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Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames


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Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames

Years ago, Clay Cooper was a member of Saga, an adventuring band beyond compare. They were heroes ploughing the depths of the Heartwyld Forest for treasure and adventurer, slaughtering monsters and rescuing captive princesses. They were legends. But they got old, they got fat, they retired and had kids. They grew up.

But now their frontman Gabe wants to get the band back together. His daughter Rose is a mercenary captain defending the city of Castia from a horde of monsters...but Castia is a thousand miles away beyond the treacherous Heartwyld and a forbidding mountain range. Worse still, the boys are not ready to get back on the road. One of them's got an incurable disease, another one has been unwisely made a king and another has been turned to stone. It falls, reluctantly, to the slow and steady Clay to get the guys back together for this one last gig.

Kings of the Wyld is a fast-paced, humorous sword and sorcery story. At its heart, this is a traditional story so familiar that it feels like a greatest hits of your favourite genre mashed together. On this basis it would be fun but forgettable, the fantasy equivalent of a Big Mac, if it wasn't for the book's masterstroke: in the world of Grandual, adventuring companies are treated like rock bands, putting on shows in gladiatorial arenas, splitting up acrimoniously, heroes going solo and of course getting back in their old age to make money when they realise they miss the old lifestyle.

It's a silly conceit but one that works surprisingly well and is sustained through the novel, which allows for commentary on things like ageing, the relationship between youngsters brimming with enthusiasm and their elders who've seen it all before and the dangers of falling prey to nostalgia. They things are handled fairly lightly though. This is a book that's more concerned with having fun.

There's a lot of inspiration from Dungeons and Dragons, particularly the less-copyright-infringing end of the Monstrous Manual, with revenants, ettins and ettercaps showing up (but not owlbears, obviously, as they are both dumb and completely mythical), but no elves or dwarves. The villain is surprisingly up-front and present in the novel and his motivations are quite well-drawn, and there's also a well-deployed cast of supporting characters such as the members of friendly rival band Vanguard who are as interesting as our main heroes and a remorseless angelic bounty-hunter who makes for a fearsome enemy, but also a worthy (if unreliable) ally.

Eames packs an enormous amount of plot, characters, battles and quips into a 450-page-long novel and the whole thing moves with verve, pace and humour.

On the minor side of things, if the rock band theme and influences don't work for you, then the novel never really rises about the serviceable. The prose is okay and the book is enjoyable, but undeniably lightweight.

Kings of the Wyld (***½) is a rollicking fun novel which acts as a good palate-cleanser if you've been reading some pretty heavy books recently. It's available now in the UK and USA.

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Just finished my own review:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2002479653

"We're getting the (mercenary) band back together."

KINGS OF THE WYLD is a book which I have to give extremely high marks because it's a story I haven't read before. This is kind of a weird thing to say but it fits with something that exists as a major problem of fantasy. Specifically, it's very rare we get anything resembling new stories in fantasy. The actual premise isn't all that original ("going to rescue a mercenary's daughter from a siege") but the handling of the story is done entirely with the iconography and theme of aging rock stars getting together to do one last tour.

Clay is living a blandly pleasant life as a farmer with his wife and daughter when his old partner Gabriel comes to him with a request. Gabriel's daughter, Rose, has become a mercenary and gotten herself caught in a siege by a horde of monsters. Clay doesn't want to help Gabriel since this requires traveling across the entirety of the known world, abandoning his family (for a few months at least), and unimaginable danger for a man in his late middle-years. Still, you just don't break some bonds.

The book follows the assembling of "Saga" (which even sounds like a band's name) for one last adventure, dealing with their crooked former manager, getting their instruments back (by which I mean weapons), and a more traditional road trip to their destination. There's some truly hilarious bits scattered throughout, usually directly proportional to how awkward a member's retirement is. My favorite character, Matrik, has gotten himself a position as king but his wife is cuckholding him even worse than Robert Baratheon. Fortunately, Matrik is both far more aware than Robert and also a genuinely better person--sort of.

The book is full of anachronisms ranging from using modern slang to the fact Nicholas Eames even uses the infamous Portal meme, "The cake is a lie." I didn't have any problems with that, though, and it fit with the general feel of the place. Hell, the band's inability to keep a bard alive strikes me as a direct homage to Spinal Tap's trouble keeping their drummer alive. Mercenaries in this world are famous people who are drenched in wine, women, wealth, and fame but who often either burn out or go through their fortunes quickly. I loved Clay's reaction to younger bands who have been reduced to fighting in arenas because older mercs have exterminated most of the local monsters.

