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David Craddock on Steven Erikson’s ‘Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, volume 1′
Posted by Darren on October 4th, 2007 at 16:36
David Craddock, writing on the Fantasy Book Critic blog, has reviewed our Steven Erikson novella collection, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach: The Collected Stories, Volume One, which compiles the three titles Blood Follows, The Lees of Laughter’s End and The Healthy Dead into one handy, recently re-released volume for only £20 ($40 approx.)
David was particularly impressed by Steven Erikson’s superb characterisation, comparing it extremely favourably to sometimes less-successful efforts that can be found in much longer works:
“Relying more on people rather than a world to drive his action, the strong personalities of Bauchelain the conjurer, Korbal Broach the eunuch, and Emancipor ‘Mancy the Luckless’ Reese drive each of the novellas. Though the reader never fails to uncover new facets of each of these three main personalities throughout the trilogy, each protagonist’s goals, and motivations used to reach those goals, are understood almost perfectly by the midpoint of Blood Follows. Some authors fail to convey proper understanding of their protagonists over the course of several books, but Erikson does so after a few dozen pages.”
David concludes: “Bauchelain and Korbal Broach… not only combines three novellas that form a complete story, but does so with the fluidity lacking in many 1,000-plus page monsters.” Which touches on just one of the reasons why we here at PS love the novella form so much, and why we’re so keen to see as many excellent novella-length works make it into print as we possibly can.