Tag Archives: fantasy

Fiction, Reviews

Tale of the Nine-Tailed: A Well-Written Fantasy TV Series

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Recently, a TV adaptation of a popular Marvel comics storyline ended its run by tripping over its feet and kissing the synthetic rubber track. Many superhero fans didn’t even watch, and many others hated their experience (not everyone, just many). The director said he was told not to read the source material and that he didn’t want to make a story that leaned into its own genre, so the show introduced story elements and tone only to set them on the shelf. I don’t know what the producers were expecting. It’s the latest installment of high value entertainment prospects that failed.

If you’d like to watch a fantasy series that is actually well-written and different to most Americans, look up Tale of the Nine-Tailed, a 16-episode Korean series starring Lee Dong Wook and Jo Bo Ah and directed by Kang Shin Hyo. The story focuses on mythological foxes (gumiho), who are traditionally wily and mischievous. The old stories say the nine-tailed fox is seeking to become human by some trial over a thousand years. The main fox of this story was once a mountain god who fell in love with a young woman. When that woman was murdered, he gave up his divine position in hopes of finding her reincarnation one day.

At the beginning of Tale of the Nine-Tailed, Lee Yeon, the fox, is hunting down lesser foxes who are posing as humans and killing them. I forget why he is hunting them, if it’s more than just defending humanity. TV producer Nam Ji Ah is building evidence for her version of X files when she notices Yeon’s distinctive umbrella. Somehow, she ropes him into accompanying her to a remote island village where she hopes to find a clue to her parents’ disappearance (her motive for researching paranormal accounts). In these 3-4 episodes, the show has a horror tone. Traditional Korean shamanism is displayed throughout the series, and you see some of the ugly practices in these episodes. It lightens up after this, leaning first into a romantic storyline and plunging into fantasy for the rest of it. Yeon is plagued by many things, primarily his murderous half-brother Rang, who resembles Loki in attitude and miscreant behavior. The tension between the brothers is compelling to watch.

I mention it here because the writing is strong throughout. Wikipedia credits Han Woo-ri for this. Bravo. Yeon is presented as crafty with great, but not unlimited, knowledge. Many mythological foes come after him, and they never lay a hand on him because he’s an idiot. He works the situation, turning the tables when he can. None of his victories feels forced or as if he has read the script. Once, the irritating trope of loving her so much he can’t tell the truth is used to bridge two episodes, but it’s short lived and nothing else stands out as clichéd.

A second season was released this summer on Amazon. I hope I can find a way to see it.

In other news —

Reviews: Bad reviews can be helpful. “Instead of specialties, we were known by our critical styles: We were the Shredder, the Beheader and the Fredder.”

Funny Stuff: “A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humour are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing.”

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Non-fiction, Poetry

Vanity Is Common, Blasphemy Ever Green

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Fear and Vanity
incline us to imagine
we have caused a face
to turn away which merely
happened to look somewhere else.
 
----  ----  ----
Everyone thinks:
"I am the most important 
Person at present."
The same remember to add:
"Important, I mean, to me."

from “Marginalia” by W.H. Auden, City Without Walls and Other Poems

Mencken: “[Paul] Fussell credits Mencken’s series of ‘elegantly subversive’ Prejudices volumes with making him a genuine reader and eventually a writer. He reveled in Mencken’s ‘refreshing battle against complacent inhumanity and the morons’ – like any know-it-all aspiring young literary man.”

Comedy: Monty Python is irreverent and sometimes blasphemous, but now one of its productions is being accused of a different kind of blasphemy. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality, as T. S. Eliot opined, and that seems especially true of the progressive political class and its commissars among the creative types.”

Fantasy: Patrik Leo raves over Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair among others. See the whole trilogy here.

Also, Elliot Brooks talks about a few new fantasy novels.

Non-fiction: Bookstore tales. Here’s a “charming tale of an Italian book publicist and poet who ‘launched a [successful] crowdfunding campaign on Facebook to open a bookshop in a tiny village in the mountains.'”

Also, ten non-fiction recommendations from Kirkus Reviews.

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction, Reviews

Dark, Stirring Sequel in Kotar’s ‘The Curse of the Raven’

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Something about the voice enchanted Llun. It awoke forgotten images of sharp mountain peaks and waterfalls at dawn, images associated with a childhood longing that flared in his heart whenever he listened to his mother sing a ballad of Old Vasyllia.

