Summer of Sword and Sorcery: Week 6

The Enchantress of World's End by Lin Carter.  I don't quite know what to say about this one. For awhile I thought I might actually like it, somewhat in spite of itself, but in the end I was disappointed. There are a couple of potentially interesting characters (a fussy woman warrior and a cranky wizard who keeps his face hidden behind a perpetual cloud of shifting mists, and a tiger-man) but no one is developed along the way, except possibly Phaida, a rescued sex-slave, who starts out as an extreme gay stereotype but then becomes a red-blooded hetero once given the chance. Main hero Ganelon Silvermane is as uninteresting as they come, and the whole book is tongue-in-cheek, suggesting Carter took none of it in any way seriously.  Some of the humor is amusing at first (I kind of liked the city of Chx, which is Moral Majority central by day and a den of iniquity after dark - our heroes get arrested for failing to debauch themselves sufficiently) but this bizarre Vance/Smith/Oz mashup wears out its welcome fast. Carter seems never to have taken his own fiction very seriously; he wrote as if it were a hobby for him, and it shows in everything I've read (I pushed myself through most of his Lovecraft-inspired stuff a couple years ago, and of course read most of his Conan pastiches as a kid).  And that was his downfall.  Whatever talent he might or might not have had fell by the wayside as he ground out clever but amateurish tales for small change and (I guess) his own amusement.

Kothar - Barbarian Swordsman by Gardner F. Fox.  Honestly I'd never have picked this up if it hadn't been for the highly positive review on the Appendix N Podcast, which stressed so strongly that Kothar was largely a tongue-in-cheek parody of Conan, rather than a mere shamelessly derivative rip.  Wellll... while I did find Kothar at times amusing, the parodic aspects really didn't jump out at me.  It seemed merely derivative.  Like Jakes' "Brak the Barbarian" stories, there's an empty, all-but personality-less hero, who's big, tough and a barbarian, not one of these namby-pamby city fags (we are constantly reminded of how Kothar is not an ordinary, civilized man, and how mighty his thews are, and of his yellow mane)(to be fair Howard does this a bit too much as well).  There's a Hyboran-like backdrop, with exotic place names dropped left-and-right, but unlike in Howard's stories, the backdrop never resonates, never comes alive.  

Fox writes better than Jakes did, and his monsters are imaginative, but they're still just there for Kothar to knock over with his magic sword, Frostfire.

But then...

Kothar is, strictly speaking, made up of three novellas.  The first "Sword of the Sorceror", which tells of how Kothar got his magic sword, does feature an evocative lich.  The second, "Treasure of the Labyrinth" is nothing special but does have a surprising kick of a twist ending.  But the third, "The Woman in the Witch Wood" is actually damn good!  

It's not so much that "Woman in the Witch Wood" is so much better plotted or written (Fox's writing is never actually bad) or that it rises above any of the aforementioned problems.  Its just that Fox genuinely seems engaged here.  The story actually resonates, has at least one unexpected (and one fully-expected) twist that are pulled off with some aplomb, and some of that humor does poke through, particularly in a moment when Kothar damns himself for an idiot for always playing the hero.  Also the big K shows some intelligence here for a change.  "Woman in the Witch Wood" is good enough as a standalone to have a place in the ranks of my favorite sword-and-sorcery tales.  So the book is by no means a total loss, even though I doubt I'll read any more of Fox's Kothar opus.