A review by tbr_the_unconquered
Bloodstone by Karl Edward Wagner
4.0
The world of this book is one where forces of darkness lie just beyond the visible horizon. At those places where the light doesn’t reach, things stir in anticipation for the carnage to come. Monsters lurk there and the magic at play in those realms conjure up things that are best left unsaid. When this tale begins, these forces are known to all and like the legends are not much of a threat to anyone. The kind of tales to say around a fire at night or to scare children with. Just when the people of the world had forgotten all of this and gotten into their petty little squabbles and power struggles, a man appears in their midst. He is an enigma but in a time when brutality determined status in society, he was far more ruthless than those around him with any weapon that he chose to fight with. And so we are introduced to Kane who among other things is an immortal and is pretty good in anything that he does. Kane’s ambitions are beyond what the mere mortals think and he unleashes a force that the world had all but forgotten eons ago. Bloodstone is the story of a small but overwhelmed group of people fighting an alien evil and a man whose mind is far beyond their comprehensions.
While anti heroic characters are all the rage in fantasy now, Kane is not someone who will fit into the hero bracket even on such scales. He is well and truly the antagonist and the chief trouble maker of the tale. Being an immortal, Kane transcends good and bad of the normal human thought process and appears to be a totally nefarious entity when you consider his plans. There are occasional glimpses of love, tenderness and affection in him but they are all brushed away in the grander scheme of things. His is a wretched existence knowing that he would outlive everyone and everything and is doomed to an existence of watching humanity perish like mayflies against the ravages of time. It is precisely this attached detachment that makes Kane an interesting character study. Having been written in 1970’s the story is atmospherically heavier than its focus on character development. The places, the magic and the geography tends to get a preferential treatment when compared to the growth and development of the characters themselves. While Kane is an interesting enough character, Wagner keeps Kane mostly in the darkness under a cloak (literally and figuratively) and only gives us glimpses of him in this book.
Read it as a start to a series that defined heroic fantasy in the early days but if you read and judge it with an eye for fantasy of the present day then it might not be enjoyable. Recommended !
While anti heroic characters are all the rage in fantasy now, Kane is not someone who will fit into the hero bracket even on such scales. He is well and truly the antagonist and the chief trouble maker of the tale. Being an immortal, Kane transcends good and bad of the normal human thought process and appears to be a totally nefarious entity when you consider his plans. There are occasional glimpses of love, tenderness and affection in him but they are all brushed away in the grander scheme of things. His is a wretched existence knowing that he would outlive everyone and everything and is doomed to an existence of watching humanity perish like mayflies against the ravages of time. It is precisely this attached detachment that makes Kane an interesting character study. Having been written in 1970’s the story is atmospherically heavier than its focus on character development. The places, the magic and the geography tends to get a preferential treatment when compared to the growth and development of the characters themselves. While Kane is an interesting enough character, Wagner keeps Kane mostly in the darkness under a cloak (literally and figuratively) and only gives us glimpses of him in this book.
Read it as a start to a series that defined heroic fantasy in the early days but if you read and judge it with an eye for fantasy of the present day then it might not be enjoyable. Recommended !