“When You Talk, You Are Only Repeating What You Know. But If You Listen, You May Learn Something New”
Dalai Lama XIV
Something different for this post – none of my words – just those of the author:
“Saw a lot of people come and go over half a lifetime on the Range. Some of them came and went, some of them came and died, and the ones that did neither weren’t often the kind you wanted around. First time you lose a friend, feels like you’ll never be the same again. Lose enough of them, you realize you aren’t the same, but you’ve forgotten h ow to be whatever it was you were before.”
“When you realize the mountain you’ve been climbing is just a heap of s**t, the fall doesn’t feel so far”.
“Real power shows itself through the disregard one has for those that defy it.”
“People are sheep,” I said. “They do as you tell them.. They believe what they want to, or whatever frightens them the most. If they don’t like it, they reject it or they ignore it. It’s natural. Can’t blame them for it. Can’t tell them they’re stupid either. They don’t understand that they’re sheep. How could they? The sheep don’t realize the shepherd is smarter than they are.”
“We all sat down, and Destran brought coffee. According to Dantry, it was an excellent, smooth blend, but to me all coffee tastes the same. It tastes like not-booze, which means it might as well be mud from a ditch.”
“The poker was starting to glow red at the tip. Not quite hot enough, not yet. Stannard knew his business. Wasn’t his first time playing the torturer either. Prince Herono sat with a faraway look, deep in thought, somewhere else. Nice to know that my impending agonized destruction wasn’t the most important thing on her mind. I could smell the iron getting hot, giving the air that forge-baked hollowness, the dry empty flatness of scorched metal.
The world is a cruel mother, a matron of darkness, selfishness, greed, and misery. For most, their time suckling at her breast is naught but a scramble through stinging, tearing briars before a naked, shameful collapse as the flesh gives out. And yet in the bright eyes of every newborn, there lies a spark, a potential for goodness, the possibility of a life worth living. That spark deserves its chance. And though most of them will turn out to be as worthless as the parents who sired them, while the cruelty of the earth will tell them to release their innocence and join in the drawing of daggers, every now and then one manages to clutch to its beauty and refuses to release it into the dark.”
“The Iron Goat had decided to go as well though there was no running for him. His withered, shrunken frame swayed in a cold wind blowing in through the windows. The plush red curtains lay in a heap on the floor. He’d used their hanging cord to form the noose, made a ceiling beam his own gallows. His eyes stared, tongue protruding from his toothless gums. I stood in the doorway, watched his cadaver sway in the wind. Before I’d come to the Range, there had been stories of Range Marshal Venzer. A tactician so cunning that the Deep Kings had chased him across the Misery. A living legend, responsible for countless triumphs, a man who made every arrow go farther, made every campfire seem warmer just by sheer force of reputation. I’d have died for that man, and now he slowly swung back and forth in an uncaring wind. Just another body.”
“Half armor is like a whore’s dress: just enough there to cover the vitals without getting in the way of business.”
This was an exceptional debut by a writer who, IMHO, has the potential to tell truly exceptional stories in a truly exceptional way for quite some time. I was locked onto every word, sentence, page and chapter and did not let go until it was done. It was everything that Cameron Johnson would have wanted “The Traitor God” to be and more.
I’ll have to go back and review my reads but – right now – still thinking through the last few pages, I have to say that this may represent the best book I’ve read this year.
Please give it a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. You’ll be hammered a bit flat – it’s humorless and quite dark – but you won’t be disappointed.
Have a Great Week.