The real heart of the book, for me, is the fact it's based around the relationship of the main characters. Every one of the band members has an individual story and all of them are interesting. Representation fans will note the wizard Moog is a rare gay main character and he's also one who was both old and happily married. His quest to find a cure for the "Rot" was also something I found deeply touching since it's the disease which claimed his husband's life.

A lot of the book reads like an old school Dungeons and Dragons (1E D&D, not your silly 5th edition stuff!) quest with lots of focus on the conflicts between men versus monsters. The mercenaries don't make any pretensions what they did was noble or good (indeed, they are uncomfortably aware a lot of what they did was murder for gold--especially when some trolls host them in their lair) but that just adds to the book's hardcore feeling. Some encounters do feel truly random and I'm not particularly fond of a certain bounty hunter character who seems flatter than a pancake in terms of characterization but the variety of weird things our heroes run into felt like a random encounter chart brought to life. I, especially, loved how the characters got robbed by the same lovely bandits twice.

Does the book have flaws? I'm going to say yeah. The villain, Lastleaf, is adequate but the confrontation with him feels like it belongs to a more traditional fantasy story while I was much more interested in the band's enemies Kallorec (the manager) and Lilith (Matrick's wife). Indeed, the final of the book does feel a good deal too removed from the rock band mythos to be as enjoyable as it could be. I also felt disappointed the book didn't end with them deciding to do smaller tours for the rest of their life.

So, do I recommend Kings of the Wyld? You bet your magic sword I do. It's a great book for those who want some easy light fantasy reading which is full of horrible monsters out to murder you. The book is surprisingly moving at times, often contemplating the kind of legacy you've left behind.

9/10

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I swore we had a thread on this already.  But since we don't I will echo the others on the thread.  Good fun, not too dark, and humorous without relying on cheap puns. 

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4 hours ago, SkynJay said:

I swore we had a thread on this already.  But since we don't I will echo the others on the thread.  Good fun, not too dark, and humorous without relying on cheap puns. 

Actually,a few of us (me,you and polishgenius talked about it a bit in the Feb/March 'Reading' threads.

Interestingly,the 2nd book (sequel?) is titled Bloody Rose and comes out in April 2018.

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I tried it a few months ago and dropped it after 15%.  The ongoing parody of The Blues Brother set in D&D could be funny -- Terry Pratchett already did The Beatles on Discworld -- but it wasn't actually funny.  Without some humor to sustain the parody, it felt pointless and flat.  

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1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

I tried it a few months ago and dropped it after 15%.  The ongoing parody of The Blues Brother set in D&D could be funny -- Terry Pratchett already did The Beatles on Discworld -- but it wasn't actually funny.  Without some humor to sustain the parody, it felt pointless and flat.  

What is funny about this is I am as big of Pratchett fan around but I hated Soul Music (probably my least favorite in the series until the soccer one) while I enjoyed the hell out of this.  All humor is personal ain't it?

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I really enjoyed this book and think it worked extremely well for 2/3rds of the book. The book is always at its best when it's about a bunch of rock stars who just so happened to be mercenaries who don't play music. I got a lot of the jokes which others might not have by having seen "This is Spinal Tap" but the actual plot involving Lastleaf and saving Rosie didn't do anything for me. I also felt the Daeva bounty huntress was a flat character I wanted to see die horribly.

It's got a lot of funny quirky bits but it's not meant to be a COMEDY so I think that's where some tonal issues are being hit. But yes, all the best bits are lost whenever it shifts to a more straight D&D-esque world.

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  • 4 months later...

I'm a bit more than a quarter through the book, and I'm not finding it very enjoyable. But I never was a D&D, though having this big mix of creatures and warriors in the story doesn't bother me. I'm just finding it very bland, the prose is simplistic, and it probably doesn't help that I've picked it up after finishing Jemisin's Stone Sky. And maybe I missed some of the jokes.

I almost gave up on the book after

Spoiler

the Council meeting where Lastleaf first appears. I just didn't like how the story transitioned from this big moment where the villain killed the ruler of one nation, everyone else dispersed, and off page the main characters faked the death of their buddy. There is little subtlety in the plot. 

 

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