Things that brought me delight in March, 2023:
Saladin Ahmed and Dave Acosta, Dragon
I backed Dragon when it was on Kickstarter and like many Kickstarter projects, it fell prey to delay after delay. When it finally arrived...I promptly forgot about it. I finally broke it out of the plastic and gave it a read in early March.
Dragon tells the tale of a haunted Janissary and a disgraced nun teaming up to confront Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula. Oh, Prince Radu is along for the ride as well And of course this version of Vlad Tepes is a vampire. Dragon sits comfortably somewhere on the Castlevania to Hammer Horror spectrum of things I enjoy. The comic itself is a little short, taking up about half the book, with the rest of the volume being filled with sketches, roughs, and in-process colored pages.
I've been meaning to watch The Last Duel for a long time, but the formidable run time made it tough to carve out some spare hours. Now that I've had a chance to watch it, I can say that it's excellent. Ostensibly the story of a wronged woman seeking justice, it's really the tale of how women often live balanced on the knife's edge of men's egos. You might expect a film that replays the same events from multiple viewpoints to dabble in questions about the nature of truth and perception, but The Last Duel is actually pretty succinct in its presentation of the moral issues at hand. And the actual duel? Seldom have I seen something so brutal.
Leech is an unexpected gem; I thought this was going to be a different kind of novel entirely, but this story of a doctor traveling to a winter-locked domain to figure out what killed her predecessor is full of twists and turns. The most immediate is that the doctor is part of a hive-mind inhabiting all the doctors in the known world that finds itself up against another invasive parasite. I was initially interested in Leech because I saw it referenced in a few conversations about modern Gothic novels, though I admit I didn't see the connection at first. However, by the end of the book you're knee-deep in a Gothic fantasy bloodbath.
Sonja's Loud Arriver is a more traditional metal album than I usually go for, but it's hard not to like it. It's a charismatic album, full of rock swagger, an unabashedly sexy mood, and a even a touch of Gothic darkness. I'd recommend Loud Arriver strongly to fans of Judas Priest and Unto Others especially, but more widely I think this is a great metal album for folks who aren't yet avowed metal fans.
This was a Bad Books for Bad People read, so we have a lot more to say about it when that airs. A quick precise: Christine Morgan's The Raven's Table is a collection of stories that combine Vikings with horror, two great tastes that taste great together, in my opinion. It's also impressive that the stories in The Raven's Table cover such a wide variety of horror: there are a few Lovecraftian tales, a few riffs on colonial horror, a vampire story, etc. More than anything else I could say about the collection, I want you to know that these stories often quite brutal, as they should be given the subject matter.
I have to admit, there's a pretty sharp drop in quality between the first and second omnibus volumes of Hack/Slash. I suspect a great deal of that is connected to who is, or isn't, providing the art at the time. Still, there are some fun bits here. The Archie Comics art style paired with a story about a slasher let loose at a school dance in the second omnibus is pretty fun, and it's nice to see Vlad get a little something-something in one of the arcs. The third omnibus gets some digs in one superhero comics, which I always enjoy, and Pooch--the alien dog--is quickly becoming my favorite character in the comic.
I found myself strangely craving metal with technical and progress elements in March. I pulled out records by Archspire, Opeth, and Spawn of Possession, but I also made some time to dig into Entheos's back catalog. Time Will Take Us All, Entheos's latest album, feels like it isn't getting the critical attention it should; I appreciate that they never let the progressive elements overwhelm the heaviness or the songcraft. I think in time this could grow into a recognized classic.
Poirot: The Adventure of the Clapham Cook
I'm still working through the Poirot episodes that are adaptations of the stories in Poirot's Early Cases. "The Adventure of the Clapham Cook" is pretty fun; it's a fairly convoluted story where the crime to be solved is not immediately obvious, but it's a good time getting there. I forgot to read any Christie in March, but luckily I still have this backlog to get through.
It's been a while since I've taken this wild ride, but it turns out that the next volume in the Vampire Hunter D saga is the biggest one yet. D is hired as a bodyguard by a vampire lord headed to the reaches of the Frontier to kill his father. Comically, as much as D wants to fly solo, the trip balloons with the addition of a mean vampire lady, two acrobat kids, and a magician's assistant who join in the journey. (And of course need his protection.)
Of course, a variety of assassins have been hired to make sure D and his employer never make it to their destination; each of them has a wacky superpower or shtick to reveal. The funniest bit: D finds an airport run by an AI. Dracula once flew out of this airport and the AI fell in love with him, causing it to manufacture several Dracula clones, which D then has to fight in some sort of postmodern Oedipal contest.
Tragedies is the recently reissued debut album by Funeral, one of the creators of the funeral doom genre. (They kinda gave their name to the genre.) The record is surprisingly melodic, but interestingly I don't think the overall mood of the album is as unrelentingly bleak as you may expect. Melancholic, for sure, but not absolutely devoid of sweetness and light. The reissue caps things off with a live track that I can take or leave and an acoustic track that feels very left-field for this particular band.