“I will gladly pay the price of my life,” said Llun.

“You do not know what you are saying.”

The Curse of the Raven, the sequel to The Song of the Sirin, appropriately focuses on the oppression suffered by everyone who survived the fall of Vasyllia. Llun the Smith keeps his thoughts to himself, while almost everyone else in the city parrots approved words and tries not to upset the overseers or their enforcers, the “dog-men.” But he couldn’t keep himself from making beautiful things or adding unnecessary ornamentation.

He is pulled into the enemy’s chambers where they imply he would be useful to them for a project they won’t describe. He is fairly certain that any job they give him will be the last one he ever does, but the enemy won’t make a demand, preferring to hint. They give him time to think about it.

I could give you ninety percent of the plot in three more paragraphs, because the story takes only 84 pages. It’s a good side story that allows time to pass while Voran, the hero of the larger story, is doing small things offstage. Another twenty pages are given to the first chapter of book three, The Heart of the World.

In these few pages, we feel the significant dread smothering the kingdom and have an opportunity to wonder if their hope for salvation is in vain. The Russian spirit still comes through in the nature of the oppression and neglect of the people, which keeps this book in the spirit of its predecessor.

I look forward to the next one.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Reading, Reviews

‘The most transcendent fantasy novels’

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My thanks go out to the people at Shepherd.com, who asked me to select a group of five novels to promote. The idea is to push books I like, and also to give people some clue what my own books are about. You can see my selections here.

Rather a nice concept, I think. The site is worth poking around some.

Authors, Blogs, Socials, Bookselling

Comfort in Christ, Acceptable Sins, and Fantasy Nihilism

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This afternoon, I was wishing for comfort food, blankets, and books. It’s been a long week. Will I take my fatigue to the little comforts around me and drink too much coffee, or will I remember my weakness before the Lord? Will I console myself with my gifts or with the Giver? (There’s a phrase that’s probably said in a pulpit somewhere at least once every Sunday.)

A child may not have a penny in his pocket, yet he feels quite rich enough if he has a wealthy father. You may be very, very poor, but oh! what a rich Father you have! Jesus Christ’s Father is your Father. And as He has exalted His own dear Son, He will do the same for you in due time. Our Lord Jesus is the firstborn among many brethren and the Father means to treat the other brethren even as He treats Him. Your Father has made you one of His heirs—yea, a joint heir with Jesus Christ—what more would you have?

Charles Spurgeon, in a sermon delivered Sept. 17, 1899

And what links do we have today?

Wendell Berry: “The public certainly retains a keen sense that some actions and attitudes are wrong, and public figures often condemn particular offenses with totalizing ferocity. As Berry notes, the ‘old opposition to sin’ remains, but he worries we have narrowed the acts that count as sin. He warns that ‘nothing more reveals our incompleteness and brokenness as a public people than our self-comforting small selection of public sins.'”

Fantasy nihilism: “HBO has succeeded in identifying popularity and prestige with immorality. Things that could not have been shown in prime time 20 years back are now the only prime time fare there is.”

Graham Greene: In 1950, author Graham Greene was stuck on an America-bound ocean liner with a reporter who shoved a mic and camera in his face. The reporter was Jack Mangan, who was working on his ABC TV series “Ship’s Reporter.” Dwyer Murphey shares a video and some details.

Reading: Need a device to help you read several volumes without requiring you to move? Consider this design by Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli: the bookwheel.

Bookstores: Booksellers adapt to new customer patterns. “We like having browsers, but we don’t depend on it. This idea that a person is going to come to a bookstore and browse, it doesn’t sustain the business now.”

Jokes are evil? Here’s a YouTuber who talks about writing and breaks down comic book stories and select movies to learn more about writing well. Last month, he riffed on an issue of X-Men: Years of Future Past to discuss a theme in that story, that jokes are evil.

Photo: Texaco gas pumps, Milford, Illinois. 1977. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fiction

The Wingfeather Saga Animated Series Coming End of Year

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The first season of the animated adaptation of Andrew Peterson’s Wingfeather Saga will be streaming from Angel Studios after Christmas 2022.

