Absolutely. Very comprehensive, especially when it comes to the major battles and campaigns. Not to mention extensive. I picked it up through Audible, so I don’t know page numbers, but the audiobook for Twilight of the Gods is almost 37 hours long.
Just about done with Carrie. Now I can clearly see the structure of it—it's structured between the two big events at beginning and end—the shower-room scene and the prom. Everything that happens in between is like clockwork, events just unfolding as they had to to get there. But Sue Snell and Tommy Ross did an amazaing thing, even after Sue originally (against her better judgement, responding to peer pressure and mob mentality) took part in making fun of Carrie in the shower room. Their kindness, as well as Miss Dejardin's (who initially felt repulsed by her) brought Carrie to life and allowed her to grow up, against all probablility, and actually attend her prom, and actually not be made fun of by everybody, and actually for the first time have some dignity and grace and know how to act socially and not embarrass herself. It's really a beautiful thing—they made her life through their acts of kindness. But Chris Hargenson's hatred and rage destroyed it all. What began in a cascade of water and blood ended the same way, followed by and purged by fire and sheer destruction. When you whittle it down to these basic elements it's a very simple and perfect structure and story. And Stephen King really knows how to create characters designed to propel the story ahead inevitably. I feel like I'm not doing that yet (I know I'm not). My characters are made up before there's a story, and their personalities and traits were already in place. But I'm modifying them now so they become working cogs in the machine of the story. The characters for Season do seem better-suited to their story than the ones in the Beastseekers. And next time they'll be even more so. And I just remembered the rule for tragedies—you have to make readers see the could-have-been before you snatch it away. King really does this, He makes you feel it viscerally—the beautiful life waiting ahead for Carrie. And then the bucket falls and it's all over. So much emotional power, orchestrated so well.
I'm on my third Daryl Gregory book, Afterparty. His premises are so freaking clever. I wish I had such original ideas. This one reminds me of an interesting mix of the rampant drug use in a Philip K. Dick book mixed with the hypothetical science of a Michael Crichton book. It also happens to be quite well written so far.
I've just started reading Medea: an Unauthorized Biography by Philip Matyszak. (It's the second in his "Unauthorized Biography" series; the first was Hercules). I'm at a bit of a loss on this book. Matyszak is brilliant at condensing and clarifying ancient history and mythology, and he has some very good points to make about how we treat our heroes and villains, both now and in antiquity. For example, Matyszak argues that our stories these days, especially in Hollywood, read more like morality plays; heroes must be knights in shining armour and never make any mistakes, and villains must never have any redeeming features, and even have "kick the dog" moments, just to emphasize their villainy. If a hero makes any mistakes at all, he is instantly labelled an anti-hero at best. When a film ends, the audiences are left with the moralistic lesson that good always triumphs over evil. In antiquity, heroes and villains were not treated like that or even labelled as heroes and villains. They were simply people, doing the best they could against the uncaring gods. If they made mistakes or had setbacks, they had to deal with the outcomes -- and the key was how they did it. That's why their stories still resonate with us today. I'd say his argument rings true. Examine, for instance, the stories Hercules or Theseus, or Oedipus -- or Medea herself. Hercules is, at best, deeply flawed; he is emotionally unstable and controlled by his own wrath, which he then tries to make up for by doing acts of penance. Theseus is generous and brave, helpful and intelligent, but his impulsive and recklessness ruin him. Oedipus is intelligent and brave, but believes he can outrun his own fate, and in the end, loses everything. Medea, Princess of Colchis, wants to leave the backwater she is born into and her murderous father, and seeks to develop the skills to help her to do so. She is highly intelligent and ambitious, but also passionate, and (like her husband Jason) suffers from her own recklessness and hubris. (Jason betrays her to further his own political career, and as revenge, Medea poisons his future wife and kills her sons by him, and then escapes on a chariot -- drawn by dragons.) You can say what you like about their moral flaws, but I'd say that the ancient Greek heroes always did things bigger and louder, even if they suffered for it later.
