I have spent the
first half of the year pontificating about the nature of Sword &
Sorcery, but now I have decided I will go through and do some book
reviews in the genre for a while. As I have already done write-ups
of some of the more seminal and influential stories in the canon, now
I intend to go about things rather differently. I have a large
collection of S&S and pulp novels, many of which I have either not
read, or not read very recently. So for these reviews I will reach
into the grab-bag, as it were, and pull out a relic to consider.
Karl Edward Wagner
was more influential as an editor than a writer, but his Kane books
and stories remain his most well-known legacy. Kane was, rather like
Elric, invented as a kind of antithesis to Conan, and Wagner detailed
his adventures in three novels and a few collections of stories and
novellas.
The first Kane book was published in 1970 by a small press as Darkness
Weaves With Many Shades, but Wagner was unhappy with the changes
the editor made to the text. It didn’t get a lot of distribution,
and was eventually corrected and re-released as Darkness Weaves
in 1978. Then there was the collection of three novellas released in
1973 under the title Death Angel’s Shadow by Warner Books.
Warner obviously believed in Wagner, and they commissioned a
full-length Kane novel and also enlisted Frank Frazetta to produce a
cover for it, and the result was Bloodstone in 1975.
Despite that the
character had been knocking around for years, and had appeared in
book form before, this was really the first mass-audience
introduction to Kane. The publisher pushed the book pretty hard, and
the fact that you can still find copies to this day says they printed
a shit-ton of them. And as an introduction to the character,
Bloodstone is . . . odd.
Because while Kane
was always depicted as an antihero, in this novel he is really a
straight-up villain. The book opens with Kane acquiring a weird
bloodstone ring, and then he spends some time researching it, finding
out where it came from. Then we switch to him serving as a kind of
spy for two opposing kingdoms, and the book spends a lot of time with
him doing a kind of Yojimbo thing where he works for both and
plays them off against one another. The two kingdoms are rather drab,
faux-medieval realms and don’t contain any really interesting
characters. It’s not exciting and we don’t really know why he,
or the novel, are spending time on this.
So what Kane has
done is discover that the ring is the command device for an ancient,
evil intelligence called Bloodstone that lies in a ruined city inside
a swamp guarded by degenerate frog-men. This angle is very
Lovecraftian, as the thing is described as though it is an artificial
intelligence made by aliens who later tried to destroy it, but were
enslaved by its power. Other aliens chased it away in spaceships and
it crashed on the world of the book, was buried in the muck of a
swamp and attended by the enslaved aliens as they regressed into
barbarism.
Having unlocked its
power and thinking he is in control of it, Kane is essentially
fomenting war between the nearby kingdoms so they won’t unite
against him when he comes to conquer them. The whole plot is rather
convoluted, and the small scale of the kingdoms in question makes his
plot seem rather petty and sad. The last part of the novel is
essentially a war between the remains of the kingdoms and Kane as he
tries to hold them off until Bloodstone reaches full power. He sends
his frog-men after them, and comes out wielding magic/sci-fi powers
that let him shoot lasers from his ring and suchlike.
It doesn’t have
much resonance or drama because the powers Bloodstone has seem
arbitrary and are rather vaguely defined. The defenders marshal some
of their own magic to fight him, but this is also left unclear and
the source of this power is also ill-defined. So a lot of the battle
scenes are just space magic MacGuffins shooting lasers at each other,
and you lose the human scale and any sense of real tension, since
everything just seems like it is made up on the spot and has no
rules.
The end just comes
when Kane realizes Bloodstone intends to enslave his mind and control
him as a puppet – which seemed obvious and really makes him seem
dim that he does not figure this out sooner – and he goes in to try
and destroy it. He essentially does this by messing up the controls
until Bloodstone explodes. Because we all know how dramatic it is
fighting a computer by pushing levers.
Wagner tries to
infuse some drama into this by hinting at Bloodstone’s origins and
the great age of his world, sketching ancient vistas of weird races
and decadent empires that would be cool to see, rather than the
rather mud-intensive world he decided to detail in the novel.
(Seriously, there is so much mud in this book, between the dirty, sad
kingdoms and the swamp it is just mud mud mud.) Kane using this
ancient power to war with a huge, mighty empire could have been
awesome, also maybe having a slave race that were not frogs. Frog
men are silly, not scary, no matter how hard you try.
The writing is
passable, but no better than that. In the novellas Wagner showed he
could write evocatively, but Bloodstone seems rushed. The
characterization is weak at best, the action is bloody but
unexciting, and the style has these swoops up into a very affected,
elevated diction that is supposed to sound erudite but just comes
across as strange. This is a weird, rather off-putting book where
the ostensible protagonist is off-screen for 75% of the time, and is
the straight-up villain for most of it. I get that Wagner wanted to
tell a different sort of story than the usual kind of heroic fantasy,
but I think he could have done a lot better than this.