Angel Studios is the company responsible for The Chosen series as well as two clean comedy shows, Drybar Comedy and Freelancers (The first season of Freelancers is mad-cap hilarious.)

Last week, World News Group released an interview with two men behind The Wingfeather Saga series, Neal Harmon, co-founder of VidAngel and Angel Studios, and the series showrunner, Chris Wall.

The interview has a few points of interest, and I want to share only one of them here. Wall talked about some of the difficulties in finding partnering studios who may push or insist their story hit certain cultural values they don’t want to hit. Angel Studios said, “You guys make your show. Like, we’re happy to provide feedback for what we think works, you know, audience metrics and that sort of thing. But you know your people, you know your content, go make that.”

Netflix wouldn’t have it that way. Wall said, [edited] “We were told they’re not going to do Wingfeather Saga, they’re not into it over at Netflix, because it’s patriarchal in structure. And we’re not going to do those kinds of stories. . . . because we have a grandfather and a mother and these kids that live together and like we’re not into that. It has to be, you know, a single mom or a dad and any other kind of gender or sexual things you can put in there, they’re into it.”

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

The Wheel of Time Calls Roadside Assistance

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Until this week, I knew next to nothing about Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I knew it was very long and that some people loved it. I did not know that Jordan was rewriting The Lord of the Rings and that the first of fourteen novels, The Eye of the World, was meant to be his version of The Fellowship of the Ring.

One Goodreads reviewer writes of the first book, “It is difficult to comprehend how an author could take such a simple, familiar story and stretch it out over so many pages.

The hero is an orphan who looks different, he gets his father’s magic sword, he goes on a quest with an old, wily mentor, gets attacked by evil (dark-skinned) mongoloids from the mysterious East, meets the princess by accident, becomes embroiled in an ancient prophecy, discovers a magic ‘force’ which controls fate (and the plot), &c., &c.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. 

Of the second book, another reviewer praises the overall story but recommends reading with friends to help get through the boring parts. “Jordan’s prose was super wordy and descriptive, there’s no way around it. Two books (570k words in total so far) into the series and when it comes to the actual story progression, not too much have actually progressed.”

A reviewer of eighth book notes he would have included a plot summary, but the book has no plot or development at all.

Because many TV producers want to create the next Game of Thrones, Amazon released last year an eight-episode series based on The Eye of the World, and it appears that they have done a terrible job.

Man Carrying Things reviews it in about an hour, noting some strong weaknesses in the scriptwriting such as frequent deaths that are undone a minute later. Another reviewer appeals to the book lore to say this is supposed to be a very bad move done only by evil magicians, but there’s no indication this show has that in mind. In fact, the show seems to have cliched TV formulas most in mind. It lacks continuity within single episodes. It spends too much time on exposition that doesn’t develop anything.

One major change from the source material is questioning who the chosen one–the Dragon Reborn–is among the main characters. The book tells us upfront, but the show says it could be anyone, and as a result, doesn’t explain what being the Dragon Reborn would mean. It’s apparently an open question whether this is good or bad. Maybe the writers couldn’t pull themselves away from a desire to drive the story toward a character saying, “Maybe the real Dragon Reborn were the friends we made along the way.”

Photo by Hannah Morgan on Unsplash

Fiction

Penguin Is Recording All Discworld Books in New Audio Series

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Penguin Books UK is releasing a new, cohesive audiobook series of all 41 books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. The video here will show you who’s involved and how much work everyone is doing to pull this off.

I can’t quite tell what’s available yet, but the first book, The Colour of Magic, will be released at the end of July 2022. Look over all the books, including all print and digital editions, on Penguin’s website.

Blogs, Socials, Reviews

Reviewing Books on the Socials, Wuthering Heights, and Disney Nightmares

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All the faults of Jane Eyre … magnified a thousand fold

from The North British Review, 1847

A reviewer for a Scottish magazine, The North British Review, used the words above to dismiss Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. He didn’t believe the work would find a broad audience, but as the Narrator says, “Little did he know.”

The Examiner called it “strange.”

We detest the affectation and effeminate frippery which is but too frequent in the modern novel, and willingly trust ourselves with an author who goes at once fearlessly into the moors and desolate places, for his heroes; but we must at the same time stipulate with him that he shall not drag into light all that he discovers, of coarse and loathsome, in his wanderings …

The Spectator seemed to think it a well-written but ugly story. “The success is not equal to the abilities of the writer; chiefly because the incidents are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them …”

And yet Brontë’s book endures. (I found these reviews on a site dedicated to the book.)

