Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie

[lightreads]

Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie




Revenge fantasy, and by ‘fantasy’ I mean the swords and sorce—okay, no, just the swords kind. And maces and axes and a lot of knives. This is that new millennium brand of epic fantasy, you know the kind that dropped all the nebulously old-fashioned dialogue and portentous prophecies for a lot of fucking and people calling each other cocksucker in gritty patois. It’s supposed to be more real or something. I dunno, I don’t think I identify any extra with a woman bent on killing the seven people who killed her brother just because she says ‘motherfucker’ almost as much as I do.



…Is it relevant that I’m drunk reviewing again?



The point. The point! About 300 pages too long, and it does the things you expect a revenge book to do – wrecking some lives and redeeming others. It does them pretty well, on the whole, though not spectacularly. But it’s been three months since I read this, and the thing I remember most is the way Abercrombie writes about violence. He has this – I don’t want to call it a gift, though that’s what it is. He has this grasp for the sounds bodies make, and for the ways they move in instinct and in pain. His sex scenes and his knife fights have the same vocabulary, though there’s usually less intestines in with the sex. I’d say that impressed me, but it’s also not quite the right word.





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