't read that series, this place is kind of like The Matrix in reverse. In that series, the real world isn't the one we all know and sometimes love--that's just a construct of the actual, frighteningly barren world taken over by a superior species. In Otherland, there's a lot of vicarious fun with simulations of fictional fantasylands we'd all kill to visit. Unfortunately, Orlando is trapped in this place. His former, real world, disabled body is gone, though he can visit his parents virtually. In the novels in this series, Orlando and his friend Sam apparently saved Otherland from an evil "program", the Grail Brotherhood, within the system. This tale takes place after that and highlights the bizarre consequences of those events, in which some unexpected developments plague Otherland. While, as I said, this story started out as a lark, quite promising, it quickly turned dark and somber, maybe a little too much. I will say it was well-written, enjoyable, and the author obviously knows a lot of about computers, technology and literature. Unfortunately, I left the novella feeling like 1) I wasn't really sure I enjoyed it after it turned dark and 2) that I'd gotten as much out of the premise as I cared to. 

4     4) The eleventh and final story in the Legends II collection, "Indomitable" by Terry Brooks is, as I said, the story I bought the anthology for and it's the direct sequel to his novel The Wishsong of Shannara, Book 3 of his Shannara Series. Brooks was one of the first fantasy authors I came to love and Wishsong was a favorite of mine (and my son's) with Brin and Jair Ohmsford as the protagonists. Jair is just a kid, excited with the potential of his magical gift, in Wishsong. Together, the siblings have to destroy the Ildatch, a book of dark magic. Only Jair finds out later, in "Indomitable", that one page was missing and it has to be found and obliterated. Familiar characters Kimber Boh and her grandfather Cogline also play starring roles in the novella, which is the perfect bonus to the series, in which Jair is the hero, a young man who never anticipated having to use his power again. I highly recommend the Shannara series and its many off-shoots, as well as Brooks' wonderfully creative Magic Kingdom of Landover series. 

Concerning the arrangement of the stories in Legends II, I would have had these stories interspersed in this way with the other stories: 1st story: "Homecomings"; 3rd: "Happiness"; 9th "Indomitable", and "Sworn" last so the two strongest are at the beginning and end and the two other strong ones are straddling the central areas of the beginning and end. I wish there'd been another I thought was an incredibly strong story positioned at #6. Given that I can't say I overwhelmingly loved "Happiness", I probably would have put "Indomitable" at #6. But certainly those who know and love the other series and authors would possess more of a connection with those stories I haven't reviewed here than I did. 

While I wanted to like all the other selections in the first Legends (after all, I usually like Stephen King's writing and several other stories mentioned possible dragon appearances--dragons!!!) and Legends II collections, I just couldn't get into them. One story I was really looking forward to in the first collection was the final story there, an off-shoot of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, which has been on my radar since I saw Amazon Prime was adapting it into a TV series. That looks seriously good. However, I initially found Jordan's writing style in "New Spring" plodding. Far too often he used words and phrases that meant nothing to me--obviously things that fit into his series, things I couldn't understand, having never read any of the novels, and things which he didn't bother trying to clarify here. Sigh. Despite this, the story was fairly compelling and definitely something fans would thoroughly enjoy. I spent too much of it lost to get there myself. 

I think sometimes there's no getting past the fact that few people can "unknow" or forget things, even authors. Once a writer has established something in a series, he or she can't write about a time before the events of those books as if they didn't happen yet. While writing, details are backfilled by the author without, barely, thinking about them and he or she neglects, either ignorantly or arrogantly (I don't need to explain--who hasn't read my series?), to explain them. Fans appreciate those "series lore" factors--I know I do. They need to be there because new readers to the series can quickly find themselves lost and unable to catch or keep up if the writers refuse to "backtrack" elucidations for the readers who need them. (I'll inject here that sometimes impatient and sparse publishers don't want to include them either, so it's not just authors at fault here.) If a reader has never read anything else in a series, they need to know what series specific details mean--concisely. Part of a writer's skill is in conveying those special elements in an intriguing way without overwhelming the reader with too much that may not be needed in this particular story. Some of the short novels I read in both of these collections simply assumed I knew much more about the series they're associated with, and I didn't or, alternately, they assumed I knew nothing and engulfed me. Therefore, I was underwhelmed and those tales fell short of the mark for me. While I wouldn't say this has definitely ruled out the possibility of me trying to read the series the stories are associated with, these may not have been the best representations of their series to me, at least at this time.

