Heroic fantasy that stands out from others, January 1, 2001

Not Lars Walker! Walker is telling his own story -- and what a storyteller he is -- but his imagination is drawing on a much richer compost than (it seems to me) most authors command. Walker knows the Icelandic sagas, and has adapted the terse saga style for the modern fantasy reader. Thus he provides us with a series of memorable supernatural incidents -- pagan gods, werewolves, ghosts -- and battle scenes, but he doesn't "write them up" in pulp magazine style. You may find yourself going back and reading again some of these scenes, to savor how really eerie or violent they are. His locales are generally convincing; they do not seem to have been invented by a writer who is making things up as he goes along.

There's human depth here, too. Walker gets me interested in characters without halting the story for extended patches to "work up" the description of the person. Here are men and women with blood in their veins.

I'm teaching an undergraduate course on modern fantasy. If I'd known of this book in time to include it in the reading list -- where it would have been in the company of Tolkien, Le Guin, and Peake -- I'd almost certainly have done so. I would have liked to include an example of really worthwhile swords-and-sorcery fantasy -- and that's what we have here!

 Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)