Contents
From the Editor
By Adrian Collins
Lessons of Necessity
By T.C. Powell
Who is the Grimdark Hero?
Article by C.T. Phipps
Review: The Liar’s Key
Author: Mark Lawrence
Review by Tom Smith
First They Came For The Pigs
By Chadwick Ginther
An Interview with James A. Moore
Review: The Mechanical
Author: Ian Tregillis
Review by malrubius
Boomer Hunter
By Sean Patrick Hazlett
Excerpt: The Dinosaur Lords
By Victor Milan
An Interview with Peter Orullian
The Right Hand of Decay
By David Annandale
Review: The Witcher 3
By CT Phipps
Against the Encroaching Darkness
A Dominion of the Fallen short story by Aliette De Bodard
The cover art for Grimdark Magazine issue #5 was created by Jason Deem.
Jason Deem is an artist and designer residing in Dallas, Texas. More of his work can be found at: spiralhorizon.deviantart.com, on Twitter (@jason_deem) and on Instagram (spiralhorizonart).
From the Editor
ADRIAN COLLINS
My goal in starting Grimdark Magazine is to enjoy being a part of a developing and growing genre while the moniker and the focus of fans and critics are still young. I also want to show that grimdark isn’t restricted to medieval fantasy and Warhammer 40K. It can extend into other established genres where authors haven’t yet fully explored the possibilities of anti-heroes and switching perspectives to the antagonist.
In this issue we’ve put together a solid range of grimdark stories set in zombie apocalypses, the heartless world of the near future, medieval fantasy, and in Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen.
Alongside some awesome grimdark fiction, you’ll find an exploration of the grimdark hero, reviews and excerpts of some fantastic new releases, and interviews.
I hope you get a kick out of issue #5.
Adrian Collins
Founder
Connect with the Grimdark Magazine team at:
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Lessons of Necessity
T.C. POWELL
My twelve-year-old son backs away from the crawling corpse and holds the knife out, handle up. ‘Mum,’ he says to me, drawing the word out so that it sounds like two syllables. It’s as though he’s five again and wants me to cut up his steak.
God. Steak. What I wouldn’t do for some steak.
I take the knife from Taylor, flashing a look so he knows that this is not acceptable behaviour for his age. The corpse, or zombie, or whatever we few survivors are calling them, is pathetic, crawling on one intact leg, the other sheared off at the knee. I look at Taylor to ensure he’s watching as I plunge the knife into its rotting head.
Taylor’s eyes shift away at the last second. I resist the urge to snap at him.
‘That’s that,’ I say, withdrawing the knife and returning it to Taylor’s trembling hand.
With the basement cleared, we’ve checked the entire house. It’s not perfect. There are rats scratching in the walls and cockroaches skittering across the floor, but that’s true everywhere. What’s important is that the doors and windows are intact, and there’s a generator. The basement is also defensible as a last resort, with the only approach being the stairs from the kitchen. Although going to the store will still be a risk, it’s only a five-minute walk; there are enough canned goods there to keep us well fed for years. This is home.
Taylor smiles at me and I smile back, eager to reassure him. Underneath, however, I know there’s still work we need to do. I won’t be around forever.
* * *
‘Happy Birthday to you!’ I sing.
Taylor blows out the candles on the fruitcake I’d found in the wrecked aisles of the supermarket. An extravagance, perhaps, but it makes him happy to be reminded of the old times, when we were a normal family and his father was alive. Besides, I want turning thirteen to be a big deal to Taylor. I want him to know that I now consider him to be a man.
‘Are there any presents?’ he asks.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Let me go get it.’
It’s in the basement. I walk the flight of steps down from the kitchen and already feel winded. A bad sign. I first felt the lump in my breast last winter; I don’t know why I had continued to check, after things like chemo and surgery were obsolete. Habit, maybe. Now I feel my illness every day, steadily getting worse. Taylor doesn’t yet know. I wish I didn’t either.
I return from the basement, smiling to cover the pain. I needn’t have bothered. Taylor only has eyes for what I hold in my hands: a genuine Japanese katana.
‘Oh my God, Mum! It’s so cool!’
I laugh at his enthusiasm. ‘You want to take it out for a test drive?’ Knives, swords and other silent killers are our best bet for survival. Guns bring unwanted attention.
‘Yeah!’ Taylor says, taking the sword and snapping the blade free from its curved black scabbard. ‘There are some mannequins in the Walmart. Maybe we could carry one back with us next time we go.’
I shake my head. ‘Not exactly what I had in mind.’
His face falls. Damn it, now he sees the gift as a set-up, which it was, but I still want him to enjoy the moment. There remain so few opportunities to simply enjoy anything.
Taylor drops the sword clanging to the tiled floor. ‘How many times do I have to tell you, Mum? I’m not killing anything.’
