by Loren L. Coleman

Published by Ace Books

Reviewed by Ryan Harvey

The Story

A harsh winter tears through Cimmeria, and when King Conan withdraws his Aquilonian troops from the country's borders, Vanir from the north make raids deep into the Conall Valley under their fearsome leader Grimnir. Burok Bear-Slayer, chieftain of the village of Gaud, dies from gangrene; the village outcast, the frost-haired and yellow-eyed warrior Kern, ponders his fate should his boyhood tormentor Cul become the new chief. Cul defeats Kern's friend Reave in the challenge for the chieftainship, and then thins the clan by casting out whom he considers unfit--and this includes Kern. Kern heads south with scant hope of surviving, but soon his fate takes a strange turn as he finds himself leading a desperate band of Cimmerians in a campaign to take the war to the invading Vanir. As Kern struggles to learn the secret of his birth and his connection to the "Ymirish," the frost-men of the Vanir, he unifies various Cimmerian clans into a push against the Vanir-infested Broken Leg Lands and a confrontation with the seemingly invincible Grimnir.

Comments:

After a lengthy hiatus, new Conan adventures have at last invaded the bookstores. Except without a particular character: Conan.

The first installment in the next era of Robert E. Howard pastiches, The Legends of Kern: Volume I—Blood of Wolves, arrives this month to start Conan Properties' new publishing strategy in conjunction with the venerable science fiction and fantasy publisher Ace Books. This novel from Loren L. Coleman starts off a Cimmerian trilogy, one of a number of series that will premiere this year and introduce new heroes from across the lands of the Hyborian Age during the time that Conan sits upon the jeweled throne of Aquilonia. The overall series goes under the general title: "Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures."

If this first novel indicates what we can expect from CPI's new publishing plans, the Hyborian Adventures will last as long on the shelves as a snowman in a Stygian summer.

Blood of Wolves is a thundering disappointment, a misfire of Æsir-sized proportions and a poor way to hook new readers into Conan creator Robert E. Howard's classic sword-and-sorcery background. I find it hard to determine exactly whom to blame for the book's failings. Coleman obviously has writing talent, and his prose works far smoother than many of the sloppier Conan pastiches of the 1980s and '90s. However, the novel has a dull and wandering story, and the extensive cast of characters consists almost entirely of names without anything in the way of personality. Blood of Wolves was obviously a collaborative effort between Coleman, CPI, and Ace, but the plot they cobbled together resembles nothing more than an aimless sojourn through ice country with too many confusing battle scenes and gratuitous duels, and too few dramatic consequences.

The story needs a stronger central thrust. The hero Kern leads a party of Cimmerians around the snow of their land during a time of Vanir attacks, but they have no plan onto which the reader can easily latch. The heroes slosh from sacked town to sacked town, picking up more warriors, skirmishing with faceless Vanir, and then splitting up and reforming while hatching another strategy. Anonymous characters like Daol, Raeve, Sláine Longtooth, and Gard Foehammer—no more than names or perhaps a single characteristic—make protagonist Kern's ambiguously plotted quest to "take the war to the Vanir" and discover his parentage even more difficult to find interesting. Even the dark-skinned Shemite Nahud'r, who falls in with the Cimmerians after Kern rescues him from enslavement, does not stand out or achieve anything memorable.

At the heart of the problem lies the new hero, Kern, a Cimmerian whose frost-white hair and yellow eyes make him an outcast from his own Clan Gaud despite his prowess. He takes inspiration from Elric and R. A. Salvatore's dark elf Drizzt, but he has no distinguishing personality of his own. The story should show his gradual development into a great hero and eventual leader of the Cimmerians (the next two novels will follow up on this), but Kern does hardly anything notable or iconic here; even as a warrior he feels second-rate. His unusual coloring and its similarity to the "Ymirish," the frost-men who fight for the Vanir, will hopefully develop in the later novels, since it goes nowhere here except for a few reflective, brooding passages. Kern's only other remarkable feature, an animal kinship to the scavenging dire-wolf Frostpaw, never develops beyond a thematic symbol and an interesting idea. (Frostpaw, however, is one of the better developed of the book's characters. At times I wondered if an animal fantasy based on Cimmerian wolves might have made a more thrilling and original novel.)

Many other intriguing ideas lay scattered throughout Blood of Wolves like corpses on a Nemedian battlefield, but they remain dead and unlooted. A traitor within Kern's ranks changes sides so quickly that he loses all suspense. A romantic possibility between Kern and Maeve, the daughter of Clan Gaud's last chieftain, fizzles quickly. Political tensions between the tribes of Cimmeria receive only lip service and some growls before they smooth over. Perhaps these potential conflicts will emerge stronger in the sequels, but since Blood of Wolves does stand alone as a complete story with a definite conclusion, these loose strands are still disappointing, and they won't make many readers eager to snatch up the next installment.

The book does have a select few interesting and effective passages. It begins promisingly with the death of Clan Gaud's chief and the subsequent free-for-all contest to seize the chieftainship, and then it builds toward the exiling of Kern from the clan. At this point the plot balances on a knife's edge, ready to thrust Kern into a desperate struggle as an outcast. But the novel takes the unfortunate step of sending the hero back to his clan to begin the circular series of wanderings that eventually drain the energy from the narrative. Coleman does sprinkle in a few intriguing action set-pieces, such as the Cimmerians discovering the use of sleds as war weapons, but most of the fight scenes start to blend into each other in the last hundred pages, and none of the battles advance the plot much or have a lasting impact on the characters. For a sword-and-sorcery battle epic, Blood of Wolves has a startlingly low body-count.

Coleman at least creates a better version of Cimmeria than Harry H. Turtledove's suspiciously bucolic rendition in the recent Conan of Venarium. Coleman has done his research into Celts and primitive societies, and the sections involving Cimmerian ritual and custom have the cold steel ring of truth. Still, nothing about the Cimmerians feels as furious and bleak as the hints that Howard made about them in his Conan stories or his essays about the Hyborian Age. You will find bloody combat and gory wounds here, but you will not find the real rage and thunder.

Conan does make an "appearance" of sorts; the Cimmerian warriors mention him often as a living legend, one that collects many other legends to him. In what might be a clever piece of planned retconning, the Cimmerians suggest that many of the tales of Conan actually happened to other heroes, but Conan's larger-than-life persona absorbed them. Could this be a way of explaining away the many Conan pastiches that have followed in Robert E. Howard's wake? Even Howard might have admitted that some of Conan's exploits had undergone 'embellishing' over the years of their telling, either by the minstrels or the aging King Conan himself.

Although Coleman orchestrates numerous battle scenes (too many, actually), he provides only a few droppings of the supernatural and dark horror that are so important to Howard's milieu and his sword-and-sorcery in general. A few extinct beasts, like saber-tooths and mammoths, appear in the climactic combat, and the Vanir make use of some minor magic against their foes, but the aura of the dark fantastic feels sadly absent.

When I first heard the announcement that CPI's new publishing campaign would move away from the character of Conan and focus on other figures of the Hyborian Age, the possibilities excited me. Twenty years of Tor pumping out Conan adventures had strip-mined the character into near obsolescence, and new blood and new characters sounded like the perfect solution to the rut. But after only one book, I feel much more cautious and apprehensive about the coming "Hyborian Adventures."

And I miss Conan already.