David Alastair Hayden

By the hoary frost of Heimdall’s beard, THOR is the might­i­est Mar­vel Stu­dios film yet! Well, I think so any­way. What’s not to like about a movie that is, to put it sim­ply, an epic fan­tasy super­hero love story of broth­erly love and betrayal, mixed with plenty of appro­pri­ate humor and based on Norse myth. To be clear, the movie focuses on the Mar­vel Comics char­ac­ter Thor who is loosely based on the Norse deity. Nat­u­rally, Mar­vel exer­cised much cre­ative license over the years.

The movie–directed by Ken­neth Branagh and writ­ten by Ash­ley Edward Miller, Zack Stentz and Don Payne–is done with a Shake­spearean approach well-suited to such larger than life char­ac­ters and in keep­ing with the comics. That said, it doesn’t take itself too seri­ously nor stray into the realm of ched­dar, which was my biggest con­cern com­ing in. Thor has always been a dif­fi­cult char­ac­ter for writ­ers to pull off, walk­ing a nar­row path between ridicu­lous and mythic. The Nordic deity didn’t have this prob­lem, but Thor who some­times encoun­ters char­ac­ters like Spi­der­man or, say, Batroc the Leaper, does.

As a fan of the char­ac­ter, and the Avengers in gen­eral, I have awaited this movie most of my life, but I never thought it would hap­pen. I wasn’t dis­ap­pointed. I can’t imag­ine any fan not lov­ing it. And I have yet to meet any­one who didn’t at least like the movie after see­ing it.

The movie cur­rently stands at 78% on Rot­ten Toma­toes, which only proves to me that 22% of review­ers have no taste in good super­hero movies. (Ignore Roger Ebert’s review, unless you want to be amused after see­ing the movie. He failed to grasp basics that any first grader could handle.)

As the story begins, Kind Odin of Asgard (Anthony Hop­kins) is pro­claim­ing his hammer-wielding son Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to be his offi­cial heir when a trio of frost giants attempt to steal the Cask of Eter­nal Win­ters. Odin wishes to deal with this diplo­mat­i­cally, but Thor insists on teach­ing those damnable frost giants a thing or two. (Long ago when Thor was but a child, the Asgar­dians defeated the frost giants and seized the cas­ket: a bloody flash­back of this opens the movie. Peace has since reigned.)

When Thor’s ado­les­cent actions nearly lead to open war­fare, Odin ban­ishes Thor to Midgard (Earth), where he must learn humil­ity or he will never regain his immor­tal­ity or the power of his ham­mer, Mjolnir.

On Earth, Thor runs into three sci­en­tists, most notably Dr. Jane Fos­ter (Natalie Port­man), who is stricken by his god-bod sex­i­ness. And per­haps his improv­ing personality?

When Odin falls into the Odin sleep, his other son Loki (Tom Hid­dle­ston) takes throne and begins to machi­nate most might­ily whilst SHIELD messes around with Thor’s ham­mer and gets in the way.

The action in the begin­ning sequences with frost giant bat­tles and Asgar­dian splen­dor are breath­tak­ing. I saw the movie in iMax 3D, and while I’m not nor­mally a fan of movies that appear in more than 2 dimen­sions, 3D made the grandeur of Thor more … well … grand. I also found the sound­track by Patrick Doyle to be most heroic and impres­sive, one of the best I’ve heard in some time.

The plot is fast, engross­ing, and well-done, but I think this was more of a char­ac­ter story than any­thing. A com­ing of age story for Thor and Loki, even if they are grown men… gods… Asgar­dians… whatever.

Speak­ing of char­ac­ters, Balder the Brave is notably absent, prob­a­bly because hav­ing him around adds too much com­pli­ca­tion with lit­tle pay­off. But fans will be pleased to find Thor’s com­pan­ions the Lady Sif and the War­riors Three: Fan­dral the Dash­ing, Vol­stagg the Volu­mi­nous, and Hogun the Grim. I wasn’t crazy about the actor who played Hogun. I thought his accent too strong off-putting, but his part is small. Oth­er­wise, the char­ac­ters were well por­trayed and added depth and humor to the movie. Dr. Foster’s assis­tant, Darcy (Kat Den­nings) was beyond hilarious.

Heim­dall, played by Idris Elba, is every bit as awe­some as one would expect. In addi­tion to being a badass, Heim­dall has cool pow­ers and is one of the most pow­er­ful of the Asgardians.