It goes hand in hand with the ever-increasing Disnification of fairy tales, myths, legends, and folk tales across the ancient literature, which actually began well before Disney entered the picture. A lot of Victorian women (and some men) took subjects from the old tales and adapted them for their contemporary audiences, and for whatever reason the convention was already in place that fairy tales and the like were suitable only for children (say what?). So they would censor out the violence, the cruelty, and the ambiguity of both 'heroes' and 'villains,' or rather they'd take the originally very ambiguous characters and turn them into their own black-and-white ideas of heroes and villains. No, that's still not quite right—it wasn't the author's own idea, it was what they thought the children should be allowed to see or hear. Already the idea was in place that children have no toughness of mind, and can't handle reality or even a whiff of ambiguity, and that everything intended to serve as their entertainment must become simple, good-vs-bad morality tales. Increasingly they imagined children as tender little morsels of inanity, and little idiots who need to be spoon-fed ideas, and that the ideas needed to be custom-tailored by them—the censors—so as to ensure the continued simple-mindedness and moral purity of their little darlings. So what they were actually doing, while playing up to their own sweet innocent ideals of what children should be (and ignoring the realities of what developing little human beings need to become) was turning them into what they imagined them to be. And the problem with that is, if you make the children simple-minded, capable of seeing things only in simplistic black-and-white terms, and incapable of handling even the slightest bit of moral ambiguity (aka real life), then they grow up to be the next generation of adults, and will educate their children the same way, and probably decide they're even sweeter and more precious and must be protected even more from any hint of what the world is really like. They set in place an ever-worsening paradigm that's been snowballing ever since. And it was because they were ignoring the realities of what children are actually like and the kinds of things they need to be learning, and instead wanted to show how virtuous and magnanimous they themselves (the writers) were. By that time children had become, more than ever before, imprisoned in the nurseries (though undoubtedly they encountered more of harsh reality and could handle it better than the children of future generations would). I remember a blog called The Anadromous Life from years back where there was a series of posts discussing this topic in fascinating ways. I can't seem to find the blog anymore, but the guy (Byrne) has created a youtube channel and apparently, only 4 weeks ago, has started turning the old blog posts into videos. This should be interesting. He also apparently has moved from Alaska to Georgia (the country adjacent to Russia, not the state). Here's his first video in the new series:
We are legion by Dennis Taylor. Genre: SciFi Premise, The MC is a human who dies and becomes the intelligence for an interstellar Von Neumann probe. A very interesting story. An interesting aspect to the writing is as the story progresses, The MC is a self replicating probe, and as he does so several also become POV characters.
Those books are great. I haven't read the fourth one he put out about four years ago. I think it's close to the size of the whole trilogy, which in my opinion should have been one book. Greedy publishers split his book in three for no narrative reason.
So ... earlier today I finished reading Medea: Queen of Witches (An Unauthorized Biography by Phil Matyszak. Dr Matyszak (or Maty to his readers) studied Roman history at Oxford and has a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) from St John's College, Oxford, so he knows his stuff. I also have many of his previous books, and I know that he has a clear, concise writing style, and manages to hone in on the points he wishes to make, without confusing or overwhelming the reader. So, I was looking forward to reading this book. I was especially looking forward to it because I read Maty's previous "Unathorized Biography", called Hercules: the First Superhero, in which Dr Matyszak -- using archaeological, literary and other sources -- draws together the life story of the mythical Hercules and how he affected other classical Greek heroes and kingdoms. I enjoyed it very much, and recommend it highly. The Medea book, however, is a mixed bag. The story that Maty draws together is highly lucid and entertaining; 5 stars. Unfortunately, Dr Matyszak is let down by poor editing -- i.e. poor punctuation and superfluous words (e.g. one sentence repeats the word "be", as in "be be"). If this was an isolated example I'd be prepared to overlook it, but this sort of thing repeats through the book. There's another spelling mistake that caught my eye; Dr Matyszak refers to the ancient Greek kingdom of Troezen, now a small town in the northeastern Peloponnese, Greece -- but in antiquity, it was the birthplace of the Greek hero Theseus, who killed the Minotaur of Crete. The first mention of this place is spelled correctly, but the rest of the book spells it "Trozen" (rhyming with "Frozen"), which was surprising and then irritating. So, clearly Maty's editors let him down this time (which is strange, because I have never seen this in his books). But again, the overall story is excellent and very well-written, as usual. I recommend it and give it 4.5/5 stars, with half-a-star taken off because of the poor editing. (Sorry, Maty!)
Finished off Twilight of the Gods last week and picked up The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane. I’ve read a few of REH’s Solomon Kane stories before, but it’s nice to have them all now. “Skulls in the Stars” remains my favorite so far, but “The Right Hand of Doom” made a really strong impression, especially for a story where Kane himself is actually pretty peripheral. Also, I have to wonder whether that story influenced the creation of the crawling claws in D&D.