There's a lot for fans of the genre and of the excellent writers and their popular series to love with the 22 stories included in the two Legends collections. You may even find something new, as I have, to further broaden your fantasy reading horizons. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy Edited by Robert Silverberg, Part 1 by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review

Legends and Legends II: Short Novels by the Masters of Modern Fantasy

Edited by Robert Silverberg,

Part 1

by Karen S. Wiesner 

 

Be aware that there may be spoilers in these reviews. 

The two Legends short fantasy novel collections, edited by Robert Silverberg, first came to my attention when I was reading Terry Brooks' Shannara Chronicles to my elementary-school-aged son. I'd read that an epilogue to The Wishsong of Shannara (a particular favorite of ours) called "Indomitable" had been included in Legends II, and if there was a second installment, there also must be first, in this case, logically called Legends. Naturally, I bought the book and became interested in both volumes of these all-star collections. The concept is intriguing. In the introduction, Silverberg says that these masters of the genre became famous through the series their particular stories are set in. In my mind, that made for a great initiation into already popular series from the crème de la crème of fantasy writing. 

Unfortunately, I failed to take into account that most of these series are well established with multiple entries. Stepping into them, even with a prologue or offshoot--in other words, an installment that presumably comes before the beginning of the official series, or merely runs parallel with it but doesn't necessarily share the same storyline--proved to be intimidating, to say the least. 

I'll say upfront that all 11 stories in each collection, even the ones I couldn't really get into, were well written and engaging. I have no trouble believing that those who are fans of the individual series represented here will love these bonus offerings. However, having little or no previous reading experience with the majority of the writers and their series from both collections, I didn't have the same impression as readers familiar with their worlds. I can't say for sure whether the contributing authors were the types who deliberately refused to explain previous events (some writers are like that--I'll discuss that assessment more next week) or if they made every effort to adequately establish their worlds and characters and it simply didn't work in my case--in part because it's easy to become overwhelmed if there are already several works available in a particular sequence that haven't been read previously (or at least read recently). 

These two collections require a bit of explanation because they've been republished and repackaged (by more than one publisher) so many times. The list of stories and series contained within the first collection are as follows: 

Legends (hardcover published in 1998; trade paperback in 1999 with 715 pages)

1.     Stephen King: "The Little Sisters of Eluria" (The Dark Tower)

2.     Terry Pratchett: "The Sea and Little Fishes" (Discworld)

3.     Terry Goodkind: "Debt of Bones" (The Sword of Truth)

4.     Orson Scott Card: "Grinning Man" (The Tales of Alvin Maker)

5.     Robert Silverberg: "The Seventh Shrine" (Majipoor)

6.     Ursula K. Le Guin: "Dragonfly" (Earthsea)

7.     Tad Williams: "The Burning Man" (Memory, Sorrow and Thorn)

8.     George R. R. Martin: "The Hedge Knight" (A Song of Ice and Fire)

9.     Raymond E. Feist: "The Wood Boy" (The Riftwar Cycle)

10.  Anne McCaffrey: "Runner of Pern" (Dragonriders of Pern)

11.  Robert Jordan: "New Spring" (The Wheel of Time)

Note (because I'll bring this up again later): This is the order in which the stories are featured in the full collection. 

In 1999 and 2000, Legends was split between two volumes:

·       Volume One contained the stories by Pratchett, McCaffrey, Martin, Williams, and Jordan.

·       Volume Two contained the stories by King, Goodkind, Card, Silverberg, Le Guin, and Feist.

 

 

Additionally, a three volume set was published, the first two released in 1999 and the final in 2000, separating the stories this way:

·       Volume 1 with King, Silverberg, Card, and Feist.

·       Volume 2 with Goodkind, Martin, and McCaffrey.

