Reviews for Great Condition

The average rating for Great Condition based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-11-11 00:00:00 Todd Menges Arguably the most doom-haunted of Howard's protagonists (because Bran Mak Morn is literally the last king of the Picts (Howard's somewhat ahistorical imagining of an aboriginal British race, although in some ways it was inspired by actual theories at the time), fighting an ultimately losing war against the Roman Empire's British outposts). These are stories that kind of occupy the intersection of the Venn diagram between historical adventure fiction, sword & sorcery and horror -- the main conflict is between the Picts & the Romans, but there are Dark Forces lurking around the edges of things, and at various points, Bran is not above making arrangements with those Dark Forces, even if it may not be the best idea he's ever had. And in one story ("Kings of the Night") he literally summons the spirit of Kull: Exile of Atlantis forward tens or hundreds of thousands of years to join him in his fight against the Romans. (Remember Brule the Spear-Slayer and the other Picts in the Kull stories? Bran is their descendant.) Not a long book, relatively speaking -- only about half a dozen Bran stories, plus some other related stories, poems, fragments, etc., published with Wandering Star/Del Rey's usual attention to scholarship and detail -- but a great one.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-18 00:00:00 Pamela Mayer A fantastic collection of stories, but in a different way than Howard's Conan. Where reading Conan gives you the feeling of a man besting all of the odds and laughing in the face of danger, the Bran Mak Morn stories are more haunting and-in a way-sad. Bran is the king of a dying, deformed people that are quickly fading from the world. Where Conan attempts to tame the wild and laughs in the face of civilization, Bran desperately fights to keep the wild places free in the face of unstoppable progress. This is more than just the tales of Morn, however. Here, we find the tales of the Picts as a people. To really understand what the Picts meant to Howard is to understand Howard himself. More than Conan or Kane, Howard's Picts were the soul of his work in a lot of ways. They represented, for him, the savage, wild, free (and thus true) man. From boxers and cowboys to barbarians and knights, every untamed man that Howard wrote about were shadows and whispers of this wild race.