This Crooked Way by James Enge

If you love to read, one benefit of being out of the loop for awhile is that when you start paying attention again, there are whole unread series, not just a book here and there, to hold your attention for hours at a time.

Morlock Ambrosius is, as someone else said somewhere (?), one of the few iconic figures to emerge in the current/ongoing Sword & Sorcery renaissance. I read "The Red Worm's Way" in the anthology RETURN OF THE SWORD and ordered the first novel, BLOOD OF AMBROSE, quickly, hoping for more of the same, and got it. What a great book!

So could THIS CROOKED WAY possibly be equal to what'd come before?

It is. It's the same only different. James Enge is an interesting thoughtful writer. You see him do these little things all the time in the writing that show either off-the-cuff genius or a lot of rewriting, no way to know which.

Example? Okay. One of the most fun parts of his writing is when hero Morlock, faced with some impossible task, pulls a magic whatsit out of his pocket and turns it on and the story proceeds uninterrupted. Now, this sort of deus ex machina could get old fast in the wrong hands, but as one example of careful writing and how you get around it, there's a point in THIS CROOKED WAY where the characters have to access a high up window in an unassailable house. So Morlock pulls a magic bean out of his pocket, plants it, and rides up on the fast-growing beanstalk.

It turns out he had 3 more, but he traded them to some guy for his cow. I don't have the book in front of me as I write this, but Morlock's comment on the wisdom of trading the magic beans for the cow is, "But I really needed that cow." So: it isn't just a plot gimmick, suddenly Morlock is the guy from "Jack and the Beanstalk"! And on the story goes.

THIS CROOKED WAY is what's called a picaresque novel (meaning episodic), unlike BLOOD OF AMBROSE, which built and built upon its plot arc until the spectacular ending. (These pieced-together novels also used to be called "fix-ups," a term I believe invented by A. E. Van Vogt for novels made up of previously written short stories, but used by others including the legendary Philip K. Dick, who wrote several and may have gotten the concept from Van Vogt for all I know [he was a huge admirer of his on numerous other levels]).

THIS CROOKED WAY is different than its predecessor also in that it's told from multiple points of view; moreover, multiple first person points of view. As a struggling amateur fiction writer myself for many years, I can tell you getting the voice in the story right is a big deal, and so to deliberately switch it around?

But it works. Again and again, I had that slight bump for a page or two when the new "story" began and the pov character went from a soldier to mother to daughter, etc., inevitably within a page or two I'd forgotten and was wholly into the tale again.

Because of this approach, we get to see Morlock Ambrosius from multiple angles, which only lends complexity/depth to a character whose "obvious" traits become more and more familiar to us as we go along.

(The reference to Morlock as "iconic" makes total sense to me, and will to anyone who's enjoyed the stories. I assume our response is partly due to Enge's comfort with writing the character. He said in one interview he'd been writing about Morlock for thirty years. Anyway, I get it. One has a sense of Morlock after awhile the same as you do reading Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, or Sherlock Holmes, et. al. We get a sense of a stable character, yet the stories continue to surprise.)

I haven't said too much about the plot and won't. There are nasty bug invaders, and the parts told from their pov are particularly well done, reminding me for some reason of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live In Vain." You aren't fed the backstory on these creatures; you get their story from their pov and figure it out as you go. Highly effective; well done.

THIS CROOKED WAY is definitely a keeper. I read it in two days. And now it's going to be a YEAR before the next one comes out. Blah.