Stealer of Flesh - William King

I know William King primarily as an author for the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 lines of epic fantasy and science fiction, although I haven't read any of his work for them. But he's also written quite a bit in universes of his own, including a sword-and-sorcery series about a warrior/priest (a Guardian of the Dawn) named Kormak. The first book in this series, STEALER OF FLESH, is a series of four linked novellas: "The Demon Unleashed", "The Wolves of War", "The Flesh Stealer", and "That Way Lies Death". In his notes on the collection, King discusses how as a young man he was a reader and fan of the sword-and-sorcery tales of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, and others, especially the way so many of the stories by those authors were novellas instead of the enormous doorstop trilogies and endless series that passes for heroic fantasy these days. He set out to write something similar, and STEALER OF FLESH is the result. I can certainly see the influence of those authors in these yarns.

In the first story, "The Demon Unleashed", a nobleman takes Kormak prisoner and uses his sword, which has some limited sorcerous abilities, to free a demon known as a Ghul that has been trapped for centuries. Feeling at least partially responsible for the Ghul being loosed on the world, Kormak pursues it as it takes over various hosts and vows to destroy it. In "The Wolves of War" he encounters werewolves being used as a military force. "The Flesh Stealer" is set in the squalid criminal underworld of a big city. "That Way Lies Death" takes Kormak and several companions he's picked up along the way to a lost city in the desert for a final showdown with the Ghul.

The world in which all this takes place seems to be based, not surprisingly, on ancient Europe and Asia. King establishes some history in broad strokes and sets up an eternal clash between the west, which worships the god of the sun, and the east, which worships the gods of the moon. It's pretty easy to pick out the analogs to our own world, but to give King credit, he never dwells much on such things. They're just there as background to stories full of sorcery and swordplay.

To be honest, this book could have used another copyediting pass. But I'm willing to cut King some slack for that simply because these stories really are throwbacks to the sword-and-sorcery yarns of an earlier era and are lean and fast-moving instead of bloated and never-ending. I can easily imagine myself sitting on my parents' front porch reading a Lancer paperback of this book, and anything that can make me feel like that is well worth reading, as far as I'm concerned. Hey, I can edit those typos in my head and just keep right on going. King has written a number of full-length novels featuring Kormak, and I have the next few already on my Kindle, ready to go. If you're a fan of old-school sword-and-sorcery, STEALER OF FLESH is worth a try.