·       Volume 3 with Jordan, Le Guin, Williams, and Pratchett.

If you can believe it, there was another four volume set published after that, as reported by isfdb.org, but the page for it on that website is confusing, at best, about which stories were included in which volumes. 

Tracking down any of these, whether sold in one volume or over several, was a bit of a nightmare for me. Eventually, I frustratingly ended up with both Legends and Legends II as single volumes as well as all the individual ones--in some cases, more than one (because listings were confusing when I was purchasing them). Regardless, the stories I enjoyed in them did at least make the effort worthwhile and, hey, the gently used duplicates will make good gifts. 

All right, let's get to the reviews. As I said before in my Rogues Anthology review,  rather than insult some perfectly good writers and stories I just didn't happen to connect with--though I'm certain others will, I'll mainly go in-depth with reviews of the particular stories I actually liked in the first collection. 

From Legends: 

1)    1) The third story featured in this collection, "Debt of Bones" by Terry Goodkind, tells the origin of the Border between the realms in his fantasy world from The Sword of Truth. At the time of this publication, there were four novels available in this series. According to the introduction to the series included before the story, this tale takes place years before the first book, Wizard's First Rule. In "Debt of Bones", a woman comes to see the wizard Zorander (or Zedd) in "Debt of Bones" to beg him to save her young daughter from invaders to the land she hails from who have kidnapped her child. Her only means of persuasion is a debt owed (or so Abby believes) to her mother by the sorcerer. She goes into this endeavor certain it's the only way to save her daughter. But is it? I've never read anything else by this author, nor do I fully understand how this particular story fits in with the series it's associated with (I think Zedd may be the First Wizard, a mentor and friend to the two protagonists in the novels but, without reading them, I can't be sure). I can't say exactly why "Debt of Bones" gripped me the way it did when the previous two stories in the collection failed to impact me. For a good two dozen pages or so, I believed the main character Abby was a little girl. Then I found out she was actually the mother of the little kidnapped girl. I guess I had compassion for her desperate plight regardless of her age. The wizard Zedd and his ability to hold countless conversations simultaneously intrigued me, as did the impossible decisions he was forced to make--invariably either saving the many or the few, never all. I loved the final words in the story: "Enemies," the wizard said, "are the price of honor." In the future, I may see what The Sword of Truth series has to offer, on the basis of this compelling story.

2    2) The seventh story in this collection, "The Burning Man", by Tad Williams includes a haunted castle and events in the age before his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn Series. Oddly enough, I found that I own all four books in this series and I'd read them maybe a decade or more ago. The only real memory I have of this is that I wanted to and felt that I should have liked this series more than I ultimately did. But, because this author's name was familiar, I gave "The Burning Man" more of a chance to make an impression on me than I usually would an unknown (to me) writer. It took a while for the story to grow on me, and there was some confusion in the first several pages before the plot began to coalesce and work itself into something intriguing. I believe the hindrance before that point was due to the style the story was written in, namely the one Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft seemed to prefer. Both were enamored of telling stories by starting at the end of the story, when the main character is past the actual events. The protagonist in "The Burning Man" has come through the ordeal and decided to divulge all, and proceeds to retell that story from the start. In my mind, this removes any chance at all of the story being suspenseful since the reader is told upfront the main character has survived and, one way or another, things have worked out after a fashion. In general, I despise this manner of writing, but I will point out that it rarely stops me from reading a story I think I'll like. I'm particularly glad I gave this one a chance since I enjoyed it very much. In particular, the aspect that the heroine's stepfather is searching for something--the answer to what's beyond death, if anything, in order to give his life meaning. The path to finding what he seeks to the exclusion of all saps his happiness while his stepdaughter physically follows behind him in a blind sort of manner, always keeping to the dark so she isn't caught. What happens as a result teaches her that "love does not do sums, but instead makes choices, and then gives its all". Despite what I considered a limited way of presenting the story, the characters were well drawn, their quests intriguing and convincing. "The Burning Man" has made me consider re-reading the original series again, to evaluate whether I'll have a better reaction to it now. 

