A review by cheezvshcrvst
Dzur by Steven Brust

5.0

This wonderful reread continues to stun and bring smiles to my face, gifting me with laughter and malevolent glee, seemingly at every turn of a page. The structure of Brust's Dzur is exquisite: each chapter begins by describing a course of a meal in a fictional 5-star restaurant that occurs immediately after the events of Issola and precipitates the events of this novel. These descriptions of the meal correlate with where Vlad is in the plot of the novel or else an aspect of a character or the story that we need to focus on at that point in the narrative. Of course, Brust's writing style does not allow for much confusion where the latter is concerned as he is a deft hand at keeping our focus on the narrative, or the meal, before us, and never once gives us pause to consider what might be going on up another table's skirt (so to speak.) And it is a delectable dinner we are served here that is full of wit, violence, a huge reveal or two (if you're keeping count) in the over-arcing story of the series, and a heap of cool. Folks often ask me, Frank, I've heard good things about this series, but I've never tried it, so why do you recommend it? My answer is always ready because it's always true: Brust writes cool. There's a (SPOILER AHEAD) moment in which a long-awaited and never-seen (in the Vlad narrative, thus far) character gets to flex his badass murdering skills in which he does something Vlad mentions he is terrified of having done to himself at least a few times up until now and when you're casually told about this integral part of the novel on this one side of a piece of paper in a very-manageable sheaf of pages you would have to be stupid or completely unappreciative to not think 'wow, if that wasn't the coolest thing I've heard of anyone doing to a bad guy in my entire life...' (END SPOILER ALERT.) And that's what Steven Brust does so well over multiple novels in so many narrative styles while holding as many threads (sorry, Lady Teldra) of this one man's life story in his hands: he forges a Great Weapon and then doesn't bludgeon us to death with it so much as lets us check its legs and rear out, want to go to dinner with it, you know? Cool-like. I'm mixing analogies here, I know. But I have been gushing over these books for the better part of 2 decades. These, and Dzur, are completely underrated gems that are as much fun as they are DIFFERENT from the standard sff fare of any generation, present-day contemporaries of Mr. Brust included. Dzur itself earns a 4.5 outta 5 for being brief but delicious, and I challenge anyone to name a better genre fiction novel that completes a full meal so nearly as satisfactorily as the plot of this atypical sword and sorcery pulp-thriller.