Book review: Gilead's blood

Much like the previous piece of classic fantasy pulp fiction reviewed on here ("Zavant"), the first book (out of three, I think) about Gilead the elf is not a novel, but a collection of short stories.

These stories are told as 'yarns', or 'legends' if you will, and that is generally always a good way to frame tales like these, as they often do not handle scrutiny very well... So too these stories, as some become almost too intangible and expressionistic to really enjoy, while others seems to involve Gilead slaying hordes of foes, and one is a somewhat poor fry up of "Seven Samurai" (Or "13 assassins")...

I am getting ahead of myself. Gilead the elf is a tragic hero, a melancholy, dysfunctional shell of a man, robbed of his twin, his heritage, other elves to pally around with, etc. It does not spoil things in major ways to reveal that Gilead, the son of an elven lord somewhere in the old world, loses his twin brother, and with him the will to live, and becomes as if half dead. It all works very well, and the character is quite believable and well written, so that the reader understands WHY Gilead is off swinging his sword at anything that seems to need it, relentless and with an obvious deathwish.

Well, it is not quite clear how Gilead got to be SO lethal, but this is a legend, so...

Gilead travels the Old World with his last remaining and ever loyal retainer Fithvael, now in search of other elves, but mostly finding problems and disappointments. Their relationship is interesting, part Crockett and Tubbs, part Batman and Alfred. Homoerotic? I would not say that. Not because the sometimes obvious dificulty in how to handle sex and sexuality in GW books rears its ugly head again, but because Gilead is more akin to a patient, a terrible burden to Fithvael that he carries out of feelings of duty, guilt and responsibility, with perhaps just a ghost of affection for what Gilead was or could have been.

The stories are largely well written, engaging and exciting, with one possible exception that seemed like one had to be chemically enhanced to enjoy it to the max, and the last (and sadly longest) story that just came out a bit predictable and lame.

I liked the book, mainly for the melancholy, and I tend to like that sort of thing, but that does not mean I like ALL the tales of tragedy, vengeance and so on in these books, and it could have easily been handled too crudely to win me over. But it did, and I will probably read more of Gilead, hoping that they have the same strange and terrible beauty to them.

Over all I give it a four out of five. It may not entirely earn it, but it was better than some of the three's, and I enjoyed it.