Steve Perry (1) (1947–)

This review might turn out to be a little lengthy, and I don't want to keep readers in any suspense about my opinion of Conan the Indomitable. It is easily the worst Conan novel I've ever read.

In my other reviews, I've observed that the short story is the paradigmatic narrative form for Robert E. Howard's Conan, and with the vast number of novels about the character written by later authors, they have often developed new forms and styles, or used ones originating with their fellows, rather show more than attempting to work on the lines set down in Howard's one Conan novel. I have inferred a stylistic genealogy from Andrew Offutt to Robert Jordan to Roland Green, for example, while finding Karl Edward Wagner fairly faithful to Howard's original approach in the short stories. If Steve Perry had a model for his writing of this Conan yarn, I think it must have been the Marvel Comics Conan writings of Roy Thomas. Thomas, though, was often taking his plots from Howard's original stories (Conan and otherwise, following the lead of DeCamp and Carter), and he had the benefit of art from Barry Windsor-Smith and John Buscema.

An additional influence for Perry might have been some sort of 1980s fantasy role-playing game supplement, since the action of the novel literally precipitates Conan into a "dungeon" of the sort that was the stereotypical site of the action in such games. This environment--roughly at the intersection of the Hyborian realms of Corinthia, Zamora, and Brythunia, which are otherwise irrelevant to the story--is called the "Grotterium Negrotus," and is under the divided and competing regimes of a wizard and a witch, each of whom becomes magically convinced of the need to capture Conan. This subterranean political setup reminded me even more of the 21st-century board games Dungeon Lords and Dungeon Pets by Vlaada Chvátil! Parallel to the adventures of Conan and his accumulating band, the exotic monster species (cyclopes, giant worms, blood-bats, blind cave apes) dominated by the dungeon lords of this book find their collective will to revolution.

The cover of my copy (the trade paper edition that was the book's first issuance) has Kirk Reinert's art, which is both faithful to the story and perfectly hilarious, as it shows Conan confronting the vaguely-inhuman sorceress Chuntha (yes, that's her name), herself riding a giant worm whose open maw is an unmistakable vagina dentata. All of the chief villains in this story are conspicuously defined by their gender. As inferred from the sequence and difficulty of their overcoming, the greatest of these is the male wizard, followed by the impressively lascivious female witch, and least of all a fairly contemptible sorcerous gynander.

The tone throughout is predominantly comic, with obvious foreshadowings and mechanical parallels in the development of the plot. The style includes the sort of feigned archaicisms that you'll never find in a Robert E. Howard story. (He was more prone to an occasional anachronism, in fact.) It also includes "translations" of adages and idioms like, "One cannot make mushroom wine without crushing a few toadstools" (227), and features a character (I can hardly help thinking of him as an "NPC") who is under a curse compelling him to insult everyone he addresses, while his face is frozen in a smile.

Honestly, I cannot recommend this book to even the most indiscriminate of sword and sorcery readers. show less

I had almost been put off by many of the online reviews I read, the most prominent of which seemed to be exclusively negative, but ultimately "Indiana Jones vs. zombies" was too tempting a concept to ignore. And I'm glad I succumbed; I don't know if it was because of my lowered expectations, but I quite enjoyed Steve Perry's Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead.

The book sees Indiana Jones in Haiti in the middle of World War Two, searching for a mythical black pearl which has voodoo power, show more and contending with not only German and Japanese rivals (having both was a bit of overkill, in my opinion) but with a powerful voodoo priest who can command an army of undead. These are classic 'voodoo' zombies rather than modern pop-culture 'Romero' zombies, and utilised fairly well as a threat.

If you wished, you could rattle off a whole number of flaws and gripes. It's quite a by-the-numbers story, there's little flair or ability to do the unexpected, and the character of Indiana Jones lacks the wit and charisma of his silver-screen embodiment. However, I've felt all of the tie-in novels struggle to capture the character of Indy, even the better ones, and I don't feel inclined to hold pulp like this to too high a standard. The idea for Indiana Jones was of course born from the memory of Saturday-afternoon adventure serials from the 1930s, and while Spielberg and Lucas and Ford and others had the talent to make that something special and lasting, I'm also happy enough with a routine adventure-serial. Adventure stories aren't really written any more, and survive mostly in shallow pools like franchise tie-ins or formula-driven thrillers, so I take what I can get. After all, isn't that "they don't make 'em like this anymore" feeling what draws us to the Indiana Jones franchise in the first place? While it's definitely lacking in areas, Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead can be a fun amble for a reader with realistic expectations. show less

For those expecting an action-adventure piece like the prior works of Michael Reaves (Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter) and Steve Perry (Shadows of the Empire), you're in for a surprise. I'm not sure how to describe its style; I'd say it's about three-quarters E.R., and one-quarter Aaron Allston's X-wing novels. There's not much action onscreen; instead, we mostly see characters dealing with its consequences.

However, like both of their earlier books, we're treated to a cast of "normal" citizens of show more the universe, as opposed to hordes of Jedi. This gives us a perspective rarely seen, and (especially since the Clone Wars novels are supposed to deal more with perspectives and people than overall plot) is a welcome insight into the effects of the war glossed over by other media. More than a mere thousand Jedi and a million clones are involved in this conflict, both directly and not.

The book does suffer from some minor continuity glitches; there were also references to things from the movies that the POV characters shouldn't have been aware of, even though the reader is. But in its favor, there were also some other unexpected nods to the Expanded Universe.

Unlike almost every other multipart story, Battle Surgeons accomplishes something unusual: it feels complete. There's really only one thread introduced during the novel that's left to be resolved in Jedi Healer, but even that has a partial resolution which would be satisfactory without the forthcoming sequel.

Overall, a highly recommended read for fans of character-based pieces or seeing beyond a certain point of view. show less

The novel is not bad, but it's not great, either. The new characters are -- with a decent exception or two -- largely forgettable tropes (the ace fighter pilot, the attractive bartender, the conscripted surgeon, etc.), and the established ones ring slightly off to me. Particularly Tarkin is not quite as I know him from the films and cartoons -- though in fairness, this might be due to established EU personality traits I'm not aware of. Vader is better, though his sections suffer from the show more bending over backwards to make sense of his actions and dialogue in light of both the prequel films and the vast EU continuity largely grown before those films were made.

I was hoping for a political thriller about the creation of the galaxy's most horrific invention, and instead I got a street-level-view of said invention's launch and demise. But it's decent, and once the novel hit the halfway point, it picked up a lot of steam carrying through to the end, which I enjoy as a reader. show less