It’s our fault in a way. As Taylor grew, my husband and I drilled into him the importance of protecting and nurturing life. We scooped up spiders and carried them to the garden rather than squishing them, and opened windows so that the flies could leave unharmed. God, we were even vegans for a while. But that had been before, in a world where those values made sense. Where they were possible. Taylor, bless his heart, just couldn’t understand that things had changed. He believed so strongly in the things we, and especially his father, had taught him. Taylor was not with me that day to watch Michael get torn apart by these beasts. Then, I accounted it a blessing that he kept some part of his innocence. But now...
I pick the sword up. ‘You will.’
He has to.
* * *
We return from the store with our hands full: I have Taylor’s sword (he refuses to carry it outside) and a paper bag full of soap, toothpaste and brushes, a padlock, a pocketknife, and other sundries; my boy has a damned mannequin. I couldn’t talk him out of it.
We come inside and go into the kitchen where I set our groceries down on the counter.
‘Say, why don’t you set that thing up in the basement,’ I tell him.
‘Good idea,’ he says over the mannequin’s bare white shoulder.
I watch as Taylor starts his descent down the stairs. I set the katana on the topmost step and close the door after him. The basement light is on, but it’s not very bright. I hope Taylor sees the thing before the thing sees him.
‘Hey,’ he calls from the staircase. ‘Why’d you close the door?’
My answer is to take the padlock from the shopping bag and fasten it to the steel hasp set in the basement door.
‘Uh—oh, Mum, there’s one of those things down here!’
Pick up your sword, I think. Fight for yourself, my baby, my love. Because you have to.
&nb
sp; I slump down against the door; my hand instinctively clutches my misshapen breast, and the hammering heart underneath. I mark the sound of the mannequin tumbling down the stairs. The subsequent pounding against the door and Taylor’s cries for me to let him out. Then the sounds of snarling and fighting.
I do not know the results and I will not know until the fighting stops. Whatever comes out when I unlock the door ... I will be prepared to deal with it.
Because I have to.[GdM]
T.C.Powell starves full-time and is an award-winning writer on the side. He has been published by the Christian Science Monitor, New Myths, Big Pulp, and others, and in 2015 he is a two-time recipient of the Penn Cove Literary Arts Award as well as a finalist in the Defenestrationism Short Story Contest. His woeful web presence can be found at:
http://tcpowellfiction.blogspot.com
Who is the Grimdark Hero?
C.T. PHIPPS
Grimdark is a relatively new subgenre in the world of fantasy and science fiction, having emerged as the grittier, morally ambiguous side of fantasy in the 1970s and ‘80s with the likes of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series, Glen Cook’s Black Company, and the Warhammer 40K role-playing games and related literature. It is a creature that has many close relatives, arguably twins, in dark fantasy, low fantasy, and sword and sorcery. However, grimdark is a special breed. It is fantasy which places the hero in the meatgrinder of a world where good and decency are but words or at the very least rarer than unicorns, and then asks, "So now what, hero?"
But who is the grimdark hero?
Does such a creature exist?
As an author with a taste for the genre, I was required to ask myself a simple question: if I'm not going to write about a world where being the good guy works out, then what is the motive for the protagonist? What do our heroes fight for if, taking a look around themselves, they can't noticeably measure any improvement in the world? Is it just a matter of making their opponents worse off than themselves? Turning those questions over in my mind, I came to the conclusion that answering them would make a pretty good novel in itself.
Nevertheless, I will share some of my thoughts here in this article.
To understand the grimdark genre we have to go back before it was really codified into the building blocks upon which it is constructed. Heroes have always been a collection of saints and sinners if we'll be perfectly honest.
Gilgamesh, literature’s earliest known hero, was a complete bastard with sex addiction and aging issues. Hercules' entire history consists of murdering people, then feeling really bad about it, so he murders some more offensive people. King Arthur, depending on the myth, one-upped Herod the infant-slayer and intended to burn his wife at the stake instead of sending her away. Indeed, it's not until fairly recently people decided that heroes need to do more than awesome things to earn that title; they had to be role models as well—and we all know that just left a vacancy for other kinds of protagonists.
However, speeding things along to the 20th century, grimdark heroes begin to evolve from the protagonists of sword and sorcery: Conan, Elric, and a certain duo operating in Lankhmar. They don't have much in common. Elric is a civilized sorcerer-nobleman from a decadent, dying civilization, prone to melancholy and physically frail save when using magic or his Chaos-God Sword. Conan is a physically powerful barbarian from a more vibrant, less civilized time who often ends up fighting wizards while wielding no magic himself (save in one instance during The Tower of the Elephant). Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser are a barbarian and thief pairing who practice magic while enjoying the fruits of civilization in-between wilderness jaunts. However, all four share a common trait of being (mostly) good men making the most of a cruddy situation. Indeed, what all of the precursors to 21st century’s grimdark heroes have in common is none of them are actually heroes. They just sort of stumbled into the role, carrying all their faults and flaws.
