Part of cultivating your literary skills is reading different genres, if only as a trial, and lately I’ve been getting into the pulps. A short story of Ray Bradbury’s (creepy), some Solomon Kane and Conan the Barbarian (interesting), and now a more modern offering: The Long Moonlight. Whether it is intended to fit into the pulp archetypes or not, The Long Moonlight bears the stamp of Conan and Solomon Kane, alongside its more noir elements.¹ If you like R.E. Howard’s work, I recommend giving it a try.

I don’t recommend this book for everybody. If you want a hero you can cheer on and applaud, look for another book. If you want to be buoyed up with jollity, continue on. If you want deep philosophical musings, have fun somewhere else (which is not to say the book is shallow: it’s just not into navel-gazing).

I do recommend this book, though. It’s dark, it’s fast-paced, it’s a little grimy, and it has barbed wire on its hands to keep your attention fixed. It has a definite style and identity, one I’ll be discussing at more length below. If you want to try your interest at reading an engrossing, gritty run of action and excitement, The Long Moonlight is for you.

The Prose

If you’ve enjoyed to a few of the pseudonymous author’s videos, such as this talk about the pulps that got me interested therein, you’ll probably be able to hear the story speaking aloud. Razorfist’s voice and style come through clearly in the narration, and that’s not a bad thing, though it does have its strengths and weaknesses. Its style is swift, effective, and matter-of-fact, with business-like flourishes and the occasional word that most readers will need to look up in the dictionary.²

It’s in the prose that I see some of R.E. Howard’s influence. That author has a distinctive style, a sort of fervid over-saturation of language which fits and forms an essential part of the power of his narratives, whether Kane or Conan. Razorfist’s style probably has a little lower average word length than Howard’s, but it has strains of the same vigor and verve. If I had to sum its relationship, Razorfist’s style is a more modern, cooler relative of Howard’s, suited to a narrative whose actors are a little less archetypical, a little smaller, a little less brightly painted, a little more real-human than Howard’s near-archetypes.

Razorfist does have some points where his prose could improve. The most annoying, for me, are the occasional disjunctions of perspective, particularly in the first chapter, points where it takes a few lines and some reevaluation to figure out who is thinking or speaking. On a few occasions, too, the narrative slips a little away from the general third person near, offering information the character doesn’t have (not yet), something not entirely uncommon in stories but a pet peeve of mine. I will note that after the first two chapters, I didn’t particularly have issues figuring out perspective, which I attribute to a combination of the first chapters legitimately having a greater issue here and myself adjusting to the book’s style.

Razorfist’s sentences also have a little awkwardness to them at times. Occasionally, a sentence is just a little out of whack. In the sentence, “Practically unconscious of his advance, it came as a surprise when Xerdes head collided with the wall,” (which also misses an apostrophe+’s’- Xerdes’s possessive form is messed up not a few times),³ the introductory phrase seems on first reading like it should modify ‘it’, the meaningless holding-subject, but it actually refers to the protagonist. Context makes this clear enough, but it’s still an imperfection. Whether Razorfist’s overall style, making plenteous use of sentence fragments, many as short a single word, ameliorates or worsens the impact of these problems I am unsure, though I lean to amelioration.

Finally, a note on expletives and sexual content. I don’t recollect any theological expletives, though it’s possibly I missed one. I did see at least one use of a word for male genitalia as an expletive element. Certain elements of the story rely on being aware of sexual attraction and its basic ideas, but this isn’t a kid’s book anyway (it’s really not a kid’s book). Certainly no explicit sexual content is included, just some slight implications, no worse than, say, Howard’s The Frost Giant’s Daughter.

Characters

Don’t go into this story looking for somebody to admire wholeheartedly. Xerdes and the closest he gets to a fellow protagonist (his love interest) are neither of them particularly good people. Xerdes thus is a master thief and completely unrepentant about it. He might regret a particular heist, but only because of the danger, not because he has an issue with stealing. He doesn’t. He barely has an issue with killing, more of a disinclination or a distaste than anything, and he doesn’t need much reason to get over the preference. Even in the end, when facing the consequences of his actions, he has no abstract care for the effects of his actions on people outside his small orbit (and even for those…). He denies the existence of innocence (and not without reason).

Nevertheless, if you engage with the characters, the narrative rewards the experience. Xerdes lives a dirty, rotten, low-down life but also one full of motivation, skill, and excitement. He shows capacity to care for others, a real passion for his work, and a hard-nosed practicality which lends character to both his defeats and his victories.