3    3) The eighth story in the Legends collection, "The Hedge Knight" is associated with George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, though it isn't actually part of that particular series per se, nor would I call it a prequel. Spinoff series is the best description for this. The three currently available stories in the A Knight of the Seven Kingdom series (which is what it was called in the trilogy compilation of it as well as will be called for the forthcoming HBO series) are set ninety years before A Song of Ice and Fire events, while the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne, and it does include characters from that series--Aegon Targaryen (known here as Egg, the future King Aegon V) and Ser Duncan the Tall (Dunk, the future Lord Commander of the Kingsguard). Hoping to gain employment as a knight for hire by participating in a tourney, Dunk instead finds himself fighting for his life when he crosses the wrong Targaryen in order to save a young, pretty puppeteer artist. I first read this story after getting the Legends II: Dragon, Sword, and King volume in order to read Terry Brooks' "Indomitable". At that time, I'd just started getting into the "Game of Thrones" world. I had no idea how these characters fit in. The Dunk and Egg (as in, "dunk an egg") aspect seemed silly to me. So I can't say I appreciated the story the first time I read it. However, when I reread it recently in association with Legends, it was with a much clearer comprehension of the primary series. I really liked and rooted for Dunk and Egg. As soon as I finished this story, I ordered the trilogy of novellas, published together in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, complete with illustrations by the fabulous Gary Gianni. I intend to review that series in a separate article soon. 

Incidentally, if anyone's interested, in my article "Of Proper Short Story Collection Assemblage" (you can find it here: https://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2024/06/of-proper-short-story-collection.html), I talked about how stories should be arranged in an anthology, with the strongest as the first, last and middle, with other good ones sprinkled throughout the middle portions of the collection evenly, so as to maximize reader enjoyment and prevent walking away before finishing the entire volume. Based on my reasoning in that article, I ended up liking the third, seventh, and eighth stories most in Legends. I believe it would have been much more effective to have Martin's story first, "Debt of Bones" last, and "The Burning Man" smack-dab in the middle as the sixth story in the collection. 

Next week I'll review Legends II. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Hunter's Run by Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham by Karen S. Wiesner

 

{Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: Hunter's Run

by Gardner Dozois, George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

 

Be aware that there are spoilers in this review. 

Hunter's Run is a science fiction novel published in 2007 and written over the span of 30 years by "three young authors over time": Gardner Dozois (who's credited with the original concept), George R. R. Martin, and Daniel Abraham. I reviewed one of Martin and Dozois' co-edited anthology collections (Rogues) back on June 28, 2024. Martin is, of course, the famed author of A Song of Ice and Fire (HBO's Game of Thrones). Dozois was a science fiction author before he passed in 2018 as well as the founding editor of The Year's Best Science Fiction anthologies (from 1984 through 2018) and Asimov's Science Fiction magazine (1986–2004). Abraham is a novelist best known for his The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin fantasy series, and (with Ty Franck) as the co-author of The Expanse science fiction series under the joint pseudonym James S. A. Corey.  

In 1976 Dozois conceived of the story of a man floating in darkness. A year later, he was invited to teach at a summer science fiction writing workshop by Martin, who found Dozois's story interesting. Dozois felt stalled in continuing it so, after three years in a drawer, he asked Martin to collaborate. Martin wanted to explore the alien world of São Paulo. In 1982, Martin couldn't get any further in completing the story either, so he passed it back to Dozois. Neither was able to find a way to progress, and the book went back into a drawer until 2002. Martin brought it to the attention of a young "Turk", author Abraham, who completed it as a novella. Martin called it "Shadow Twin". It was published in 2004. Later, Dozois reworked it into a 300-page-plus novel and renamed it Hunter's Run. Despite how disjointed the writing of this story undeniably was (the full account of the process is included in the back matter of the published novel), it surprisingly does come together in a seamless and cohesive way. At no point in time did I feel like someone (or some two or three) else had written certain aspects of the story. If for no other reason, that does make this "experiment" quite an achievement.

Before I proceed any further, I'll again warn that there's no way to review this book the way I want to without giving away key aspects of the plot. If you want to read the story without being told those pivotal points, go read the book and come back to this review later. 

