Well, sort of correct there. I haven't had great experiences with them. Nevertheless when I saw an opportunity to review this pop up I went for it anyway for two reasons.
1) I should like short story anthologies damnit. There's so much goodness within them and it's one of the great traditions of writing. So I'm going to keep trying them until I like them.
2) A chance to review one of Croatia's greatest SFF writers? No, I'm not going to pretend I'm super up to date and knew all about Mr Žiljak before this. Not a bloody scooby. But I do like a chance to broaden my horizons.
So in I piled, and I got an ARC courtesy of Wizard's Tower Press and here I am with my review of the anthology only three weeks or so after publication. Oops. But this does mean you can go out and buy it now.
Maybe if you got to the point where you let people know if they want to do so?
The big thing I like about Aleksandar Žiljak's style here is the sense of undiscovered legend. They're all set in our own world's history with just a few supernatural twists - twists that frequently result in bloody carnage that even Conan would be pleased with. In fact, Žiljak's work here reminds me quite a bit of Robert E. Howard's both in terms of structure and tone, only updated. There's a lot of adventures into bleak situations, a lot of savage splendour, only here these are the result of strange things happening to our heroes and heroines rather than sheer lust for the unknown, love for others is glorified above the lone hero, and there are attempts at resolving matters peacefully. I think one or two even work!
The anthology tends to hop around the place a bit too in terms of time and place - from early China to Eastern Europe at the time of the Mongols, and from airships striking against Spanish treasure galleons to artists spying on dragons. Whether that's bug or feature depends on the individual - personally I found it both.
Both?
For the first half of the book, I enjoyed the variety. It kept things fresh. Every day a new little nugget! But after a while it palled. Maybe that was me wishing I had something to cling to as a throughline. Maybe that was me simply eventually reaching the short story ideas I didn't like.
Let's just go through this story by story, shall we?
A Unicorn and a Warrior Girl is set in the time of Qin Shi Huang in Ancient China (so sometime in the 200s BC), and features a warrior girl forced into a repugnant task. The build of the tension is expertly timed and the ending is epic.
The Divine She-Wolf is a humdinger of revenge, action, superstition, and love, in which a werewolf (of sorts) does not take kindly to her son being kidnapped by Mongols.
The Nekomata is set in feudal Japan when a warlord's order to kill the head of a ninja clan leads to a monster and a refugee clashing. It's another really fun story, full of heart and hope and awareness this is a dark world.
Elsebet and the Book of Dragons is a charming fairy tale-esque take on a wizard employing an artist to illustrate his Book of Dragons, a task that involves getting a lot closer to dragons than is strictly wise. Unfortunately the ending lost me a little.
The Law of the Sea was one where nothing grabbed me at all however. Not the setting, not the characters, not the dilemma. They're on a Spanish ship headed to the New World when a sea serpent strikes; the short story opens with them on the shipwreck, in sight of land but unable to get there due to sharks. And while nothing grabbed me, the sexual violence took me by my surprise and felt unnecessary.
The Aeolomancer featured airship pirates attacking Spanish galleons. The sexual violence here did make more sense story wise and was less explicit, but between it jarring with the tone built up in the first stories and my lack of investment in the characters, I didn't get into this one.
Rumiko snared me a little more but the steampunk/Victoriana aesthetics and mannerisms placed it in a genre I have little love for. It is a fun adventure story but, well, this is the downside of world/time hopping.
As the Distant Bells Toll is an interesting one, an Urban Fantasy set in Zagreb. I didn't love it but I would re-read it.
And I'd definitely re-read the first three stories. I might re-read Elsbet. I won't be re-reading the next three.
A Curate's Egg, huh?
That is the most succinct description, yes. I do really like aspects of this anthology. Others leave me very cold. If I was a rating guy, I'd struggle to give a rating.
Fortunately, I simply concern myself with whether people will like this or not. I think a lot of people will like some of it. I'd definitely be interested in more work from Žiljak. The question is whether you'll like enough of it. Hopefully many people will. This deserves to be successful.
Thank you again to Wizard's Tower Press for the ARC, given free in exchange for an honest review. This is book is out now, so go fill your boots.
No comments:
Post a Comment