New fantasy book available on Amazon.com

I’ve always been more partial to George RR Martin and David Gemmell, but it seems there is a new fantasy writer on the scene and he’s coming loaded for bear.

It’s about a bunch of disgruntled dwarves who join a military unit and go off to fight, but they see things other don’t see. So, they are fighting an actual enemy, and also a supernatural one that no one else around them can see. I haven’t read it yet, but from the excerpts, it just doesn’t sound all the realistic, even for a fantasy novel. For instance:

“I remember one woman walking by,” said Jason Washburn, a corporal in the U.S. Marines who served three tours in Iraq. “She was carrying a huge bag, and she looked like she was heading toward us, so we lit her up with the Mark 19, which is an automatic grenade launcher, and when the dust settled, we realized that the bag was full of groceries. She had been trying to bring us food and we blew her to pieces.”

Now, why the character didn’t just use a sidearm to down this threat, or tell her to stop before using the grenade machine gun to obliterate her isn’t entirely clear. It reads like a Schwarzenegger film where everyone is running pell mell around and the good guys never get hit. I mean, really, when you hit a lady and a bag of groceries with numerous 40mm rounds, I don’t know that you could identify the contents of the bag all that well.

Here’s another passage:

“One time they said to fire on all taxicabs because the enemy was using them for transportation…One of the snipers replied back, ‘Excuse me? Did I hear that right? Fire on all taxicabs?’ The lieutenant colonel responded, ‘You heard me, trooper, fire on all taxicabs.’ After that, the town lit up, with all the units firing on cars. This was my first experience with war, and that kind of set the tone for the rest of the deployment.”

See what I mean? He’s sacrificed believability for a good yarn.

I hope it ends with Charlie the Unicorn making it to Gum Drop Mountain.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War