In this futuristic science fiction, humans have reached the stars but unfortunately alien species including the Silver Enye, Turu, Cian, and others have already claimed the choice worlds. However, these races allow human colonists (mostly the downtrodden, poor, and/or potential lawbreakers) to join in the world-building by crash-testing them on empty planets too dangerous to be colonized by the "worthy". 

The main character Ramón is a thoroughly despicable creep who came to the planet to escape the poverty and hopelessness he faced on Earth. Unfortunately, the capital city on São Paulo is no better. The only law in this place is survival. A prospector, Ramón drinks away whatever money he makes or spends it on the woman he's with, though certainly doesn't love or particularly even like. He's an abusive jerk (though Elena can be described exactly the same way) who ends up killing someone important. On the run in the wilderness "wastelands", he tells himself if he can find a rich mineral strike somewhere, he can start his life all over. He stumbles upon an alien installation. Before he can do anything about it, he's kidnapped by the aliens. 

When he comes to, he's told by the aliens that another man has discovered their location and they have to capture him before he reveals their existence to the human colonists back in São Paulo. Ramón is compelling to join that hunt. In the process, Ramón begins to bond with his captor Maneck. Eventually Ramón learns that the other human intruder was actually the original Ramón that the aliens have cloned to create him--he's the clone of the original Ramón. Despite this, Ramón begins to understand that these advanced aliens also landed on this hostile planet where they're just trying to survive. Cloning humans and trying to learn their behavior is simply a way for them to blend in and co-exist. 

The clone-Ramón manages to escape this captor and meets up with the older, jaded and, frankly, out of shape version of himself, who doesn't recognize him. It doesn't take long for clone-Ramón to realize he really, really does not like the original Ramón. He begins to question his own existence, intentions, and purpose as a result. When the original Ramón discovers who he is, survival is again the only option. The clone kills the original (whoa!) and tries to take up his old life in the capital--which means consequences of the original's crimes and imprisonment. Soon the clone decides he has more in common with the aliens and more chance at a life of peace and purpose with them. 

While all the authors who had hands in this project played with radically different ideas (told in the interviews in the back of the book) for Hunter's Run, at its heart, the theme is in the exploration of what it means to be human. Everything you've read thus far in this review are all the reasons I wanted to love this book. It sounds amazing, doesn't it? The subject matter, the setting, and the concept is utterly compelling to me as a person and a writer. I truly enjoyed the Enemy Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_Mine_(film) overtones that pervaded the interactions of clone-Ramón and the alien. 

To me, the fatal flaw in Hunter's Run (and probably it's earlier version "Shadow Twin" as well) was that the authors jointly made the protagonist--and, by default, his clone--so unlikable and thoroughly despicable that I never got to the point of feeling like his/their story was captivating, nor were they worth rooting for. In his interview in the back of Hunter's Run, Dozois said, "There was an essay by Damon Knight complaining that almost all heroes in science fiction are middle-class white Americans whereas almost no one on Earth is… 'Where is the space hero who is Mexican?'…I made Ramón in the 1970s very stereotypical… We needed to move away from that." Given that glimpse of story creation, I found it highly ironic that the three authors, even working together, ultimately chose to make Ramón stereotypically violent and reprehensible, so much so that it was hard to feel sympathy for him on the basis of the fact that, wherever this man went, he constantly felt he had to fight from every side just to survive. Ramón as a person was portrayed as ruthless, selfish, and vicious. He made bad choices he couldn't blame anyone else for. Regardless of his merciless setting or the environment he was in, he was a man who would always be who and what he was…a creep. There's no sugar-coating that fact with philosophical, psychological, or cultural discourses. 

As the majority of this story was told from the point of view of his clone, who does--to his credit--seem to be at least aware his original self was a jackass, I experienced disappointment that the clone didn't seem significantly changed even after he realized who he was in relation to the original Ramón and admitted to himself he didn't care for his "predecessor". As Jerry Seinfeld said, "adjacent to refuse is refuse". I guess ultimately I strongly need to feel a protagonist is a hero, or more accurately, has the potential to become one through the course of a story, not simply a degree above a villain, as this clone character was. I could in no way conceive that clone-Ramón might break free of any association with his original counterpart. His motives only felt slightly less egotistical and "survival of the fittest" than the original Ramón's. I kind of wish the authors had chosen to tell the story from Maneck's perspective, or at least partially so. 