The first characteristic of a grimdark hero is, by and large, they aren't fighting to improve the world. There are exceptions to this, of course, but mostly this truism holds fast: the grimdark protagonist is a product of their environment. Conan the Barbarian kills, plunders, and indulges because that's what barbarians do. Elric is from a society where good is an alien concept, and his chief source of woe is his realization that that's really messed up. There are idealistic figures in the world of grimdark, but invariably, they are bigger bads than the bandits because the axiomatic nature of grimdark is things don't get better.
They just get slightly less bad.
At best.
This hopelessness in the balance of good versus evil, this yearning to make the world less bad, allows us to accept the grimdark hero, flaws and all. In Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series, Geralt of Rivia gives a fantastic example of this when he relates his first ‘adventure’ to his silent lover Iola:
Where was I? My first noble deed. You see, they'd told me again and again in Kaer Morhen not to get involved in such incidents, not to play at being knight errant or uphold the law. Not to show off, but to work for money. And I joined this fight like an idiot, not fifty miles from the mountains. And do you know why? I wanted the girl, sobbing with gratitude, to kiss her savior on the hands, and her father to thank me on his knees. In reality her father fled with his attackers, and the girl, drenched in the bald man's blood, threw up, became hysterical and fainted in fear when I approached her. Since then, I’ve only very rarely interfered in such matters.
It is an impressive summary of just how the grimdark world differs from that of more mainstream fiction, emphasising that things do not always work out for the best and events play out with no regard for the morality of the participants. As the titular character said in the 1982 John Milinus-penned Conan the Barbarian: ‘No one will remember if we were good men or bad, how we fought or how we died. No, all that matters is that few stood against many. That's what's important.’ Locke Lamora, protagonist of Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastard series, is a con man who possesses no higher aspirations than to continue tricking the absurdly wealthy out of their goods. He’s not even doing it for the money but simply because he enjoys tricking them. We, the audience, sympathize with Locke in his pointless cons and mindless accumulation of wealth because, really, the people he tricks deserve to be tricked (with rare exceptions).
The grimdark hero is the product of their world. They are nasty because the world is nasty, ruthless because the world is ruthless, and cruel because the world is trying to step on their face. If the grimdark hero is, finger wag, evil, then that is because their world is no less so. Rob J. Hayes’ The Price of Faith stars Inquisitor Thanquil Darkheart who is as close to a ‘good guy’ as you might get in most grimdark fiction. He is pious, gentle, nonviolent, and cares for the common people with a loving heart. He’s also forced by his religion and the mandates of his superiors to engage in some truly horrific acts because he believes the alternative is unleashing literal hell on the world of man.
Even so, the best grimdark heroes are also the ones who invite us to sympathize with their perspective and maintain some sort of human hook that we can hold onto while enjoying the ride through their existence. Some lesser authors of the genre fail to keep readers invested in their protagonist because in their desire to shock, they neglect to make the protagonist someone who, actions aside, we want to succeed. This can lead to the TVtropes.org defined concept of ‘Darkness Induced Apathy’, which is easily summarized as, ‘I don't care who wins; I want them all to die.’
Some of the best grimdark heroes are those who, in other circumstances, would have been shining knights. The aforementioned Geralt is a cold-blooded mercenary and deadpan snarker who rarely has anything but contempt for the people around him. Geralt desperately wishes he could improve the world around him, but he can't because it's not that kind of story. Geralt thus contents himself to pissing against the wind by slaying the worst of the malefactors he encounters and trying to survive another day. The grimdark hero at their best is like Geralt, doing good in
spite of its pointlessness, or at least having fun.
Much of the grimdark hero’s appeal is that they tend not to have degenerated quite as much as their fellows. Another Rob J. Hayes novel, The Color of Vengeance, stars the Blackthorn. The Blackthorn is a character that the preceding novel, The Ties that Bind, establishes as a murderous cutthroat who kills people with absolutely no regard for their innocence or guilt. He kills them simply because they stand in his way. Yet, The Color of Vengeance makes him an engaging hero through his love of his cohorts and gang and contrasts him against the utterly monstrous Swift who has no loyalty to anyone around him.
To use another example, Locke Lamora’s actions would be reprehensible even from a charming rogue such as himself, if not for the fact he is surrounded by psychopaths who bleed the kingdoms dry. Glen Cook’s infamous Black Company’s members are professional mercenaries in the service of an evil overlord but said evil overlord isn’t any worse, really, than the other dictators around her. It’s just she’s better at conquering and despotism. Z, the ruthless anti-hero of the dark urban fantasy Clandestine Daze novels by Tim Marquitz, murders an innocent man then assumes his life because that’s what is required of him to do his job, a job which is all that stands between humanity and the Ael race.
Grimdark is a relativistic genre and, like good and evil itself, an infinite direction you can walk into. The hero is a villain who is a hero compared to a worse villain who might be better still than another.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #5 mobi Page 1
