Book Review | The Good, the Bad and the Smug by Tom Holt

New Evil.

Same as the Old Evil, but with better PR.

Mordak isn't bad, as far as goblin kings go, but when someone, or something, starts pumping gold into the human kingdoms it puts his rule into serious jeopardy. Suddenly he's locked in an arms race with a species whose arms he once considered merely part of a calorie-controlled diet.

Helped by an elf with a background in journalism and a masters degree in being really pleased with herself, Mordak sets out to discover what on earth (if indeed, that's where he is) is going on. He knows that the truth is out there. If only he could remember where he put it.

***

Evil just isn't what it was.

Used to be, you could slaughter a dwarf and gnaw his gnarly bones all the way home without attracting any undesirable attention. Now? Not so much. It's a new world, you know? And it might just be that the new world needs a new breed of evil.

In The Good, the Bad and the Smug, Tom Holt—aka K. J. Parker—proposes exactly that as the premise of a satirical and sublimely self-aware fairytale that brings together the wit and the wickedness of the author's alter ego with the wordplay and the whimsy which have made the YouSpace series such a sweet treat so far.

Readers, meet Mordak: King of the Goblins, and winner of a special award at this year's Academy of Darkness do. The prize is just the icing on the (unfortunately metaphorical) cake; he's been turning a whole lot of heads of late. Why? Well:

It wasn't just Mordak's arbitrary and bewildering social reforms—universal free healthcare at rusty spike of delivery, for crying out loud—though those were intriguing enough to baffle even the shrewdest observers, frantically speculating about the twisted motives that underlay such a bizarre agenda. It was the goblin himself who'd caught the public imagination. Mordak had it; the indefinable blend of glamour, prestige, menace and charm that go to make a genuinely world-class villain. (p.3)

It isn't all he has to offer either, for Mordak is also the face of New Evil: a "caring and compassionate" (p.281) agenda he's in the middle of forcing down folks' throats when his eternal enemies—is there anything worse than people, really?—suddenly find themselves filthy rich. So filthy rich, in fact, that they could cause a proper problem for the goblins.

This is an obstacle Mordak simply must overcome if he's to have a chance of realising his reforms. To wit, together with Efluviel, an elf who'd do almost anything to get her job as a journalist back—a job Mordak can give her as easily as he took it away in the first place—the King strikes out on an unexpected journey in order to expose the source of all the goddamn gold the humans have gotten their grubby paws on.

Book Review | Gleam by Tom Fletcher

The gargantuan Factory of Gleam is an ancient, hulking edifice of stone, metal and glass ruled over by chaste alchemists and astronomer priests.

As millennia have passed, the population has decreased, and now only the central district is fully inhabited and operational; the outskirts have been left for the wilderness to reclaim. This decaying, lawless zone is the Discard: the home of Wild Alan.

Clever, arrogant, and perpetually angry, Wild Alan is both loved and loathed by the Discard's misfits. He's convinced that the Gleam authorities were behind the disaster that killed his parents and his ambition is to prove it. But he's about to uncover more than he bargained for.

***

Hot on the heels of three deeply discomfiting horror novels, Gleam marks the starts of a fantasy saga that's never better than when it harks back to Tom Fletcher's first fictions. It's burdened by a bland protagonist and a lacking opening act, but besides that, The Factory Trilogy is off to a tantalising start.

In large part that's due to the darkly wonderful world it introduces us to. Gleam is a devastated landscape equal parts Ambergris and Fallout 3, arranged around a truly hellish edifice:

From the centre rises the one structure that is not tarnished with extraneous growth, or overwhelmed with moss, or just rounded and worn by erosion. It's a vast, black, six-sided pyramid, separated from the rest of the chaos by a ring of ashen wasteland. The wasteland is the top of a hill, which slopes down into a darkness from which all the rest of the chaos emerges. This is the only visible ground in the whole place, and it's grey and dusty and somehow creepy. The pyramid itself, though, looks clean and new, and its edges are all sharp. (p.3)

Alan has lived in this "knot of lies and rituals that referenced only each other and combined to mean less than nothing" (p.211) for twelve tedious years—long enough to meet and marry his wife, Marion, and father a boy by the name of Billy with her—but he doesn't belong here any more now than he did on the devastating day he was made welcome within its walls. "He'd never been a Pyramidder and he never would be. He still dreamed about Modest Mills; being able to run around outside. And not in some courtyard or garden, but the real outside—the Discard." (p.12)

His dreams of freedom come true too soon, in truth. In short order Alan offends an Assistant Alchemical Co-ordinator, who sends heavies to his house to remind our protagonist of his place in the Pyramid. In the aftermath, Marion asks Alan to leave—not because she no longer loves him, but for the sake of their son's safety.

She doesn't have to ask him twice. He packs a bag and skedaddles, to find that though life in the Discard is difficult, it's not as awful as the Pyramidders insist.

Book Review | The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde

The Mighty Shandar, the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, returns to the unUnited Kingdoms. Clearly, he didn't solve the Dragon Problem, and must hand over his fee: eighteen dray-weights of gold.

