Last Argument of Kings (2008) turned out to be the best Sword-and-Sorcery novel I’ve read since David Gemmell’s The Swords of Night and Day back in 2004, the culmination of Joe Abercrombie’s tough love redemption of the oh-so-discredited concept of the fantasy trilogy. An interview displaying the relaxed humor that’s only found in a creator deeply serious about his creations is now up at YouTube; don’t be alarmed by the fact that it’s in five parts, as each is of little more than blink-and-you’ll-miss-it duration.
Abercrombie reveals that John Boorman and Lee Marvin’s brass-knuck classic Point Blank and Machiavelli were the not-so-strange bedfellows that inspired his fourth novel Best Served Cold (to be released this summer), that he won’t be stinting on the “gruesomeness” any time soon, and that some of the secondary characters from Last Argument of Kings and its predecessors show up in the new book without having been persuaded that an ascetic, contemplative, unilaterally disarmed life is best.
Seriously, it’s time to stop wondering about what happens to Brak when he finally reaches Khurdisan (my guess would be, he’s beaten senseless by guardsmen; that’s kind of his thing) and cease work on that lifelong project of creating a spreadsheet for the noun, verb, and adverb variations of every Richard Blade novel’s sex scenes. Instead, why not help Sword-and-Sorcery take a giant step into the 21st century by taking a chance on an Abercrombie novel?