The end also bothered me because, again, it displayed so pointedly that clone-Ramón wasn't much better than the original. There was no clear resolution. Clone-Ramón escapes prison and heads back to the alien hideout, hoping to find a way to live with the aliens in peace--and the reason he does this is to escape the imprisonment he's facing and to better himself. We never learn whether the aliens are amicable to this. I hate endings that don't provide adequate resolutions. To me, this still feels like a story untold, as it certainly must have at the many stages the authors shelved the unfinished versions. 

While there was a lot to be impressed by here in terms of the thematic explorations which make this tale well worth reading and the masterly world building of these three amazing writers, sadly I didn't actually enjoy it at any point. Still, it's certainly something any lover of science fiction action/adventure tales and fans of these three authors should consider picking up. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

and https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/karens-quill-blog

Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/

 

Oldies But Goodies {Put This One on Your TBR List} Book Review: If It Bleeds Collection by Stephen King by Karen S. Wiesner

 

Oldies But Goodies

{Put This One on Your TBR List}

Book Review: If It Bleeds Collection

by Stephen King

by Karen S. Wiesner

 

I grew up reading a Stephen King book every few days, sometimes within a single day if I got the enviable time to actually read that much. He was unquestionably my favorite writer when I was a teenager. He was without peer in my mind at conjuring supernatural creatures that I loved to be terrorized by, in large part because they weren't real. He also introduced me to a lot of things I was young and hungry to know, naughty, nasty things, and things that, in truth, I almost wish I'd never found out. As I got older, I got less and less able to handle realistic horror stories--the ones King wasn't intending to tell me. He wrote almost casually about horrible things like secret child molestation, deviations (sometimes sexual) that harmed a person as well as others, and the true crimes of this world, namely, the real ones where people are ritualistically cruel and judgmental, prejudice, and life was so routinely unfair to the underdogs. There's so much suffering that goes on inside battered souls that want nothing more than to hide and escape the attention of the world. He detailed vividly the kind of torment that no one else sees until it comes out and manifests itself almost like a demon out of control. 

I guess the books I was reading as I moved into adulthood made me want to escape, not to have bad situations finitely dissected and served up as a kind of punishment. I found it easier to throw the baby out with the bathwater. More aptly, I threw out the author that forced me to live such painful scenarios. That's undoubtedly a good testimony of King's skill as a writer, but I still find it hard to watch what can only be described sometimes as gruesome train wrecks. 

When I've ventured back into King territory here and there in the long years since then at the urging of a lifelong fan, I found his writing decidedly more mature, at least slightly more sensitive to realistic injustices, and less about supernatural horrors running amok. I miss the dark fantasy aspects, but I appreciate that I'm less traumatized reading his work these days. 

 If It Bleeds is a collection of four previously unpublished novellas by Stephen King published in 2020. I actually watched a wonderful adaptation of "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" on Netflix without having a clue it was based on the Stephen King story of the same name. I looked it up mid-watch and learned of the fact. Not more than a week later, I was at a book sale and saw a hardcover copy of the collection. I bought it and started reading. 

In "Mr. Harrigan's Phone", Craig is initially a refreshingly sweet nine-year-old boy who gets a job reading books to a retired, rich gentleman who lives in a choice spot in a town that's not so nice as to invite flurries of visitors at any given time. Rumor has it that in his younger years Harrigan was "tenacious" in exacting fitting judgment on those who wronged him or those close to him. But that's a side young Craig never actually saw in his kindly mentor of sorts--well, he never saw that side of Harrigan in life, at least. In death, now that's a whole different matter. 

