I.A.M. Musing About…

Oddly, neither of these is published by Humdrumming, but both are highly recommended.

I am now another convert from the ‘I hate books with dragons on the cover’ camp. Tim Lebbon’s writing is resistant to all but ‘good things important to the story’, and doesn’t rise above the troll and swords genre so much as generally rape it for all that is useful and chuck in the bin anything that’s less than that.

As a result, Mr. Lebbon’s books really aren’t “books with dragons on the cover”, so I suppose I can go on hating the typical Warriors of Gor or Dragonriders of Mystik Valley shite that has no purpose to my mind except providing something for some people to obsess endlessly about.

I sucked the two books up whenever I had the chance (which wasn’t often, but…), and loved the character-driven nature of Mr. Lebbon’s two tales. The details and ‘whys and wherefores’ of the so-called ‘ancient language of magic’, the ancient war, the different origins of tribes, none of that mattered; all that they do is establish the rules of the world so clearly that we get the dynamic of the interchange, and they do so with enough detail that we can fill in the finer details sub-consciously. Totally brilliant.

Of course, he must die for this genius. It simply won’t do, you know; he’s making people like Adams and Morris look bad.

Get both books and find out what I mean.

And get both at the same time. When you finish the first one you’ll want the second one near to hand.

• DUSK: Winner of the British Fantasy Society Award for “Best Novel, 2006″
• DAWN: predicted (by me) to be winner of the 2007 British Fantasy Award for “Best Novel, 2007″

DO IT!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 28th, 2007 at 10:59 am and is filed under BLOG-O-RAMA, books, FantasyCon, horror, LIT-O-RAMA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.