The Heroes Video
If you are watching GRR Martin’s A Song Of Fire And Ice and enjoying your foray into the world of fantasy then you’ll need to get your chain-mailed arse down to your nearest bookshop and get Joe Abercrombie’s ‘The Heroes’ as it is a cracking good read. Yep, I’m blogging about someone else’s work again and not my own, but it is such good work I need to spread the word around so others can enjoy it as much as I have. Some time ago I was lucky enough to have Joe answer five questions on my blog, something he did which much aplomb, even though the questions were way... way... way... outside the norm he didn’t flinch and answered them in good spirit. Much like some of his characters in ‘The Heroes’
When I bought the book I imagined it was his main protagonists that The Heroes referred to but I was wrong. The Heroes is a group of standing stones atop a hill under which there is the suggestion that great men are buried. Much like Hamburger Hill in Vietnam this particular hill with its eerie set of standing stones, which I imagine in my mind’s eye to be similar to Stonehenge, is occupied by a party of men fighting for The Union, one side in a war that started in his previous books, The First Law Trilogy. Trying to take this hill and its standing stones is Curnden Craw and his crew who are fighting for Black Dow who has proclaimed himself King of the North the other side in this conflict. Against a background of bloody battles fought by men who are lead by incompetent leaders, who have no thought to the cost in lives that taking and maintaining this hill and its surrounds will demand, more than a couple of times I was reminded of the catastrophic leadership in World War One and the terrible losses incurred.
The Heroes is a fast-paced novel that you’ll have to wear running shoes to keep up with, you’ll have to wear eye-protectors because of its gritty and bloody fight scenes and you’ll have to have loads of coffee at your bedside because, if you read in bed like I do then, you won’t want to put it down and sleep.
I just wish I could write half as well as this, and then I’d be pretty happy...