With the movie version of this story, I was pretty surprised to find it dubbed a horror. From start to finish, it didn't frighten me one bit. I imagine it wouldn't have scared even a skittish four-year-old. It's just not what I consider horror. I wondered if they just called it that because of King's crown--he's known as the King of Horror after all. Later, as I thought about the story it told, I realized that the underlying horror of this piece was in adult Craig letting himself believe for even one second that justice can be rectified or gained through injustice and revenge. I loved this story and enjoyed watching Craig grow up. I was moved as he discovered for himself the limits of wrong and right. (The actors in the movie version were fantastic.) "Mr. Harrigan's Phone" was far and away my favorite in this collection. I heartily recommend both the story and the movie version of it. 

The second story in the collection, "The Life of Chuck" details the end of the world and what that looks like for various people but mainly for someone named Chuck. This tale is told backwards, with the end revealed first, working backwards. The three acts didn't make any sense in the order they were presented. Would they have been clearer if they'd been placed in linear order? I'll never know. I enjoyed the first (which was actually the last) of the three disjointed parts. From that point on, I was lost and never found my way back. Afterward, I read about the story online, trying to figure out the point. Not much explained it either. That they made a movie of this story is utterly unfathomable to me. King actually cited a billboard that he'd seen that read, "39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck" as his inspiration and decided to try to figure out what that meant by writing about it. My opinion is that the outcome feels unfinished and fragmented the way it's presented.

"If It Bleeds" is a Holly Gibney story. Originally she appeared as an important secondary character in King's Bill Hodges trilogy (including Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, and End of Watch published from 2014-2016), which I've never read. Suffering from OCD and a form of autism, Holly took the role of main character in the novel The Outsider, released in 2018, as a private investigator. I read this book long ago, also watched the 10-part miniseries version in 2020, intrigued by the idea of a man supposedly committing a murder when he was nowhere near the scene of the crime at the time, though the DNA found there and eyewitness accounts on both sides claim he was in each area simultaneously. His alibi is absolutely solid, as is his guilt in murdering and raping a young boy. So which is right? Or has something much more sinister taken place? 

I have to confess, I remember little of Holly Gibney in the book or the miniseries. What I recall most is that both the novel and the serial were long, so very, very long. Way too long and boring to hold my attention. Hundreds of pages and many hours filmed could easily have been cut to get to the gist of the story--the beginning and the ends were the two parts worth saving. The middle stuff was far too much to carry my interest, though I tried with both the book and the movie. By the time I got to the end of each, where it was actually exciting again, I didn't care. I just wanted it to be over. 

 

I had a similar experience with "If It Bleeds", which continues with a similar theme as The Outsider. I'm sorry to admit I found Holly excruciatingly dull, and I had a lot of trouble making it to the finish line with this story, though the overall idea was of interest to me, as was The Outsider. If anyone else is interested, Holly is also in a 2023 released, self-titled novel. 

The final story in If It Bleeds is "Rat". A writer with only short story success has never been able to finish a full-length novel. Inspired with an idea that has him excited, he rushes to his isolated cabin to write it. Bad weather and sickness set in while he's there. Unsure he'll finish his novel and feverish, he makes a shocking bargain with a sinister rat, but the author is just so desperate to make his career aspirations come true. Gee, what could go wrong? How could this man have not seen the end coming from the off? I can't say I loved this story, though it started out well enough. I couldn't get past the "what kind of a creep would agree to this pact?" aspect. Sigh. Incidentally, Ben Stiller optioned "Rat", intending to produce, star in, and direct the film adaptation at one point, but it's unclear whether that'll ever happen. 

While it's true I only found one offering in this collection really worth reading, I do think that single story is strong enough to warrant putting time and money into procuring it. Whether or not you're a fan of Stephen King, "Mr. Harrigan's Phone"--the novella and the movie--are the very best of the author. I expect you may see more reviews of Stephen King's work here in my Friday column in the future, as I ease back into the works of a favorite writer from my youth. 

Karen Wiesner is an award-winning, multi-genre author of over 150 titles and 16 series.

Visit her website here: https://karenwiesner.weebly.com/

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Find out more about her books and see her art here: http://www.facebook.com/KarenWiesnerAuthor 

Visit her publisher here: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Karen-Wiesner/