Chris Hemsworth makes for a believ­able Thor, and the ladies seem to like his mus­cled looks quite a lot. But Tom Hiddleston’s per­for­mance as Loki was mar­velous. He deftly added nuance to the char­ac­ter as he was able not only to por­tray depth but swiftly switch between dif­fer­ent sub­tle emo­tional dis­plays. To me, Loki’s tragic rela­tion­ship with his brother and father steals the show. Loki’s motives, how­ever, seem to be lost on some view­ers, espe­cially crit­ics. Loki is not your typ­i­cal “I want to mess stuff up because I’m evil” char­ac­ter. His moti­va­tions are nuanced and personal.

Clint Bar­ton (Jeremy Ren­ner) appears in the movie briefly, bow and all. (That’s Hawk­eye to those lack­ing exten­sive knowl­edge of the Avengers.) Those few brief min­utes made me feel like a kid again. I’m not exag­ger­at­ing. I nearly leapt out of my seat.

So what’s not to like? I have no major com­plaints. The movie hit every note that a Thor movie should hit.

While the spe­cial effects were great, the cos­tumes were a bit glitzy for my taste. But how does one pull off the trans­la­tion of col­or­ful, fan­tas­tic Asgard from the comics into a movie? They didn’t want to do a drab his­tor­i­cal look, thanks the gods, but I could have done with a lit­tle less bling.

The Foo Fight­ers song as the cred­its scroll bugs the crap out of me, even after a sec­ond view­ing. Noth­ing wrong with the Foo Fight­ers, but metal would be far more appro­pri­ate. Viking metal. There’s no short­age. I would have rec­om­mended the Faroese metal band Tyr because they’re fret-thundering musi­cians, because they’re sin­cere about hon­or­ing the old ways, and because the band is named for the same deity.

All in all, if you like Mar­vel Comic’s Thor, you will love this movie. And if you’re unfa­mil­iar with the char­ac­ter but like super­heroes or epic fan­tasy action, I think that at the very least you will like the movie, if not love it. And don’t for­get, since THOR serves as a lead-in to next summer’s THE AVENGERS, you must wait until the end of the cred­its to see the ultra cool sneak peek. (You see now why the Foo Fight­ers song bugs me so.)

This review orig­i­nally appeared on Rogue Blades Enter­tain­ment.

The Desert of Souls by Howard Andrew Jones.

• … 9 of 10 Dag­gers (adventure)
• … 3 of 5 Dev­ils (malevolence)

Zom­bie monkeys!

There, I should have your atten­tion now.

The blurb text for this amaz­ing adven­ture novel appears below, because I’m not going to recount the plot for you. If you insist on know­ing more, read the damn book. That’s the point.  You should, in fact, read the book any­way. You won’t regret it. I promise.

The Desert of Souls is one part his­tor­i­cal, one part fan­tasy, and two parts action adven­ture. The main char­ac­ters, Asim and Dabir, are rem­i­nis­cent of Fafrhd and Grey Mouser or Sher­lock and Wat­son with­out being copies of either pair. They are dis­tinc­tive and well-rounded. The Desert of Souls is, to some degree, an adven­tur­ous buddy tale in 8th Cen­tury Bagh­dad. With sor­cery. What’s not to like about that?

Howard Andrew Jones made good use of pulp sto­ry­telling tech­niques rarely seen today, employ­ing them in a sophis­ti­cated, mod­ern man­ner. The Desert of Souls is an elo­quently writ­ten, fast-paced tale that, at its best, reminded me of The Adept’s Gam­bit by Fritz Leiber. I enjoyed the sup­port­ing cast and the lush his­tor­i­cal set­ting, as well as fan­tasy ele­ments that don’t often get the screen time they deserve. Mythic djinn and the above men­tioned zom­bie mon­keys are just a few of the many fun, pulp-fantasy ele­ments the author throws in for our read­ing pleasure.

The Desert of Souls is sword-and-sorcery at its best, and a fun read that any fan­tasy fan will enjoy.

The glit­ter­ing tra­di­tion of sword-and-sorcery sweeps into the sands of ancient Ara­bia with the heart-stopping speed of a whirling dervish in this thrilling debut novel from new tal­ent Howard Andrew Jones.

