Morlock the Maker -- James Enge

[Magus]

Anyone been reading these? I first read James Enge in Black Gate magazine (heck, anyone read that? I've had to fulfill my subscription with back issues because they've dropped the print edition entirely) a couple of years ago, I believe the short story was "Destroyer". I really enjoyed it--it felt a lot like a classic sword and sorcery adventure with an interesting antihero character and a pretty unique fantasy universe. The main threat was fairly uncommon in fantasy literature--a race of intelligent parasitic insectoids who implant people with their eggs so they can burst out of them later, Alien-style. Then a few months later I saw the first two novels in a bargain bookstore and picked them up for just a few dollars each, brand new, since they were so cheap, meaning to read them.

Well, as often happens with me, as I have a hard time passing up a "bargain", they found their way (still in the plastic bag) to a shelf and didn't see the light of day again for a few years. I mean in the meantime I have read the entire span of Guy Gavriel Kay's ouvre, for an example, and multiple other novels--I just kind of forgot I picked them up.

So, anyway, one day I found I was sick to death of whatever I was reading (I think it was a Death Gate novel) and looked at my shelf. They'd been in the back of my head for a long time, so I thought, hey, what the heck, I'll check these out.

ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT THE NOVELS NOW

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Morlock Ambrosius is the protagonist of the novels. He's a crook-backed, centuries old magician, master of the art of Making, exiled from his homeland for the crime of saving the world, and dry drunk (he's an alcoholic, but does his best not to drink...sometimes he can't always succeed, however). Carrying the magic sword Tyrfing, he often finds himself getting involved in various adventures he would probably rather avoid.

Blood of Ambrose is the first novel, and it is excellent. Hilarious, exciting, unique--Enge has no problem interlacing dark humor with gorey action and gross horror. It's not high literature (though the prose is pretty great, actually) but it's some of the best sword and sorcery I've read in years.

Morlock returns to the capital of the Ontilian empire to "save" his sister (as powerful as him in many ways, she doesn't really need much saving) and save his great great great great great great...etc. etc....nephew, heir to the kingdom, from the evil Lord Protector. Unfortunately, killing a golem in a trial-by-combat (while hopelessly drunk) is just the first step in a sequence of events that will have him facing ghouls, necromancers, animated flayed skin (yuck), and a host of other horrors. The story is not just a Morlock adventure but also a coming-of-age story for his great great...etc. etc.... nephew, Lathmar, who has to deal with being a king in a kingdom where his overbearing grandmother is almost as scary as the people who really want to kill him.

This Crooked Way, the second novel, is actually a novelized version of many of the Morlock the Maker short stories Enge has written over the years, arranged in chronological order and modified a bit to be interrelated. One could easily read this book without reading Blood of Ambrose, as most of it was written before that novel. Having not read 95% of them before I was still well entertained even though I had read a few in the past. A few of these stories are available on the internet, however, so it might be possible to skip this volume if you are very cheap, though at least a few of them are not available anywhere else but this book or Black Gate magazine.

From Amazon:
"Travelling alone in the depths of winter, Morlock Ambrosius (bitterly dry drunk, master of all magical makers, wandering swordsman, and son of Merlin Ambrosius and Nimue Viviana) is attacked by an unknown enemy. To unmask his enemy and end the attacks he must travel a long crooked way through the world: past the soul-eating Boneless One, past a subtle and treacherous master of golems, past the dragon-taming Khroi, past the predatory cities of Sarkunden and Aflraun, past the demons and dark gnomes of the northern woods. Soon he will find that his enemy wears a familiar face, and that the duel he has stumbled into will threaten more lives than his own, leaving nations shattered in its chaotic wake. And at the end of his long road waits the death of a legend."

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I've got The Wolf Age (an actual novel, not a collection of short stories like This Crooked Way) and A Guile of Dragons ordered. A Guile of Dragons is actually the beginning of a prequel trilogy better explaining Morlock's backstory in detail as to why he was originally exiled from the Wardlands for wrestling the lord of the Sunkillers (long story) and his further adventures before Blood of Ambrose. We'll see how they are.

Anyway, if you have read any of these books, thoughts? If not, hopefully I whetted your interest in them a bit. They really are a lot of fun to read, some of the funnest pulp fantasy I've read in a long time.

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For those interested, James Enge's wikipedia page has links to all the stories available free on the internet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Enge

The first five chapters of This Crooked Way:

http://pyrsamples.blogspot.com/2009/10/this-crooked-way-by-james-enge.html

If you have no time for anything else, I'd recommend reading the story Chapter V: "Fire and Water", as a good example of his writing style and plotting.

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Note: Artwork and pictures from Black Gate (http://www.blackgate.com/) magazine.

http://www.blackgate.com/

[RickZarber]

James Enge is one of my favorites; it's pretty cool hearing someone else rave about him! I'd read a few scattered short stories here and there (the first being The Singing Spear in the Swords & Dark Magic anthology from a few years ago), and just last year I finally read through Blood of Ambrose and This Crooked Way. I own the other two but haven't read them yet. (Oddly enough, because I got sidetracked by my first Guy Gavriel Kay book. Tigana, if you want to know. It's been sitting on my shelf for maybe two years now? I am bad about reading books these days. I started it in January and I'm still only like a third of the way through. >.<)

The thing that drew me to Enge was definitely his prose. I especially liked that he doesn't feel beholden to that post-modern sensibility that the only good storytelling is "show don't tell".

"The modern realistic novel, increasingly in the twentieth century, concerned itself with character above all else: what the character felt and perceived. I'm not knocking this: realistic fiction has some triumphant achievements in this line . . . But I think it's an approach that is susceptible to diminishing returns. Genre fiction, like medieval and classical traditions of storytelling, tends to concentrate much more on what people do and the context in which they do it. I love this concentration on conduct, on action (but not necessarily in the car-chases-and-gunfights sense) and on the world . . . I find it in the older narrative traditions; I find it in genre fiction; and I think it's the reason that twenty-first century literary fiction is looking to refresh itself at the well of genre."

[Magus]

I'm obsessed with Guy Gavriel Kay, too, so getting sidetracked by him is as good an expenditure of your free time (you should get The Lions of Al-Rassan ASAP. And A Song For Arbonne...and everything else by him).

He does have a talent for action scenes which were always a hallmark of sword-and-sorcery, and yet he does manage to make Morlock a three-dimensional character through dropping bits of his back story. It's a bit like a good TV serial--you find out a little bit more about Morlock in each of his new adventures.