the gazette of fantasy
Old Things in New Clothes
The season turns, new things arrive, and many do so in unexpected forms. Here in Barrel Town, the days are growing colder. The lamps go on earlier, the rivers outside town are swollen with rainwater from the mountains,…
The game's hero is whoever happens to be playing, and its ending is the one that player chose. A prequel novel published at the end of September stops before the story starts, and HBO's series will begin after it finishes, but the show still has to settle a question the game left to every player.
A shipwrecked businessman adrift in a country made of books, a homeless wizard who keeps watch over Seattle, and a god who happens to be a very large stone: the first of the desk's occasional introductions to fantasies that deserve far more readers than they have.
Before fantasy meant a map, a prophecy and three volumes, it meant a hired blade, a sorcerer with a grudge and a story finished in one sitting. The form born in the pulp magazines of the 1930s eventually lost the bookshops to the epic.
Mervyn Peake drew his characters as he wrote them, and his first novel can be seen more clearly than almost anything else in the genre. It also takes its time, and some of its sentences take more than they need. A plain reader's case for reading it anyway.
