I finally had the time to sit and read James LaFond’s short novel "Reverent Chandler" in full and without interruption, and upon finishing it, there was a quality about it that I've found haunting. It's been rattling around in my mind since then, and it makes me grateful for this guerrilla insurgency of words and thoughts that allowed our paths to cross.

I've recently moved, and to occupy my mind while waiting for the machine to finish my post-moving-in-laundry at the laundromat, I'd sprung for the $.99 kindle version of Robert E. Howard's collected works. (Technological progress I can believe in.) While there, I'd read a chunk out of the first story, "The Phoenix on the Sword." When I came to the following, it immediately sank a barb, reminding me of a theme running through LaFond’s work:

I mention that so the reader gets an idea of where my head was at when at last my chores were done, the guests were gone, and I found sufficient solitude to crack the seal on "Reverent."

The prose synched up with Howard's remarkably. With his work fresh on my mind, I could see it reflected in LaFond’s story of “the Nords,” while at the same time, he took that root and grafted in something that is distinctly his own. As for the story itself...it took me for a ride.

As it began, I was immediately struck by how dark and grim it was. (The babies brained against the tree made it abundantly clear that the author wasn't fucking around with us.) With the slaughter so complete, it was like there was no reason to hope. All the people are dead; now what? Even with the war band trying to save the Reverent, the Nords were still lost, and as each one fell, it ratcheted up the sense of tragedy. The loss and merciless brutality provoked an emotional response in me, and I found myself hating the Papas/Muds/Mudders, and in turn rooting for the band.

I suppose Nord's last stand was when it really made me begin to get lost in it. Getting to see them in action; how they thought and acted in the crucible. (Much like Howard's work, and as Mister LaFond has noted, a modern reader has difficulty truly identifying with the barbarian. We can only view them as outsiders. As he put it in a review of Howard’s work, "Reading a Conan, Kull or Kane story gives the reader the sense of being next to the hero, not the delusion that he is the hero, which is the only way that a denatured product of modernity could understand it." With the first of our heroes to fall, I found myself unconsciously drawing closer to them.) After seeing him fight on while his legs were getting eaten made me grateful the author let him take the head of the Mud who dealt him the death blow.

When Cull made his berserker symphony of violence, covered in shit and piss, it made me cheer, and his interior monologue regarding his axe ("She loved him no longer, his powers having seeped into the dank earth and with them his allure. He wished not, wanted to cleave on, but knew better and let her go.") was something I particularly enjoyed (having developed attachments to weapons and gear myself and seen others do likewise.) His blasphemous nature and high spirits were mixed in ways I've seen in infantrymen, and I couldn't help but like him.

I was ambivalent of Est at first; him being a badass swordsman juxtaposed against his bullying of Fend rustled me, but at the end, where he calls down death, he'd redeemed himself in my eyes. What's more, the use of a character wielding nature like a weapon isn't something you see every day, and it really showed how much this author can get outside the box.

Fend snuck up on me. His alienation as a result of his sensitivity and intelligence rang all too true, given the social dynamics of groups consisting of men whose world touches violence. (It also offered an interesting glimpse into their culture; not only in how they see healers as effeminate, but in their prohibition on domestication of animals.) By the end though, I was rooting for him, and all too happy to see him come into his own and evolve into a sort of barbarian warrior-shaman.

Aside from the characters, there were some other things that jumped out at me. The significance of codices was particularly interesting. Their use by both Nords and Muds as a shield (or a weapon as was the case with the Papa/Mud at the end chanting their blasphemies) at times seemed almost to work as a metaphor (like a narrative or story literally being used to protect a person or people), to say nothing of it being a kind of symbol of a people's identity. Also, the hints here and there that we were glimpsing a future Earth became things I found myself looking for, so when the end came, a part of me hoped that not only would something survive of the Nord, but that we might get a bit of a confirmation.

With all that in mind, I was still surprised by the ending. I truly didn't expect that to play out the way it did, and it left me excited—we find out that all this played out as a small drama in a very big world, and just ratcheted things up, letting us know you were just getting started. I look forward to seeing the continuing adventures of Fend and finding out where James intends on taking us with this thing. In the meantime, I'll give it a second read…

Samuel Finlay

Thanks for the good review, Sam. I’ve thrilled to reading about fighting men since I was a boy, and tried, in writing this, to pay all of those men back in the form of a story. I also was not sure if I should put time into a sequel, until you wrote this review.

If you’d like to read about Sam’s experience fighting in an alien land, checkout Breakfast with the Dirt Cult at the link below.

If you would like to read Reverent Chandler the Amazon link is here.