In 8th cen­tury Bagh­dad, a stranger pleads with the vizier to safe­guard the bejew­eled tablet he car­ries, but he is mur­dered before he can explain. Charged with solv­ing the puz­zle, the scholar Dabir soon real­izes that the tablet may unlock secrets hid­den within the lost city of Ubar, the Atlantis of the sands. When the tablet is stolen from his care, Dabir and Cap­tain Asim are sent after it, and into a life and death chase through the ancient Mid­dle East.
Stop­ping the thieves—a cun­ning Greek spy and a fire wiz­ard of the Magi—requires a des­per­ate jour­ney into the desert, but first Dabir and Asim must find the lost ruins of Ubar and con­tend with a mythic, sor­cer­ous being that has traded wis­dom for the souls of men since the dawn of time.  But against all these haz­ards there is one more that may be too great even for Dabir to overcome…

• 8 of 10 Dag­gers (story)
• 3 of 5 Dev­ils (malevolence)

Swords & Dark Magic: The New Sword & Sor­cery, Edited by Jonathan Stra­han and Lou Anders, is a must read for all fan­tasy fic­tion read­ers, except those that don’t like sto­ries that kick ass. Just hold­ing the book you can almost smell the wretch of sor­cery and hear blood drip­ping from cold steel.

“Sev­en­teen Orig­i­nal Tales of Sword and Sor­cery penned by Mas­ters Old and New”: Steven Erik­son, Glen Cook, Gene Wolfe, James Enge, C.J. Cher­ryh, K. J. Parker, Garth Nix, Michael Moor­cock, Tim Leb­bon, Robert Sil­ver­berg, Greg Keyes, Michael Shea, Scott Lynch, Tanith Lee, Caitlin R Kier­nan, Bill Will­ing­ham, Joe Abercrombie.

With such an amaz­ing list of accom­plished authors, you know you’re get­ting tales well told. How good? In my opin­ion, it’s worth the admis­sion price for just the Lynch, Wolfe, Moor­cock, and Parker sto­ries. And after pay­ing for those you’ll be immensely pleased to find excel­lent tales by Nix, Enge, Aber­crom­bie, Cher­ryh, Leb­bon, and Lee as well. The remain­der are all solid tales. (Per­son­ally, as a Moor­cock fan, I would have bought the col­lec­tion for the Elric story alone. And after read­ing the anthol­ogy, I have to say that I would buy it just to read Scott Lynch’s “In the Stacks.”)

You can’t under­es­ti­mate my glee at see­ing the sword & sor­cery genre get­ting some love. We have new Moor­cock and Howard col­lec­tions on the shelves at Barnes & Noble. We have new nov­els like James Enge’s “Blood of Ambrose.” We have this anthol­ogy. We have hope again.

So how does Swords & Dark Magic stack up as an anthol­ogy of sword & sor­cery fiction?

If you’re a hard­core fan of old-school, Robert E. Howard pas­tiche, or bar­bar­ian fic­tion, you might be dis­ap­pointed. (Broaden your hori­zons!) But if you’re a fan of sword & sor­cery in gen­eral, I think you’ll enjoy this vol­ume, espe­cially if you like hav­ing lighter fare mixed in with the heavy stuff. (I thought the vol­ume a bit light over­all for my per­sonal tastes, but I like my sword & sor­cery as dark as a demon’s ass­hole. Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane kind of dark, you know.)

Only one story didn’t meet my per­sonal cri­te­ria for what makes a tale sword & sor­cery. Two oth­ers were bor­der­line to me, but they were damned good sto­ries. While Swords & Dark Magic didn’t meet my stan­dard with all sev­en­teen tales, I would never expect it to. No one per­son can rigidly define an entire genre, espe­cially one as diverse as S&S. And if you don’t think sword & sor­cery is diverse, then you should prob­a­bly stick to Conan pas­tiche. Inclu­sion is the bet­ter option for any genre, and I refer you to this arti­cle on the Cim­mer­ian, which says it bet­ter than I can.

One of the ironies of S&S is that while it is plot dri­ven, it has largely been defined by a few strong, iconic char­ac­ters. Other than Elric, who has long been a genre-defining fig­ure, the only char­ac­ter in this col­lec­tion that I really felt had the sort of immense per­son­al­ity you would expect in the best of S&S was Enge’s Mor­lock who has appeared in other tales and in two books from Pyr thus far, with a third upcom­ing in the fall. But most of these sto­ries were not writ­ten with recur­ring char­ac­ters in mind. (I would cer­tainly like to see some more tales with the char­ac­ter set from Abercrombie’s “The Fool Jobs.”)