Andrzej Sapkowski, Season of Storms
Season of Storms is the newest Witcher book, though chronologically it falls in-between the short stories of the first two collections rather than continuing the novel series. (It does, however, also cap things off past the novels in its epilogue, presenting a new "ending" of sorts.)
In Season of Storms Geralt finds himself robbed of his swords, embroiled in the machinations of kings and wizards, and once again falling into the bed of a beautiful and treacherous sorceress. The novel showcases Sapkowski's trademark oddity, interjecting a few bizarre scenes amid the standard fantasy to keep things fresh. It also features a good bit of action and has a great deal of the monster hunting that's absent from the "saga novels." Interestingly, it also draws inspiration from the video game series instead of treating those as something from an alternate timeline. This opinion probably isn't widely shared, but in my estimation Season of Storms is the most fun novel in the Witcher series.
Even though I'm of the opinion that if you don't have a copy of Call of Cthulhu the way to go is buying the latest edition, I failed to resist the siren call of the deluxe classic box that reprints the second-edition rules with a big heap of supplemental material. If nothing else, the contents of the box really illustrate how Chaosium's presentation and attention to the details has always been top-notch. Also, the content is eminently usable even with the new edition; though Call of Cthulhu's 7th edition is the most radical departure in the game's history, you wouldn't need to change much to use the adventures and other widgets in the box.
They Built a Gallows For Me and You is the first novel I've read in the Splatter Western series--a series that purports to offer brutal visions of the Wild West by multiple authors working their own perspectives on the theme. The novel is quite short, but it has an arresting premise: the children of a frontier town sicken and die, bleeding out suddenly, and the blame is placed on a family who may (or may not) be innocent. I wasn't sold on the style that this particular tale is told in; it feels like it strains its credibility attempting to be dreamlike or poetic, or perhaps even McCarthy-esque. I also found the anachronisms in it a bit distracting. But I'll certainly return to this well to see what else the Splatter Westerns have to offer. Dig that cover.
Between the Vampire Hunter D novel I read in March and the books from the Splatter Western series, my interest in running a Deadlands game in the near future has been re-ignited. The newest iteration of the setting, retooled for the SWADE edition of Savage Worlds, looks really well put together; some of the rougher edges of the setting have been filed down, putting the focus exactly where it should be: shooting zombies with a six-gun, bringing desperados to justice, and avoiding the gallows at all costs. I plan on digging into the core rules, the solo adventure, and the mini campaign to figure out what I want to do with the game. The pre-made "archetype cards," essentially characters you can hand out to players who don't know the rules yet, will surely come in handy.
Tanith Lee's Kill the Dead follows the adventures of Parl Dro, a wandering exorcist and "ghost-killer." Dro is a type of protagonist that feels rare in a Tanith Lee story; he's smart-mouthed and beautiful, not unlike a sassy Vampire Hunter D, and he seems to be the cause of about as many hauntings as he quells in the course of his duties. He's also bound by fate to a roguish minstrel who plays an impossible instrument. As the two trudge toward their destiny in a fabled city of the undead, the secrets of who they are and why they have been inextricably thrown together come to light. This novel features a sparer style than Lee is known for, but it absolutely fits the tone of the book. Amazing that she had so many proficient writerly voices at her disposal.
I hit up a different book in the Splatter Western series to see how they vary, and man do they come in different flavors and styles. To be honest, I liked this one a lot more than the previous one I had read. It's not great, capital-L literature by any measure, but there is an interesting metacommentary where we switch from the bloody Western tale to a satirical story in which the author is writing the story.
The most interesting aspect of the self-insert satire is that the author makes himself the butt of the joke instead of presenting a more dashing or knowing figure. In the Western section we get the monstrous description of "Persons with Disabilities" and then the author pats himself on the back for such progressive language in the metacommentary parts (even though he's still painting People with Disabilities as beasts, he wants credit for using the right terminology). The violence in this book is also quite extraordinary, but then it would have to be since the metacommentary's point is to ask if the book has lived up to our grisly expectations.
The Call of Cthulhu obsession continued throughout March, so I pulled out the remainder of the CoC books I had in high school: the 4th edition core rules, my entry in the game, and the Blood Brothers collection of non-Mythos adventures. Aside from the nostalgia I experienced at looking at these again, especially the Cthulhu comics in the core book, there's still a lot of usable stuff in both books that barely requires conversion. That's always been the great strength of the game.
I polished off a third book in the Splatter Western series before the month ended. Wile E. Young's The Magpie Coffin was both the "standard" of the books in the series (in that it most fits my expectations for these kind of books) and the best one I've read so far.
The Magpie Coffin is a tale of revenge--a supernaturally empowered killer is on the trail of the men who murdered his teacher. It has a steely, bloodthirsty protagonist, whiffs of black magic, and the requisitely high level of ultraviolence. This one doesn't have any stylistic pretensions or any metacommentary nods, and to be honest I think it's all the stronger for it. The straightforward style hits all the right notes.
