Tag Archives: Fantasy – Action & Adventure

The Birthgrave

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Birthgrave [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tanith Lee, introduction Marion Zimmer Bradley, book 1 of the Birthgrave trilogy, 80s cover by Ken Kelly.

Lee The Birthgrave 80s cover by Ken Kelly

The Birthgrave was Tanith Lee’s first published novel for adult readers, and the first novel of hers that I’ve read. The Publishers Weekly review excerpt in the jacket copy stresses its size, and compares the protagonist to Robert E. Howard’s Conan. But it’s not such a very big book by today’s fantasy standards. At just a little over 400 pages, it’s fairly modest among the doorstop novels the genre has come to produce. 

The acute storytelling might justify the comparison to Conan, but the central character actually couldn’t be more dissimilar. A much closer comparison would be Moorcock’s Elric, who is in many ways a schematic anti-Conan. Lee takes that reversal one step further with the change of gender. For style, pacing, and mood, I found myself more reminded of Gene Wolfe’s multi-volume fantasies — but it appears that Tanith Lee got there first, so I can wonder if she influenced Wolfe.

The protagonist is a nameless survivor of her own cruel, sorcery-wielding race, who adopts different identities in the course of her interactions with humanity. She is obscurely cursed, and brings misery and death to her casual and intimate contacts alike. There is an allegory here, for those who want to read on that level, made especially plain in the anagnorisis of the final twenty pages. (Feuerbachian philosophy, Freudianism, and feminism can each be useful to interpret the message of the story.)

There are a number of passages of hallucinatory vividness, and I found the entire novel quite engaging. The ending is almost too tidy, and I can see why some readers resented its deus ex machina qualities, along with what might seem like an abrupt shift in genre. But at the same time as it imposes that dislocation, the book returns to the business of its beginning in a way that makes it whole.

The Doom of Fallowhearth

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Doom of Fallowhearth [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Robbie MacNiven, part of the Descent: Journeys in the Dark series.

MacNiven The Doom of Fallowhearth

This book is — as far as I know — the first novel-length fiction to be set in the proprietary fantasy world of Terrinoth, identified with a considerable number of games under the Fantasy Flight imprint: Runewars, Descent, Runebound, Rune Age, BattleLore Second Edition, Heroes of Terrinoth, and probably some others as well. Its topic is the reunion of the “Borderlands Four,” a party of adventurers who have been enlisted to find a missing noblewoman in the outlying northern reaches of Terrinoth.

By and large, the games present Terrinoth as a bog-standard heroic fantasy world, with elves and orcs, dwarves and undead, dragons and giant spiders. This book seems careful to preserve its canon while highlighting a few elements that might seem different from the usual post-D&D synthesis of pulp sword-and-sorcery with Tolkien-style epic fare. There is at least one major pivot in the novel, amply foreshadowed, and not profoundly surprising, but the ending is a bit unconventional. It reads quickly, and does offer the sort of fleshing-out for its setting that this sort of story is concocted to achieve.

The main viewpoint characters here are the orc Pathfinder Durik and the rogue Logan Lashley. The former is the most upstanding and ethical character in the whole book, as far as I could tell, which thus comes a long way from Tolkien, but is consistent with the Terrinoth source material, I think. The aging and self-conscious Logan is something of a buffoon. In other non-standard fantasy characterizations, the whole story mentions only two amorous relationships, and they are both same-sex arrangements, neither of them stigmatized for that reason. The main one is stigmatized, but for necromancy, and that is central to the larger plot — a fact introduced in the prologue.

Ironically, the book’s branding is for “Descent: Journeys in the Dark,” a longstanding dungeon-crawler tabletop game that appears to have had its publication suspended in favor of “Descent: Legends of the Dark,” a sequel game driven by a digital app. A second “Descent” novel by a different author was issued just four months after this one, and I find it somewhat tempting, as it involves the Uthuk Y’llan, savage demonolaters who do not appear in The Doom of Fallowhearth.