Stonewielder, Volume I, by Ian Cameron Esslemont - reviewed by Stephen Theaker

I read quite a lot of heroic fantasy as a youngster: Tolkien, Eddings, Brooks, Conan (mostly spin-offs rather than the Howard originals, I’m afraid), Donaldson, Leiber and lots and lots of Moorcock. I kind of fell away from it as the books got longer and longer, and I went through a long period of reading barely anything but comics and Doctor Who novels. But in recent years I’ve started to enjoy my fantasy a lot more, reading and getting quite excited about books by Joe Abercrombie, William King and Steven Erikson - and Game of Thrones is my favourite new television programme of the year.

The First Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, Steven Erikson

This is a collection of three novellas concerning two supporting characters from Steven Erikson's set of fantasy bricks, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which I haven't read, though on this evidence I really should. Crack'd Pot Trail, a later book in this series, was so superb that I preordered this collection the moment I saw it was coming out on Kindle. Originally published by PS Publishing, this edition goes so far as to include the introductions to the individual hardbacks.

The first novella, "Blood Follows", is set in Lamentable Moll and introduces our terrible heroes to their faithful manservant, Emancipor Reese, amid a plague of nightly murders. "The Lees of Laughter's End" takes place upon a ship in transit, the Suncurl. A crew made nervous by the presence of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach finds that the two sorcerors are only barely the most unpleasant beings aboard. "The Healthy Dead" travels to the city of Quaint, where the king has forbidden all unhealthy behaviour. The Well Knights enforce his edicts by the sword, and demonic sins in the back alleys await a return to power. Bauchelain is tempted by the challenge – and the opportunity – this presents.

Although for me the third dropped off ever so slightly, straying from the bitterly ironic tone of the first two into outright humour, all three novellas were excellent. All were thoroughly unpleasant, the prose beautifully composed, the characters many-layered and ripe with mystery. As James Barclay notes in his introduction to "The Lees of Laughter's End", these novellas show that fantasy can work in shorter forms – and work brilliantly.

The First Collected Tales of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, Steven Erikson, Bantam Press, Kindle, 5193ll.

Crack'd Pot Trail by Steven Erikson

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, the Nehemoth, “quarry of ten thousand stone-eyed hunters”, travel the Crack’d Pot Trail across the Great Dry to the city of Farrog, but we travel instead with a motley group in hot pursuit: hunters of the Nehemoth, pilgrims to the Shrine of the Indifferent God, and poets heading for the Festival of Flowers and Sunny Days, in hope of being crowned The Century’s Greatest Artist (an annual event). On the twenty-third day of a twenty-two day journey the more muscular members of the party decide to start eating the artists in the party, forcing them into a competitive Scheherazade.

The book begins bravely, testing the reader’s patience with twenty-two pages of italics, introducing a huge cast of characters in deliberately overblown language, and it never stops being brave. If Erikson’s huge commercial novels are as peculiar as this I look forward to reading them. Crack’d Pot Trail is clever, playful, subtle, tense and gruesomely funny, and a defiant rumination on the relationship between reader and writer. “What if my audience is composed of nothing but idiots?” asks the narrator. “Raving lunatics! What if their tastes are so bad not even a starving vulture would pluck loose a single rolling eyeball?” Erikson puts his poets and storytellers in a situation where their lives depend upon their ability to sway such an audience.

When the reader is asked, “Am I slave to your expectations, sir? Does not a teller of tales serve oneself first and last?” it’s hard not to be reminded of songs like the Stereophonics’ Mr Writer or Nirvana’s In Bloom, where bands rounded on the critics (“snarky homunculi”, per this book) and fans who didn’t understand them, and at times you may wonder if Erikson is taking his Amazon reviews a little too seriously. Yet he offers good advice: “To be a living artist is to be driven again and again to explain oneself, to justify every creative decision, yet to bite down hard on the bit is the only honourable recourse, to my mind at least. Explain nothing, justify even less.” Thematically and philosophically rich, exquisitely written, and extraordinarily tense: this was my favourite sword and sorcery book in years.

Crack’d Pot Trail, Steven Erikson, PS Publishing, hb, 182pp.