Mark Lawrence's Reviews > The Grey Bastards

This book got a major publishing deal during the home run of the SPFBO contest. It has the highest score recorded in the 7 years of the contest out of over 2,000 books entered.

http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2...

So this is without question the filthiest fantasy book I've read, beating the former title holder The Grim Company by a factor of ten ... possibly a hundred.

The book has elements in common with Jeff Salyard's Scourge of the Betrayer in that much of it concerns the interplay between a small band of fighters.

But really if you've seen Sons of Anarchy on TV, then that's the perfect parallel. This is a book about a biker gang. Only the bikers are half orcs. And the hogs they ride are actual hogs. The sort that make bacon.



The story starts, and for a long time remains, very small scale. The focus is on the fewer than a dozen half-orcs in our biker gang hoof, and on their squabbles with small numbers of fairly low key antagonists. Some posturing leads to a fight, the fight to a death, the death to the hoof having to pay for prostitutes rather than get freebies ... it's entertaining but not epic.

We discover that the half-orcs have as neighbours all the D&D races with the notable absence of dwarves. But we do see elves, centaurs, orcs, and halflings. If I had been told this in advance it would have put me off reading the book, but fortunately I wasn't and French's take on these guys is sufficiently novel &/or grimy to stop it feeling like discount Tolkien.

Anyway, the plot spirals slowly outwards and turns out to be a complex thing of many moving parts that eventually encompasses two nations and a vast square mileage. The heart of it all though is always the hoof and the tight but complex friendships therein.

If you look past the towering mounds of vulgarity this is actually a book with a lot of heart and no real evidence of the morally grey &/or nihilistic slant often called grimdark. The main half-orc characters are loyal, good-hearted, and as inclined to do the right thing as many a fairy-tale prince, only with bags of very crude sexual innuendo (no, in your endo #Scrubs #TheTodd).

It's a well written book that captures characters well, contains great description, and keeps the pace varied but entertaining. I spotted a grand total of 2 typos and a dozen or so lines I would have scrubbed the purple out of, which now that the book has a major publishing deal should mean that the editors have very little work to do.

I really enjoyed this book. It has charisma. It's very entertaining, it builds to an exciting finish, and left me ready for more.

You know you want to read about a dozen orcs on giant pigs charging into massed centaurs while screaming insults and waving their genitals. Or ... you might not know it ... and be surprised to find that you like it!

++++++++++

Out of the 300 fantasy books that entered my self-published fantasy book contest #SPFBO for 2016 this book was the runaway winner!!

Check out the contest results here, there are other great titles clamoring for your attention.

http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk...



Join my Patreon
Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes



..