Over at The Book Smugglers, by Mark Charon Newton, author of various titles plus a new book coming out soon, DRAKENFELD: Beyond Violence.
This guest post is enough to make me add DRAKENFELD to my wishlist so I don’t lose track of it. A “pseudo-classical crime fiction set in a secondary world”? Sounds interesting, especially when Newton says:
“I wanted to respond to the changing sentiment in genre discussion that I was observing a couple of years back, the sentiment that violence equated to a good book. I thought to myself that we can do better than that. It was also a bit of a challenge to myself as a writer. Could I get that same rush of adrenaline without stooping to violent pyrotechnics – which, potentially, possibly, I may have been guilty of in the past?
So that’s how the character Lucan Drakenfeld was born.”
You all know how I feel about grimdark. Ugh. Especially when its fans claim it is “realistic.” As if. Plus, I definitely like the idea of a neo-classical setting for a crime story where the main character is “cerebral, polite, and lacks a fascination with heaving bosoms.”
But the other reason you should click through and read the post is because the video snippets embedded in the post are entertaining. Especially if you love the movie “Groundhog Day.”
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Completely agreed! Both about the post itself and about adding Drakenfeld, which I hadn’t even heard of. I love thinky posts like these from authors, especially the ones I might not have otherwise come across. And I think Newton really hit the nail on the head with his assessment of grimdark. As someone somewhere on the internet pointed out, a lot of grimdark fans appear to be reasonably middle-class white men who yet insist that “this is the way the world is!” I don’t mean to say that’s the only way of looking at it, or that those are the only fans, but I do get very impatient with the notion that if you don’t like a lot of violence, sex–and especially sexual violence–in your books, you’re a prude or ignoring reality or something.
I’m not sure that’s 100% on topic, but oh well! It is too early on a Saturday to try to figure it out. :)