A Short Collection of Book Reviews

I need a break from my own writing (41,000 words into a novel re-write), and decided to do a few quick write-ups for some books I had read recently.

Kormak’s Saga

7/10 Kormak sucks

This is one of the Icelandic sagas, and one I had read long ago. I picked it up again when I was in the mood for something old (really old). I forgot just how much magic is in this one: multiple sorcerers of various types, multiple magic weapons, an enchanted shield, a healing stone, etc.

But I also forgot what an absolute toxic dumpster-fire Kormak was. Especially when you consider what the actual history might have looked like; this guy wasn’t cursed by some witch, he did all that stuff of his own accord (and probably blamed a witch for it after the fact). And I feel like his descendants felt the same, which is why Kormak is missing from like 1/3 of the saga, and we get several chapters focused on Bersi the duelist, an actually heroic, honorable figure (and better fighter).

There were also some oddly disjointed scenes, where the saga writer didn’t seem to want to elaborate on a segment, despite it being a fragment of some greater whole that had been forgotten.

Viglund’s Saga

7/10 A fine saga

This was a new saga for me. Very different from Kormak’s Saga in style. Kormak’s Saga has lots of fragmented scenes and more emphasis on the poetry, seeming to be the author’s unwillingness to alter or add to the story too much. Viglund’s Saga, on the other hand, has a lot less poetry (barely any in the first half) but has far more detailed scenes, and reads more like a traditional story.

It being a much later saga also, to me, suggests that it’s largely a fictitious story, or that the author used more artistic license to add or change details as desired. Always be suspicious of too many scenes taking place in private. At least Viglund was mostly a more likeable protagonist than Kormak (though, Viglund also had a few unsavory moments). To be honest, I don’t remember much by this point (about 4 months since reading).

Elric of Melniboné

By Michael Moorcock

7/10 Not the strongest start

Elric is, of course, a classic fantasy protagonist, and one of the most well-known to fantasy readers. A brooding albino ruler who wields a powerful sword, Elric is a dark and tragic hero.

Many of Moorcock’s skills are in this first novel in chronological order (which is not the first-written Elric novel by a long shot): a complex hero, immersive world, and victories that come with consequences. I certainly enjoyed it overall.

However, a few things held the novel down for me. For one, the villain, Yrkoon, was a bit one-dimensional, and at times, felt like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon. Granted, this book seems to have been written as an origin story for Elric (who had already been in several novels by this time), so the conclusion to the events of the story were already established. As a first-time reader, it just wasn’t the strongest start, and it did sometimes feel like it was more about ticking certain boxes than telling a compelling story of its own.

Eye in the Sky

By Philip K. Dick

7/10 Mixed pacing slowed a dated story

Seems I hit a string of 7s. This one is PKD doing his usual mind-bending, reality-warping story-telling, inducing constant paranoia in his characters. But this one is also firmly set in the ’50s, and it shows. Between the themes of the Red Scare and casual sexism and misogyny, it could hardly take place in any other time.

That said, the story is an interesting one, where a group of characters, some of whom are strangers to one another, suffer an industrial accident and wake up to find strange happenings have become normal. It has an almost proto-Inception direction to it as the story continues. The main issue (aside from various problems that come with reading ’50s fiction) is the story loses its way for a bit, and we meander about between weird events, characters arguing, and just wasting time before the story figures out where it needs to go next. In general, it’s hard to really say there’s even a direction for the plot to go in once it’s revealed what’s really happening. A couple chapters diverted into horror, which was a fun surprise.

Goth

By Otsuichi

9/10 A grim but fun series of stories

Finally, a great one. This novel is a series of individual stories following two misfit high-school students obsessed with death and violence, but as spectators more than practitioners. Morino is the girl with no friends, and our unnamed narrator is the boy who fakes being normal.

These two characters are a lot of fun to follow through the stories, assuming, of course, you can handle deeply dark and disturbing themes. The trigger warnings for this would be a mile long. Each story involves a separate incident that somehow entangles one or both protagonists, and they either try to solve the mystery or just want to see what happens.

If it has issues, the novel’s biggest flaw for me is that each story comes with a major twist, but some of them require narrative gymnastics to pull off, and it’s not always a smooth landing. Two in particular were a bit rough for me, but the stories up to that point were still enjoyable, and the most important stories of the book were executed perfectly, with believable and relatable revelations instead of surprise gimmicks.

The movie was very low-budget, and while the story did a reasonable job combining multiple stories from the book into one, they really miscast the male protagonist (and the movie spoils a major twist in one of the last stories!).

Audition

By Ryu Murakami

7/10 Though short, it could have been shorter

This is a very short book, probably only a novella in length, but still, the simplicity of the story didn’t warrant the length. This would have been a much stronger short story. Aoyama is finally looking to remarry after his wife died years ago, and his friend convinces him to throw together a fake movie in order to audition potential wives.

The first couple of chapters are pretty slow, narrating backstory that could have been done in scenes instead. But once things get going, it’s an interesting story, but there’s not much to do except wait for the inevitable climax. There’s just so much repetition in scenes and spinning of wheels, when it’s already very obvious where things are going. Still haven’t seen the movie, but I assume it works much better as a movie than novel. I at least enjoyed Ryu Murakami’s style, so I look forward to trying a different novel of his another time.

The Iliad

By Homer

DNF

I tried. I mean, I read sagas and enjoy them. But this made me appreciate the brevity of the sagas. I’ll try again some other time, or just skip to The Odyssey, but the slowness, repetitiveness, and general immaturity of the characters (humans and gods!) was just not working.

Vampire Hunter D

By Hideyuki Kikuchi

7/10 Not much story, lots of tropes

It’s a bit rough around the edges, but I enjoyed it overall. The crazy blend of post-apocalyptic sci-fi, gothic fantasy, and even Western genres is very different. It has many of the same trappings as Shounen anime/manga, so you know what you’re getting into.

I think the two biggest weaknesses are the non-stop purple prose and bare-bones story. Barely a line of dialogue can be spoken without a full accompanying paragraph of elaborate narration, delving into the intricacies and meanings or the history of the individual, often delivered by an unreliable narrator (the author) who intentionally teases information; “What could he possibly mean?” or “Who was he speaking to just then?” etc.

The other big one is that there’s almost no plot to speak of, and the story is almost completely made of scenes where character A is trying to do something, then character B shows up and is so overwhelmingly more powerful that either A gives up without a fight, or B instantly kills A without much of a fight (sometimes there’s a trick being employed to cheat a victory). Most of the book is a shuffling of characters, each more powerful than another, and we just randomize who is thwarting who, over and over.

I expect the books get better over time with more interesting stories and hopefully less reliance on tropes (or at least a better selection of tropes).

I also watched the ’85 anime adaptation, which did not age very well. It’s kind of a mess. They hacked the already simple story to pieces, heavily changed several characters, and toned down or removed a lot of the sci-fi elements (but then made the Count’s castle way more sci-fi for some reason). It was a bit disappointing.