Con­cern­ing “Red Pearls: An Elric Story,” it is clas­sic Moor­cock and though the end­ing is per­haps a bit rushed, the tale is remark­able in that it reveals details about the Mel­ni­boneans that have only been hinted at thus far!
My favorite tale of the bunch, though, was Scott Lynch’s “In the Stacks.” Armed sor­cer­ers ven­tur­ing into a dan­ger­ous magic library. Because that’s what you have to do to check out a book. How can you not like that? Plus, it’s dark enough to suit my tastes.

The Gene Wolfe story was inter­est­ing. I don’t con­sider it S&S per se, though if it had been writ­ten in 1920, I would put it in a Clas­sics of Sword & Sor­cery anthol­ogy and label it an imme­di­ate pre­cur­sor. Strange, I know, but it felt a lit­tle too mythic and high fan­tasy to be true S&S, and I think this puts it on foot­ing with “The Fortress Unvan­quish­able, Save for Sac­noth” by Lord Dun­sany. Not a bad place to be, and as it was one of my favorite sto­ries, I wel­come its inclusion.

I didn’t see any love in the Intro­duc­tion for “The Shadow King­dom” by Robert E. Howard. It’s a shame how often poor Kull, whose sto­ries kicked off the S&S genre, gets over­looked. Nor did Karl Edward Wag­ner get a notice, though sadly this is common.

Lou Anders has expressed some regret in call­ing Swords & Dark Magic “The New Sword & Sor­cery” because the title mis­leads some to think that the anthol­ogy is try­ing to rede­fine the genre. And yet, I think the sub­ti­tle is appro­pri­ate. In this vol­ume we have cur­rent authors writ­ing sword & sor­cery now. A liv­ing genre evolves, which is a good thing. And a col­lec­tion of S&S by such esteemed authors in this time of scarcity can’t help but rede­fine the genre, if ever so slightly.

Cer­tainly, the vol­ume chron­i­cles some of the shifts in sword & sor­cery that have occurred over the last few decades. I see two major move­ments here.

First, we have an abun­dance of sor­cery. Per­haps more spells than swords. And often the pro­tag­o­nist is a magic wielder. I think the trend here started chang­ing in the 60’s with Elric. Whereas in the tra­di­tional Conan / Weird Tales S&S we would see sor­cery only used by the bad guys. (Okay, Mouser dab­bled in magic, but he wasn’t very good at it!) I’m sure this trend relates to cul­tural and reli­gious changes in our soci­ety, but I’m not about to go down that path right now.

Sec­ond, we have teams of adven­tur­ers in the Aber­crom­bie, Cook, Lynch, and Erik­son sto­ries. In the past it was one hero, maybe with a part­ner or  a com­pan­ion, a tag-along for a sin­gle story per­haps. I think this is a direct result of Dave Arne­son and Gary Gygax’s influ­ence on mod­ern fan­tasy lit­er­a­ture, though you could sur­mise that it orig­i­nated with the Fel­low­ship of the Ring. Still, I don’t see this hap­pen­ing with­out D&D. (And Erikson’s open­ing story really does read to me like a fic­tion­al­ized take on someone’s role-playing adven­ture. Not to demean the story in any way.)

In sum­mary: Swords & Dark Magic is fun for boys and girls who like badass tales of heart-thumping action, sin­is­ter spells, evil libraries, and moth­er­fuck­ing Elric. Now, go buy the damned book and get to reading.

• 8 of 10 Dag­gers (story)
• 3 of 5 Dev­ils (malevolence)

• Buy it from Amazon.
• Signed hard­cover from Sub­ter­ranean Press.

.

Wow. The first fan­tas­tic chap­ter of what I’m sure will be a grand fairy­tale. The only episodes of Doc­tor Who that I’ve seen* that are bet­ter are the ones from the pre­vi­ous sea­sons that were writ­ten by Steven Moffatt.

The act­ing was far and above pre­vi­ous efforts, though I like David Tennant’s work quite a bit. Matt Smith turns it up to 11.

Also, Amy Pond was infi­nitely more inter­est­ing than the pre­vi­ous com­pan­ions I’ve seen. Right now, I think it’s her story, not the Doctor’s.

* Admit­tedly, I have seen very lit­tle Doc­tor Who. I just never have liked it much, until I saw the Steven Mof­fat episodes. And I only gave those a try because I love Cou­pling so much.