Black Gate Online, August 11, 2013
“The Serpent of Thep” by Vaughn Heppner
Reviewed by Matthew Nadelhaft
One of the minor annoyances with fantasy literature, to me, is the names. Here I am, reviewing a story called “The Serpent of Thep,” which contains the characters Eglon, Zeiros, Lod, and Lord Lamassu, among others. It’s not just the confusion these sorts of names wreak upon my spellchecker, it’s the sense of dissociation they create when reading. I understand that part of the allure of fantasy is the exotic and unfamiliar, but I find that too much alienness sometimes interferes with my ability to become involved, to empathize with the characters, to visualize the situation. Each time I encounter a name like “Yorgash” I am jolted out of that state of immersion good fiction imparts.
More experience reading heroic fantasy may grant me the ability to assimilate these disjunctive elements, but it seems its realism that appeals to me the most. Vaughn Heppner’s story, for instance, contains intense descriptions of the life of a galley slave. Lod toils in the hold of the story’s titular ship, along with several hundred other poor wretches. Heppner’s feel for their lives is admirable and he paints a gripping picture of the abuses they suffer, of their desperation and their futile resistance.
The problem is that Heppner can’t keep his focus on these slaves while telling the story he wants to tell: of a naval battle fought with sorcery, swordplay, monsters and fire. So the narrative is shared between Lod and the ship’s captain, Elgon. Elgon is an interesting and well-constructed character, but I couldn’t picture him as the captain of a warship, and none of his actions in the story credited him with any sense of authority. Galley slave Lod seems far more suited to the task of captaining a warship, which may have been Heppner’s intent, but we still need to believe Elgon capable enough to have been entrusted with his position.
As is so often the case with fantasy I found the prose over-descriptive, with some phrases carrying so many images that they start to get in each other’s way. One character, a woman only referred to as “the Harlot,” seems to have no purpose other than to be described, repeatedly, as wanton, lascivious, scantily-dressed. I’m not, of course, averse to description and imagery, but telling us over and over, in slightly different words, that Lod is massive or that the Harlot is barely dressed adds little to our understandings of the characters. The heart of this story is in its action, not its prose, so it would have been better written in a manner that directs the reader’s attention there.