Grimdark #36, October 2023 “That Old Time Religion” by Ken Scoles
“Death at the Pass” by Michael R. Fletcher
“Death and Dignity” by Michael R. Fletcher
“A Marked Man” by T.R. Napper
Reviewed by Geoff Houghton
The Autumn issue of Grimdark contains four new fantasy/horror stories.
The first is “That Old Time Religion” by Ken Scoles, an end-of-the-world story set in the depths of the bible-belt in the present-day USA.
The pastor of a small Midwestern community receives a dangerous revelation and wakens his flock to the power and wonder of idolatry. Within days, his entire congregation has acquired their own physically visible idols that can grant any and every wish or whim, and the sober and sensible town becomes a madhouse in the style of Old Testament Sodom.
The narrator is a cynical, rather half-hearted Christian who appears to be practically the only person immune to the corrosive effect of such instant gratification. As a result of that immunity, the genuine creator God communicates his feelings to this unlikely recipient. Unfortunately for Mankind, the creator turns out to be a tetchy control freak with anger issues who issues a fatwa upon all mankind for their idolatry.
Our horrified human narrator attempts to placate the Lord and then to stop the idolatry, but his attempts are in vain on both counts.
The Lord God admits that he had promised that he would forgo destroying humanity by flood, but points out, with all the devious skills of a mafia consigliere, that that still leaves him many species-destroying tools in his infinite armoury. The idolaters similarly reject our protagonist’s attempts to stop them and the story closes with a new Apocalypse.
The second story, “Death at the Pass,” by Michael R. Fletcher is set in a complex fantasy world of sword and dark sorcery. Unusually, our protagonist is not even alive. He is the corpse of a great warrior from an ancient and long fallen Empire whose magically-enhanced body has been reanimated by a powerful and ruthless necromancer. The necromancer’s aim is to use her slave army of the dead to capture the valuable pass in which tens of thousands of them had perished over millennia of time, but too late, she discovers that she is not the most scary or ruthless creature in that valley of death.
This richly drawn fictional world pits multiple forms of magic against each other in complex alliances and antagonistic groupings and evidence that this is only the beginning of the story is offered by the fact that the third tale in this issue of Grimdark, “Death and Dignity,” also by Michael R. Fletcher is a continuation of the story of our reanimated warrior prince from the distant past. In his second outing, he must face an ancient Wizard with a historical grudge that dates all the way back to the long lost Empire.
The undead protagonist is the last man left still standing and available for further stories about that complex world when his adversaries wrongly assume that they had secured the victory. But why did they consider that causing the warrior’s second death would be any more final than his first?
“The Marked Man” by T.R. Napper is a dark fantasy set in a richly detailed but deeply unlovely world. Arcane power revolves around magical tattoos drawn with enchanted ink. These tattoos are not offensive magic in their own right but they can channel elemental power to their wearer. The exact form of that enhancement is related to the subject matter of the tattoo. For example, a hammer tattoo may confer supernatural strength, a dynamo wheel can grant uncanny stamina and tattoo armour may offer more protection than real chain mail.
This is a multi-layered saga with a primary POV character who is a complex antihero. As the story unfolds, the reader gradually discovers that his pursuers are not the villains that they initially appear to be and the protagonist shows his true nature and inherent flaws even as his pursuers gradually reveal their own honour and decency.
Geoff Houghton lives in a leafy village in rural England. He is a retired Healthcare Professional with a love of SF and a jackdaw-like appetite for gibbets of medical, scientific and historical knowledge.