As for the side-characters, they are all of them reprobates, with one potential exception (Inspector Coggins, grim-faced and pragmatic but also the only (possibly) righteous man). The dialogue is terse, with the tension of people who really mean the specific words they say (especially when they’re bald-faced lies), not modern quippiness, and Razorfist writes his characters in color and vigor and fast-pumping blood, full of human greed and human desire and human determination (as well as some well-sharpened wit). Do I admire them? Not really. Do I like them? A few, yes. Do I enjoy seeing them grind each other to dust? Most certainly.

Illustrations

The illustrations really add atmosphere and effect to the story, with a dark, affective style that really works for the narrative. By themselves, they’re not (to my untrained eye, at least) exceptional, but they serve their place in the story well. The sketch on pg. 85 (softcover) is particularly visceral, aided by its role in resolving the building dread of the narrative at that point.

Plot – Spoiler Warning

/SPOILERS START/

The story of The Long Moonlight doesn’t have a happy ending, nor, to its credit, does it try to prime you for one. Xerdes gets an ever bumpier ride down to Hell, then hits a spot pretty close to the bottom, snaps, and starts dragging specific people down with him. Hell in a handbasket is the result, for everybody. Then, as the end, there is explicit recognition that the players, not the game or its results, have changed. The city is still in turmoil, still grimy, still over-run with danger and evil-doing.

The story does not hold your hand over-much in the effort of figuring out what’s happening and why. How, precisely, the events cause each other, that is left in part for the reader to discover by implication. The causative chain is there, but the links are not explicit. You have to be intentional about finding them (and they are there to be found). This can leave the story feeling a bit disjointed, at times, when you have to scramble to figure out what happened between this scene and the last one, what changed and what it means going forward. On the other hand, it means that the story spends its time on the bones and muscles of the story, not the interstitial flesh or the tendons, keeping the pace quick, the scenes sharp, and the plot moving.

Before we proceed, I’d like to consider the question of that lack of any happy ending. From an artistic perspective, it works really well. From the beginning of the story you get a taste for its world and its genre. As a result, that tragic ending is a foretaste already in the first few chapters, even if you don’t see its precise shape. There’s a persistent certainty that nothing good can come of what just happened, not in the long run.

Morally, though, some of us will have questions about a story without hope. Now, personally, I don’t tend to write those; I’ve written stories without hopefulness, but never (to my memory) a story which didn’t even show a path of hope. But before I condemn Razorfist’s work, I must ask: is it just? Is it realistic? If the wages of sin are death, then this story comes out clear. Everybody works out sin, and they receive death of some sort, whether actual or symbolic- thematic or simply looming behind and before them. In sum, they live in an evil place, doing evil things, and eventually, some even recognize this.

Would I write this story? I don’t think I could, right now. But Razorfist pulls it off.⁴ I take into account also that this is the first book in a series- a series I have not yet read later entries in- and so I’m lacking some information that might or might not be pertinent.

Conclusion

I recommend reading this story if you think you can stomach it. It has its rough patches, skill-wise, but the overall result is excellent, a strong showing for an author who, if my reading is correct, had this as his first major output. I mean, you should definitely read my book first, but that was obvious already. The Long Moonlight is not particularly long, but it packs a punch. Go read it.⁵

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – I caution you here that I have not read much noir, if any (I’m not sure that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep counts), and am somewhat guessing.

2 – I assume, based on my need to (though in one instance, I forget where, I’m pretty sure it was a typo), as I have generally found my vocabulary is on the larger side, barring specialist/ technical terms. Words like ‘algid,’ ‘cimmerian,’ and ‘boot’ (not the boot you’re thinking of) are not very common.

3 – For the curious, I’ve found [Xerdes] and [Xerdes’]; the proper form is [Xerdes’s], as per Strunk & White, though leaving out the ‘s’ is, if not technically right, at least colloquially acceptable. To me, this is not a big problem, even if it does mean I occasionally see the typo word as an adjectival form of the name, rather than as a misspelled possessive.

4 – I offer neither endorsement nor condemnation of his worldview or morals, as I don’t know the man or much about his positions there. I do caution that he has had in the past an association, of the sort two people who talk about the same topics on the internet have, with Styxhexenhammer, a political commentator with strong connections (practicing, I think, though I’ve not investigated much) with the occult.

5 – I think this is the most straight-out review I’ve done. So, yay?