Hugh Cook's excellent: Chronicles of an Age of Darkness, finally have new editions after languishing in copyright limbo for decades.

Cook plays with genre tropes, mixing adventure, satire and humor, elements that help these books transcend the limits that make so many other works of the 80s and 90s feel so dated.

The fan group that published them have made the effort to offer them at venues other than Amazon.

You can get them DRM free while supporting local book shops at BookShop.org:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Chronicles+of+an+Age+of+Darkness%2C

@bookstodon #BookShop #amReading #SFF #fantasy #eBook #HughCook #BooksTodon #independent #copyright #republished

WAYNE'S 2024 BOOKS: BOOK 4

Plague Summer
by Hugh Cook

I love Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. Book 4 of that sprawling series - The Walrus and the Warwolf - is probably my favourite book of all time. So when a redditor alerted the Hugh Cook subreddit that a copy of his first novel Plague Summer was available at AbeBooks, I jumped at the chance to see what it was like.

Unfortunately, I won't be adding it to my top 10 list, or my top anything list.
It's not bad per se, but... it's not great.

Plague Summer tells the story of Oberth, an unlikable protagonist involved in petty and not-so-petty crime in the mean streets of Auckland in the 1980s. He's disreputable, with a grab-bag of prejudices and bad character traits piled on each other, and the sum doesn't result in a 'terrible but fascinating' whole, but rather, he's just... an unlikeable guy.

The book meanders on its way to the event that inspired the title, and it's not a good meandering. The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness at times had a travelogue feel, with the protagonists exploring - or being forced to traverse or escape - a wide variety of interesting realms and locales. Oberth's journey isn't particularly interesting, and not even the locale - New Zealand's Northland - can save it. There's drama and tension but I found it hard to actually care about Oberth in the way I cared about the main characters in Cook's other books.

It's not all bad though; at times, there's flashes of the wordy and offbeat style that Cook will develop, and some great turns of phrase. It's a first novel, and I'm glad he was able to move on to better things following Plague Summer!

#reading #books #bookreview #hughcook #reading2024

Any other Hugh Cook fans out there?!!

#ShoutingIntoTheVoid #HughCook