But the Mighty Shandar doesn't do refunds, and vows to eliminate the dragons once and for all—unless sixteen year old Jennifer Strange and her sidekicks from the Kazam house of enchantment can bring him the legendary jewel, the Eye of Zoltar.

The only thing that stands in their way is a perilous journey with a 50% Fatality Index—through the Cambrian Empire to the Leviathan Graveyard, at the top of the deadly Cadir Idris mountain. It's a quest like never before, and Jennifer soon finds herself fighting not just for her life, but for everything she knows and loves...

***

Over the years, the Troll Wars have taken a terrible toll on the Kingdoms of Britain. All but a few of these fights have been finished in a matter of minutes—trolls, it transpires, are hardy targets—nevertheless countless lives have been lost to this pointless conflict... leading, among other things, to an overabundance of orphans. And what are orphans for if not enslaving, eh?

Jennifer Strange, the narrator of Jasper Fforde's fun-filled fantasy fable, was one of the lucky ones:

Instead of being sold into the garment, fast-food or hotel industries, I got to spend my six years of indentured servitude with a company named Kazam, a registered House of Enchantment run by the Great Zambini. Kazam did what all Houses of Enchantment used to do: hire out wizards to perform magical feats. The problem was that in the past half-century magic had faded, so we were really down to finding lost shoes, rewiring houses, unblocking drains and getting cats out of trees. (p.2)

To make matters worse, the Great Zambini immediately disappeared, leaving Jennifer to save Kazam from a fate worse than death... dreaded irrelevance! In The Last Dragonslayer, she did exactly that—then, in The Song of the Quarkbeast, she got mixed up in the machinations of an idiot king. Now, having "saved dragons from extinction, averted war between the nations of Snodd and Brecon and helped the power of magic begin to re-establish itself," (p.3) our ever so patient protagonist—sweet sixteen this year—finds herself in a bit of a pickle.

Actually, the problem might be more of a ghost pepper than your typical pickle, because Kazam's actions have attracted the wrath of the Mighty Shandar. One unintended consequence of Jennifer's aforementioned intervention was to make a mockery of the professional pride of the most powerful wizard in the world, who'd been hired, as it happens, to destroy all dragons. Kazam can either sacrifice Feldspar Axiom Firebreath IV and, um, Colin, or do as Shandar demands, and seek out the massively powerful magical artifact known only as the Eye of Zoltar.

If it exists.

Which is at least as unlikely as Jennifer's chances of surviving for long enough in the dangerous Cambrian Empire to get to the Leviathan Graveyard (about which no tales are told, because no one's survived to tell them) at the top of Cadir Idris (a mountain so monolithic that its peak has never been seen) where the Eye of Zoltar is said to be stashed. Assuming it isn't a tall tale in the first place.

Book Review | A Different Kingdom by Paul Kearney

Michael Fay is a normal boy, living with his grandparents on their family farm in rural Ireland. In the woods—once thought safe and well-explored—there are wolves; and other, stranger things. He keeps them from his family, even his Aunt Rose, his closest friend, until the day he finds himself in the Other Place. There are wild people, and terrible monsters, and a girl called Cat. 

When the wolves follow him from the Other Place to his family’s doorstep, Michael must choose between locking the doors and looking away—or following Cat on an adventure that may take an entire lifetime in the Other Place. He will become a man, a warrior, and confront the Devil himself: the terrible Dark Horseman...

***

If you go down to the woods today, be sure of a big surprise... but I dare say it won't be bears. And that's assuming there are even woods within reach of you.

Where I live, I'm lucky. I have natural landscape to the left of me, supermarkets and the like to the right: the conveniences of 21st century living combined with the beauty of the world as it once was. But so many places today have no balance. Particularly in cities we have systematically stamped out the environment to make more room for humanity to do what humanity does: taint everything it touches.

Young Michael Fay, a boy about to become a man in rural Ireland sixty or so years ago, has been aware of this fact most foul ever since his parents passed:

He lives amid the acres his family has occupied for generations. They have multiplied through the years, growing from a single unit into a clan, a tribe. Sons have built houses and scraped together farms in their fathers' shadows. Daughters have married neighbours. Exiles have been and gone, have sailed away and returned to where they were born. His family has roots here as old as the hill fort nestled on the highest of the pastures. They have possess the land, raped it, nurtured it, cursed it and been enslaved by it.

His parents have been killed by it. He was orphaned by a bomb meant for someone else. (p.12)

In their place, Michael is raised by his grandparents, however he finds more in the mode of closeness with his Aunt Rose. Ten years his senior, she's like a big sister to our man in the making, but also a little like a lover, so when she's bundled away by scandalised nuns, only to die giving birth to her baby—gone beyond "like a letter lost in the post" (p.61)—the poor dear is devastated.

Years later, Michael's isolation grows greater when his teachers turn to despair over his behaviour. His abiding love of the land leads him to seek solace in the forest, where he haunts a special spot. Playing there one day, he sees something unbelievable. There are wolves in the woods!

Wolves and weirder: men with fox faces...