Via The Mad Hatter’s Book Shelf & Book Review:
The Foul, Unnatural Murder of Gaelan Starfire & the Birth of Durzo Blint
“I got a bit of prophecy,” the old assassin said. “Not enough to be useful, you know. Just glimpses. My wife dead, things like that to keep me up late at night. I had this vision that I was going to be killed by forty men, all at once. But now that you’re here, I see they’re just you. Durzo Blint.”
Durzo Blint? Gaelan had never even heard the name.
***
Gaelan Starfire is a farmer now, happy to be a husband and a father; a careful, quiet, simple man. He’s also an immortal, peerless in the arts of war. Over the centuries, he’s worn many faces to hide his gift, but he is a man ill-fit for obscurity, and all too often he’s become a hero, his very names passing into legend: Acaelus Thorne, Yric the Black, Hrothan Steelbender, Tal Drakkan, Rebus Nimble.But when Gaelan must take a job hunting down the world’s finest assassins for the beautiful courtesan-and-crimelord Gwinvere Kirena, what he finds may destroy everything he’s ever believed in.
I enjoyed The Black Prism well enough, but I’ve not read Weeks’ Night Angel Trilogy, but this prequel novella has me somewhat interested. More than anything, I like the idea that Orbit Books will be releasing an eBook edition of Perfect Shadow (an awful title, but whatever) both as a treat for fans of the series and as incentive for skeptics like me to give Weeks’ successful series a closer look. Plus, I’m a sucker for peerless-in-the-art-of-war-immortals-turned-farmer character archetypes.
Also, Weeks is an awesome interview.
If “La Voie Des Ombres” is the French title for “Perfect Shadow” then it is a much nicer title.
That’s the title (and cover) for the French edition of Weeks’ The Way of Shadows.
Duh! Of course! I should’ve thought of that.
Wasn’t very taken by the Night Angel Trilogy, for a variety of reasons. Gave up half-way through Book 3. Not sure I’d recommend it. Then again, I am exactly nobody.
I’ve found the Night Angel trilogy…uneven so far. I thought the first book was quite good, some bits worked better than others for me, I felt very let down by the second after the first ended on such a great cliffhanger. I’ve not tackling the third yet, it’s there staring at me from my to read pile, but I’ve been putting it off for a while. But that’s just one fan’s opinion and I know a lot of people who have enjoyed the series.
Weeks himself seems like a really great guy, very generous with his time for his fans and for people who want to write themselves. Despite my misgivings I’d still like to try the Black Prism and a whole new world.
My experience was similar: I enjoyed the first two books as a kind of fast-plotted guilty pleasure, but the third really suffered from the lack of a proper antagonist, in my opinion, as well as a tendency to skip over a season of high drama in a page of summary, in my opinion. Still, I’ll probably give this one a go, it sounds more reminiscent of the first book in the Night Angel Trilogy, which was quite enjoyable.
I feel like the Night Angel series is what people are complaining about when they bitch about the gritty turn in fantasy.
George RR Martin kills off characters left and right and is plenty bleak, but it earns those moments and they feel like they mean something. Joe Abercrombie’s stuff is full of sex, violence, and swearing but it’s really really funny.
The Night Angel stuff read to me almost like a parody of that stuff. The sex, violence, and swearing seems almost entirely gratuitous the deaths mostly don’t mean anything (and don’t always stick)… It seemed to take all the trappings of Martin and Abercrombie and their ilk and pasting them on a David Eddings style tale that just cant’ support them.
My two cents anyway…