Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #66, November 2025
“Barnaby’s Deceit” by Al Onia
“Sands and Forest” by Jason M. Waltz
“Great Fire” by MR Timson
Reviewed by David Wesley Hill
It’s been a while since I last reviewed Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, and I was really looking forward to sinking my teeth into the November issue. Unfortunately, the first story, “Barnaby’s Deceit” by Al Onia, is as forgettable as it is generic—of course, the protagonist is a thief nicknamed “the quick,” while his partner in crime is “the spider.” Seriously, what a tired trope—Leiber’s Gray Mouser first appeared in print almost a century ago, for heaven’s sake, in 1938! And in what world, in what fantasy milieu—except, perhaps, a second-rate video game—would you find such a multi-cultural mishmash of names: Barnaby (England); de Grace (France); Wulfa (Germany); Targon (Gondor); Skald (Norway); Banjeem (??); and Aida (Italy). The capstone of this sloppy lack of rigor, what finally blew to smithereens my willing suspension of disbelief, was the phrase, “Bedlam, God of disturbance.” Bedlam, you see, was a real place, an asylum outside of London, and I spent entirely too much time trying to figure out how some central Asian deity came to be christened after a European mental institution in this bit of amateurish gamer fiction inexplicably showcased as a professionally-written tale. Sad!
To my disappointment, the next offering of the issue, “Sands and Forest” by Jason M. Waltz, is three times as long as the first story, and only marginally better written. Again, the titular hero is a thief—a thief!—and once again we have an unexplained conflation of cultures … Sands hails from the Southlands (wherever they are) and his war whoop is … the Lakota battle cry, Hokahey? Anyway, after beating my willing suspension of disbelief into unconsciousness, I was able to endure the remainder of this very long, and very bloody tale, which mainly consists of one interminable battle with the (again, titular) vampiric forest… A story that would have benefited both by being half the length and by being professionally copy-edited … come on, Eds, if you didn’t catch summersault, you weren’t really trying.
Bing, bing, bing! We have a winner, chicken dinner! In a cursed trifecta, the protagonist of “Great Fire” by MR Timson, the final offering of this quarter’s HFQ, is … wait for it … a thief! No, really! Thankfully, though, in this case, in a welcome play against type, the thief is a female known as Cat o’ the Nines. The story is also blessed with an authentic sense of place … England in the year 1666. Hired by a mysterious Welshman, Idris (yes, that is a real Welsh name; I looked it up), Cat is tasked with liberating a baby dragon from captivity in the menagerie of the Tower of London. Of course, things go awry, and it could be that an oven in a baker’s shop on Pudding Lane was not the real cause of the Great Fire but … well, I won’t say. Read the story yourself… Although the ending is somewhat predictable, and the narrative voice a little iffy—according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, ”bloke” didn’t enter the language until the 19th century—I was entertained by the tale, and I can recommend it! Whew! At least one story worth reading. My afternoon wasn’t entirely wasted.