Book reviewing takes many forms today. A few weeks ago, an executive at Barnes and Noble noted upswings in sales according to the buzz on TikTok, which they call BookTok. Some authors have linked the success of a book to single BookTok videos.

On YouTube, reviewers call themselves Booktubers. Occasionally I think about recording videos or doing a podcast in order to boost this blog, but I have yet to justify the time. Anyone can jump into the video side of social media, and I think I have a good voice for it. But it takes a certain talent and good lighting to gain attention, not to mention all the visuals and actually having something to say.

Merphy Napier appears to be doing it right. Here she talks about books that live up to their hype, a follow-up to a video about hyped books she didn’t like.

Petrick Leo asked his network to nominate overrated fantasy series, talked over five of them, and shared his own list of five.

Elliot Brooks talks about good adult fantasy series with soft magic systems and hard magic systems.

Disney Nightmares: Speaking of fantasy, Helen Freeh talks about reasons parents should have been wary of Disney long before now.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s excellent essay, “On Fairy Stories,” addresses the very problem that Disney had from its inception: the notion that fairy stories are exclusively children’s stories. They are not. They are stories allowing adults to examine the world from a new perspective to find a better way to live. Tolkien asserts that people connect “the minds of children and fairy- stories,” but “this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childlessness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.”

Elsewhere in shared videos, a view of the side of Glastonbury Tor in Somerset.

Fiction, Reviews

Heir to the Raven, by J. Wesley Bush

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She approached the gate. God must be on the other side. She pushed it open, but did not find paradise, but rather a void filled only with noise and shifting colors that made her mind hurt. Amid the tumult, she felt something moving. No moving, really, but coming.

What pact are you seeking, child?

Larissa knew about pacts. They were dangerous if you used the wrong kind of faie. Whoever this was didn’t have a body, but she could feel it close by, as if it filled her very bones. It sounded like a woman.

“Vyr are trying to kill us all. We need to kill them instead.”

Heir to the Raven by J. Wesley Bush is a thrilling read, an original story well told.

The story begins with young Larissa, one of the few magical characters in this fantasy of kingdom politics. She stumbles into saving her village in the scene quoted above, but that raises everyone’s fears that she’s a witch. They summon the duke’s men to take her away to be examined by the king’s magician. She eventually learns she has taken the greatest risk of her life.

Heir to the Raven by J. Wesley Bush

Next we meet Selwyn, the duke’s fourth son who wants very much to kill a wild boar-like animal so that he can become a scholastic knight. If his hopes pan out (meaning he doesn’t die), the hunt will be the most warfare he ever sees. His father won’t like it, but he hasn’t liked anything about him for years. As a knight, he can escape his family and do something interesting, if not worthwhile.

All of that comes to an end when Selwyn suddenly becomes the new duke of the Jandarian savanna, moving this novel into the coming-of-age category. That would be true for both Selwyn and Larissa, but with so many characters, political mysteries, suspicions and deceit, the young stars don’t get much time to stand around and watch their feet grow.

In this light-handed fantasy we hear of a few unusual beasts and a bit about greater and lesser faie, both light and dark. Securing an agreement with an outer faie is called pactmaking. The uses and dangers of it color most of Larissa’s story. But most of what we see of it comes from the bad guys, shamans ushering barbarous throngs into battle as an act of worship to a dark faie. At times I wondered if someone could throw out some good magic, but that probably doesn’t fit the scope of the story.

Somewhere I read Bush describing his tale as a strong PG-13; it definitely is that. There are some nasty deaths, plenty of natural vulgarity, and some sexual subject matter only lightly described.

The meat of it is in realistic characters with many diverse perspectives. A conniving villain doesn’t stare out a window, twirling his mustache; instead he professes loyalty to the king as he works quietly to undermine him. The brash soldier is not a bumbling rebel, but a loyal subject. Even the petulant king, which is a character type I dislike, is handled skillfully.

And this being book one of a series, it wraps up nicely while leaving many ends loose. You really should go buy this book, if only to support the creation of the sequels. I look forward seeing what happens next.