Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If you don't already love Erikson, start now., April 21, 2006
Steven Erikson, The Healthy Dead: A Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach (Night Shade Books, 2005)
If Steven Erikson did not exist, we would have to invent him. I've been immersed in a large number of fantasy series consisting of large numbers of doorstop-sized novels for years now. And while a number of them range from the good to the utterly fantastic, I don't believe I have ever come across one that has the gritty realism and emotional impact of Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen. In a genre that is currently seeing some of the best writing in its history, Erikson is head and shoulders above the rest.
This is exactly why The Healthy Dead is such a pleasant surprise. While it takes place in the same world as the Malazan books, and its pair of protagonists are characters in that series, it throws the realism aspect to the wind. It's also a hundred twenty-eight pages, and small pages with a large font at that; you can finish The Healthy Dead in a single sitting (whereas a typical Malazan book, assuming you have a job, will take you weeks). It is a whimsical flight of fancy, a neat, tidy, gory, amusing little morality play that's surprisingly understated-- especially when put up against, for example, the past few books we've seen in Goodkind's Sword of Truth series.
The parallel goes beyond the fact of the moralizing itself. Both Goodkind and Erikson are on about the same set of morals, and approach their particular soapbox from the same basic direction. The difference is that where Goodkind fails in his attempt to get his point across (stopping the action to have one's characters moralize at the audience is, by definition, a failure), Erikson succeeds by taking the opposite tack; the moral of the story is in the actions and reactions of his characters to the setting.
The setting, in this case, is the remote town of Quaint, where the sorceror Bauchelain and his companion, the necromancer Korbal Broach, find themselves approached by two citizens who ask them to find a way to depose their tyrannical king. The king's tyranny is of a quite novel sort (at least, in a fantasy world); he is entirely convinced that the best way to make his citizens happy is to stop them from indulging in vice, and so had banned such things as brothels, alcohol, gambling, and red meat. The citizens, while healthier than they were (at least, when they're not dying of a particular complication of their new healthiness, which I'll leave it to the reader to snicker over), are dying of ennui. They want their old tyrannical despot back. The problem is, said tyrannical despot happens to be hanging on a pike outside the wall. Enter Korbal Broach.
The parallels with modern life couldn't be more obvious, and Erikson's characters react to them much as modern humans do. His solution to the problem is utterly unrealistic, and the stuff fantasies are made of. Good fantasies, though; no one wanders around preaching about the evils of tyranny and the importance of freedom of choice. Still, a straightforward narrative would be a good fantasy story, but not really on the same level of delight one gets from a full-fledged Malazan novel. What raises it to the heights we expect from Erikson are the little details he throws in, like the King's Rube Goldbergian exercise machine, the ex-harlot Knight of Purity, and most of all, the personified Seven Deadly Sins (well, four of them, anyway; one assumes the others starved at one point), who are wonderful characters in their own right.
This is a face of Erikson not seen in his larger works. It lacks the emotional punch of, say, Memories of Ice, but that's to be expected, shorter and not nearly as somber as it is. It's still wonderful. If you're a fan of the Malazan books, pick this up at your earliest convenience. If you're not, hie thee to the bookstore and pick up Gardens of the Moon. Now. ****
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable short-story with humorous plot, January 9, 2007
This, the second of the short-story masquerading as a hardback book by Erikson regarding the necromancer pair, is quite enjoyable, with a heavy element of satire on the 'health police' as a city is taken over by a king who demands all become perfectly healthy, with no vice, lust, odor, noise, etc. Predictably the city is in quite dire straits with a police-state apparatus by the time the nercomancers and their servant arrive. The plot has been described elsewhere in more detail but it is a great setup for a short-story and Erikson handles it well.
Just be aware that you are buying a story that, if printed in the typeface of the main malazan novels, would be about 75 pages long, at a price (new on amazon) that would buy 2 of the main sequence novels with about 20x the pages. You may finish this book in an hour! Nightshade has printed some great stuff (recently some out-of-print Glen Cook material, and they are going to do Clark Ashton Smith over the coming months) but I do feel the tactic of selling a short-story in hardback form at this price (retail 25$!) is arguably predatory. My rating was not impacted by the economic aspect of this.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Short but sweet, July 19, 2006
As the prelude to one of the best on-going fantasy series, Malazan Book of the Fallen, this book sets the stage to a unique world. Although the book is only about 120 pages long it still captures the imagination. This is a one night read, but the story will haunt your dreams for a year. A must read!
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