The last few months have been a really good reading season for me. I read strictly fantasy of the sword and sorcery variety, but it's been getting harder to find authors I like. I took a chance in a bookstore in December and read the first chapter of a fairly new paperback. (I almost always buy only used.) Brent Weeks is a pretty new author, having only published the "Night Angel" trilogy so far, of which "The Way Of Shadows" is the first.
I'm not finished with the book yet, so I can't technically recommend it. But I can say how much I'm enjoying it! It has all the ingredients that have become vital to me in the last few years.
1. Sword and Sorcery
2. Dark and Brutal (Good is good and evil is EVIL!)
3. Internal Character Portrayal
That 3rd ingredient seems the hardest to come by. There are many fantasy authors who spend much time on what their characters are doing and saying, and others who spend time describing the world and environment of the characters. Few seem interested in taking me inside of the characters to experience the thoughts they are wrestling with.
I found Terry Brooks and Terry Goodkind to both be very good at this. Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman also tend to do well when writing together. Robert Newcomb is a new author for me that does this well, though he has a few writing flaws that I've had to get used to. But Brent Weeks is right up there with Brooks and Goodkind in this department. The "Night Angel Books" are all over 600 pages long, but I'm flying through his chapters faster than I have on many 300 page books. Very gripping stuff!
I'm interested to see where Weeks sits philosophically. Although his characters are mostly corrupted in major ways, or incredibly broken from evil done to them, redemption is a very strong theme. He also presents a polytheism believing world in which there is also a "One God" religion. He paints its followers as good and compassionate and the religion itself is placed in a very positive light, with none of the (overdone) hypocritical- overpowering-church, (AKA,"the author has a chip on his shoulder") kind of monotheistic representation typical of most fantasy novels.
But even if Weeks happens to be a Christian, this book will never sell in a Christian bookstore due to the extremely dark content and the use of a few F-bombs and less intense swearing. A shame, really, because I think he uses the language well, without exploiting it, to present a dark world in need of redemption. And so far this book strikes me as a great starting point for discussion that would lead to examining the Bible.
Very cool stuff!
You might enjoy Ian Irvine and "The View from the Mirror" Series. I really enjoyed these, but the characters aren't strictly good or evil. Some of the good ones do bad things, and some of the bad ones do good things. I myself enjoyed this aspect, as it seemed a little more believable. But I do understand where black and white characters have their place in fiction. View from the mirror isn't really the sword and sorcery in a stricter sense, but it does have elements of fantasy, such as taking a voyage to recover an artifact, unique locations, magic of a kind, and many who are trying to stop them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the recommendation! And I'm all for books with gray characters. Brent Weeks has a ton of them and I'm digging his style a lot!
ReplyDeleteWhat's more important to me is that the AUTHOR have a clear sense of good and evil, even if his characters are a blend. I've finished The Way Of Shadows and I think Brent Weeks has a very strong sense of good and evil. Terry Goodkind slightly less so, but still a very strong part of his writing. And both authors have characters that are "good" but do bad things, or who are "bad" but do good things.
It all makes for great reading for my tastes!
-Paeter