By Loren L. Coleman

Ace, 2005

Reviewed by Ryan Harvey

The Story

In the Spring after Kern Wolf-Eye fronted a victorious battle against the half-giant warrior Grimnir and his relentless Vanir raiders, Kern takes a small band of his "wolves," which includes his close friends Daol and Reave and the youth Ehmish, and harries the Vanir invaders. He carries the symbolic bloody spear of Clan Calluagh and sets out to spread the unification message to the resistant Cimmerian clans, even though his white hair and yellow eyes brand him as an outcast without the support of any particular chieftain. Kern also plans to learn of Grimnir's new war strategy and place his wolf pack in the giant-kin's way. But the band discovers to their horror that Vanir forces under the leadership of the frost-haired Ymirish have cut a bloody swath through the villages of the Conall Valley. Lodur, the powerful Ymirish sorcerer who leads these attacks, has a special vendetta against Kern.

In the struggle against the Vanir that now follows, Kern will find unusual allies, suffer the first loses among his loyal followers, and face resistant clans and hideous beasts. Most disturbing of all, Kern starts to learn a secret about himself that may effect the outcome of the war to save Cimmeria.

Comments

So where is the rage?

This second volume in the "Legends of Kern" trilogy, set in Cimmeria during the time of King Conan, may not live up to the berserker promise of its title, but it does improve significantly over the haphazard first volume, Blood of Wolves.

Cimmerian Rage carries over a number of the faults that bogged down the first volume, but this second time out author Loren L. Coleman has crafted clever sequences and increased his arsenal with greater variety. Kern and his "wolf pack" of warrior followers still seem to run in circles in their nebulous quest to thwart the Vanir raiders of the giant-kin Grimnir, but at least the action sequences don't blend together into a slog of indistinguishable swordplay-in-the-snow. There's more magic, plenty of new character dynamics, and an expansion of the internecine conflict between the Cimmerian clans, such as introducing a nomadic clan that puts a spin on the idea of Cimmerian unity. Coleman also slathers on the gore and grime of combat and its aftermath. His descriptions of the remains of massacred villages will not sit well with readers accustomed to more gentle fantasy, but such descriptions work in tandem with the grim setting of Cimmeria—even during its spring.

The novel has two excellent action highlights: a clever sneak-attack on a Vanir camp (pitched near the ruins of a fortress that many Robert E. Howard fans will find familiar), and a grisly close-combat with giant spiders. The fight with these monster arachnids is, so far, the only place in the Kern novels where Coleman manages to tap into the Weird Tales spirit and deliver both shivery revulsion and desperate, heroic action. The strange similarity to the spider encounter in The Hobbit aside, it makes for thrilling reading.

The scope of the novel's point of view also broadens out. Readers gets an opportunity to know the villains in a way that they had not in Blood of Wolves. The Vanir and their fearsome frost-haired allies, the Ymirish, mature beyond a horde faceless foes and into identifiable figures. One of the Ymirish, the sorcerer Lodur, takes center stage in a number of chapters, and he's one of the most interesting characters Coleman has yet developed. His obsessive goal to slay Kern creates an anticipation that the first novel lacked. Lodur also wields greater supernatural power than that yet seen in the trilogy, and this gives the tale a needed boost of dark magic.

Despite the new level of mayhem, Kern's wolf pack of Cimmerian defenders appears ridiculously invincible, coming through engagement after engagement with not a single man or woman killed (plenty of injuries, but death eludes them). This problem dogged the first volume and made the action feel devoid of serious consequences. Coleman does try to alleviate the problem here with the death of a minor character; but even though he writes good reflective passages about how the loss effects Kern, the deceased warrior remains nothing more than one name among many in the Cimmerian band.

The general anonymity of most of Kern's band is one of the the flaws that carries over from Blood of Wolves. Only the youth Ehmish pushes out from the crowd of Cimmerian characters, and hopefully Coleman will feature more of him in the last volume. The principle problem that keeps the book from reaching the rage promised in its title is its roundabout plotting. The narrative at first finds a strong motivation for Kern's adventures: spread the uprising against the Vanir among the other clans while placing his band in the way of Grimnir's invasion. But soon the plot diffuses into circular wanderings and encounters with massacred villages, and the geography of where Kern's followers and Lodur's raiders are moving becomes a chore to follow and understand.

I sensed in the first volume of the trilogy that the author had to stretch out the story to fill a whole book, and I noticed the same elongation of sequences here. Some chapters, such as a tour through a slaughtered Cimmerian village, linger on for many pages without much occurring aside from brooding. A few of the chapters away from the wanderings of Kern's band feel like padding, since they connect up with nothing else in the novel. Even though I haven't yet read the third volume, I think I can safely say that "Legends of Kern" would have worked better as a single succinct five hundred page novel instead of a trilogy of shorter, three hundred page novels. A compression of the action would eliminate much of the circular peregrinations of Kern's wolf pack.

The novel's conclusion aims directly for a cliffhanger and therefore stops abruptly. This is the only place where Blood of Wolves is a superior book to Cimmerian Rage, since that first volume could almost stand on its own because of a violent conclusion that tied off many plot strands. The ending to Cimmerian Rage reads as if Coleman simply picked a chapter with a hook ending and decided to cut off the book at that point; it feels nothing like a finale, and I had to check online to make sure my copy wasn't missing a few pages at the end! In the book's favor, the character revelations in this last chapter do promise an even more exciting final book.

If Coleman manages to make the upcoming third volume, Songs of Victory, another step up in quality and plays out all the promises of things to come introduced in Volumes I and II, readers can look forward to an enjoyable ending to a trilogy that started mired deep in a snowdrift of aimlessness.