Blood Sport

0.5/5

In a complete reversal from my last read, the cover of Blood Sport is by far the best thing about it. It was the reason I picked it up off of a pile of dusty books in some shop despite no prior knowledge of the title or the author. I wish I had left it there.

Blood Sport follows a father and his son as they travel on a Narnia-esque adventure up the mysterious Hassayampa river. On this adventure, where they spend most of their time hunting and fishing, the son abandons his father to join the famous bandit group lead by 'Ratnose', someone the father has had run-ins with on his previous journeys on the Hassayampa.

It's a deeply and unapologetically racist, sexist, and perverted book that has no redeeming qualities(other than cover show more illustration). It's a book that is obsessed with the idea of masculinity in all of the wrong ways, and rails against western society preventing men from achieving some elevated and supreme form of manhood. It's also obsessed with hunting, and spent more time describing shoot game birds than any fantasy book ever should. Moreover, it's disgusting, depraved, and poorly written. There's some seriously graphic content here, and yet none of the outlandish and simply weird content that the cover describes.

It was simply a waste of my time, and were I not so stubborn I would've DNF'ed it 30 pages in when there's a graphic description of snakes having sex in the river. Assuming it to be bad, I had hoped it would bridge the gap into 'so-bad-it's-good' territory, but alas, no. Obviously this novel is no longer in print, but should you find it lurking in some dusty bookshop corner, I'd advise you to do what I didn't and back away slowly. show less

This was not for me. Pretty much like when you bite into unfamiliar food--sometimes (celeriac) you love it, and other times (black licorice) you don't. There's no point continuing to eat it. I gave it the old college try (50 pages) but it was weird, straight, obsessed with hunting, too macho for me.

A cult novel of hunting and outdoorsmanship, out of print since 1979.

En un fabuloso río que nace en el norte de China y desemboca en el estado de Nueva York, y en cuyas riberas acechan mastodontes, osos carniceros, dragones y bandidos mucho más sanguinarios que cualquier bestia salvaje, un padre y su hijo viven la más extraña y cruel de las aventuras, y una sencilla excursión de caza se convierte en una despiadada reflexión sobre nuestra sociedad neurótica y nuestra moral contradictoria.