Jesse Bullington

Jesse Bullington's follow-up to The Sad Tale Of The Brothers Grossbart is just as energetic, muscular, horrific, violent, inventive, fast-paced and icky as his debut. What wrong-footed me slightly was the sympathetic lead characters when I had mentally braced myself for more in the way of entertainingly sociopathic monsters wreaking havoc on the innocent and the guilty and the spectacularly evil alike. Instead we get Awa, an ex-slave forced into an apprenticeship by a necromancer, as nasty a show more piece of work as any Bullington has yet invented, and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, an artist turned mercenary who, against his better judgement and self-interest, rescues said trainee necromancer from the attentions of some of his fellow soldiers. The unlikely pair become friends and, with the aid of a another mercenary, a female gunner, set out to thwart the ultimate and extremely horrific schemes of the necromancer. Touring the battlefields, graveyards and whorehouses of a war-torn Renaissance Europe, pursued by a rogue witch-hunter, the ambulatory corpse of Awa's former mistress, a doctor of questionable ethics hungry for hidden knowledge and a particularly horrific corpse-hungry monster.
With corpses galore, in various degrees of decomposition, the grue and gore and ghastly fluids are plentiful, and with war raging all around and the inquisition in full flight there's violence and injustice and poverty and inhumanity to spare, but the warm heart of the book is the friendship between Deutsch and Awa and the things they do to help each other find some measure of redemption and salvation in a savage world. A strong, satisfying second novel that manages to revisit many elements of the Brothers Grossbart and yet remain utterly different. Recommended. show less

I think I've found a new favorite author. This makes 3, 5-star books in a row for Alex Marshall/Jesse Bullington. It's fantasy, but it's almost like he didn't read any fantasy before he wrote it or like he made a check list of all the fantasy tropes and then made sure to avoid them all. But it's not just the originality of it all, it's the characters, it's the writing, it's the wit. This isn't "read through this part to get to the good part" kind of writing. This is "every single part is the show more good part" kind of writing.

Highly recommended (especially on audio) to anyone into gritty fantasy without dragons, elves, dwarves or hobbits. There are demons and wizards and monsters however, as well as the occasional boys kissing and also girls and boys kissing, though that isn't a focus of the story. show less

For the dark, cold, unceasingly wet and utterly miserable winter that’s in it, here’s a little something that’ll brighten up your day, albeit by reassuring you that if you think YOU’VE got it bad, better think again. Hegel and Manfried, the brothers of the title are a despicable pair of medieval European rednecks, narcissistically convinced of their own righteousness, who make their dubious living by robbing graves. After taking revenge on an old neighbour by murdering his family and show more burning his house, the brothers flee south, headed or the fabulous tombs and riches of Egypt with a lynch mob baying at their heels. Doggedly determined, cunningly violent and utterly ruthless, they carve their way across the heart of Europe encountering monsters, witches, priests, innocents, charlatans, plague and soul crushing poverty, all the while expounding their own idiosyncratic views on life and religion.

There is a great deal of nastiness in this book, as well as horrorness and disgustingness, but that doesn’t stop it from being wildly entertaining and blackly, bleakly hilarious. It’s also an effective portrait of life in 1346, grimy, grim and ugly, full of religious awe and superstition and likely to be cut short with little notice by violence, pestilence, starvation or pure random bad luck. Bad and all as the Brothers Grossbart are, there are things lurking in the mountains and valleys and forests that make them look cuddly by comparison. Well, not really,

This is one for those with a strong stomach and a wicked humour, but it is well written and hugely enjoyable, and boasts one of the best covers for years; a clever, insanely detailed optical illusion-woodcut by Istvan Oros, and while you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, this amazing image was what caught my eye initially. What I ended up with was a gleeful sort of mash up of Umberto Eco and Cormac McCarthy as written by Stephen King. So delve, if you dare, into the blasphemous, bloody, foul-mouthed world of the Brothers Grossbart. And their beards. show less

The title of this anthology is a little misleading, implying a sense of kitsch and lack of seriousness; this could not be further from the truth. The introduction discusses the fact that this falls more within the Conan-sequence sword and sorcery camp of fantasy, rather than high fantasy. I would say these stories go a step further than that. While I agree that sword and sorcery frequently incorporates Lovecraftian mythology elements, and are certainly dark and action packed, these show more particular stories have a sense of bleakness and futility that is much more reminiscent of true lovecraftian fiction. Many also fall firmly within the realm of weird fiction, as we are left with a sense of confusion, a lack of clear explanation for what has just transpired.
Bullington has edited other anthologies for Stonskin Press, and both he and the imprint itself do a good job of recruiting authorial talent for their collections. While there are one or two stories in here I found a bit of a slog to finish, on the whole it was an excellent example of what can be accomplished by placing weird fiction in various historical ages. One or two of the stories I was struggling with really turned around after a few pages and became some of my favorites of the collection. There’s even a really novel use of something which other children of the 80s like myself may remember with fondness, the choose your own adventure story, by one of the authors. show less