Okay, that's a disingenuous title. There's actually nothing wrong story wise with Imaro, by Charles Saunders. (Sister feminists, please note: I DO acknowledge the misogyny in the work, yet I accept it as part of the template for this type of traditional s&s. I'm not gonna give him shit about it or invalidate the entire work because of it, in part because (in my mind, anyway) he apologized later with the character of Dossouye. You wanna take and shred my feminazi card? Fine. The HNIC sends me revocation notices all the freakin' time and you can see what a fat lot of good that does, with my black ass joyously running around a Renaissance faire for weeks. I'll just point out that pretty much all the white boys have EVER given we ladies in this subgenre was Red Sonja, she who must be raped and dominated before she can "blossom" into full womanhood. They love her so much they use her over and again in prose, comics and movies. As we note that the Big Red emerged in the mid-80s at around the same time Saunders gave us Dossouye, and as we ponder why the white boys need their strong women raped and denied full use of their sexuality until they can "be made women again" only through repeating an act of rape and dominance, and revel in how Saunders didn't do that when he decided to make a kick-ass fighting woman .... we trip up in the tangle of a poorly constructed sentence and stop. The point is that to me Dossouye gives Saunders a pass for the depiction of women throughout the Imaro saga. Hmm.. Maybe I should do up a post down to road with reccs of good s&s that maintains the traditional form while allowing the women to be strong . Okay! On the list that idea goes! I like it. When I get around to it, I hereby promis NOT to go off on a tangent about how Saunders is THE ONE PERSON RESPONSIBLE for me never getting my Dahomey-inspired stuff out of random notes and into story form over all these years. Those Dossouye stories were so powerful they coded directly into my DNA, and I haven't been able to figure out how to work around that. I SHAKE MY FIST AT THAT MAN EVERY SINGLE TIME I REREAD THAT STUFF. *sniff* *pout*) ANYways, where was I?
Right. I hadn't read the original novel in umpteen years, and though I had forgotten about the Whole Lots Of Elipses thing, the novel is still great fun. Lots of stuff is different in this version than in the original book that DAW put out way back then; didn't realize just how much was tweaked until I started reading. No worries, though, it's still a strong, glorious, total immersion read. Fans of heroic fantasy should DEFINITELY put Imaro on their Things To Read list.
The only problem with Imaro lies with the book as a physical object, which, like all paperbacks I've purchased from Nightshade Books, began falling apart before I was even 1/4 of the way through it. By the time I was past the halfway point, turning a page meant often watching that page rip free of the spine. By the time I was finished, the back cover and spine had divorced themselves from the rest of the book. There's a reason I got Move Under Ground in hardback (besides my Lovecraft jones). I wanted to have a copy of that book that I didn't need to keep held together with rubber bands. Nightshade's hardbacks are fine. It's their paperbacks which are levels of suck. When word came down that the reissue of Imaro was going to paperback I almost didn't order it for just this reason. Happily, the fangirl in me won out over the disgrunted customer. Oh well. I've got lots and lots of rubber bands. I'm just not gonna be able to loan this out, is all, nor will I buy loaner copies.
(Though part of me will always cut Nightshade a wee bit of slack because of what they're doing with the fantabulous Manly Wade Wellman, an author in my pantheon and one of the best traditionalist American fantasy writers whom everyone should read Because I Said So.)
Anyways! What was the most exciting new thing about reading Imaro? This bit from the introduction:
"For many years Charles has been working on a stunning series of high fantasy novels Combining Celtic and African mythology."
That line filled me with the same jolt of combined ! yaay ! and ! dismay ! I experienced after finishing American Gods and musing I bet he's gonna do something more with Anansi...
The Imaro introduction also mentioned there's a Dossouye novel in the works. THANK YOU, JESU! (Said even as we bash our heads against the desk at that news.) No linky with this one because there appears to be on comprehensive Dossouye page out there that Google can find. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Also, there's a fascinating bit in the second intro about why "Slaves of the Giant King" isn't part of this new Imaro narrative, and why Tanisha showed up in a different way. That's good stuff for the writerly among us to read and mull.
