This is the first part of my ongoing, story by story review of Bohun: The Complete Savage Adventures by Steve Dilks.
BOHUN: THE COMPLETE SAVAGE ADVENTURES
By Steve Dilks
Carnelian Press, 2024. 219 pages
Cover artwork Adam Benet Shaw
Interior artwork Kurt Brugel
Available as a paperback or kindle eBook
The opening story, The Festival of the Bull, is an action-packed, violent and intricately woven tale of treachery, deceit and peril. It’s also an origin story, though these details are subtly inserted into the narrative without holding up the action.
For those unfamiliar with Bohun he is a huge black warrior from the ill-fated kingdom of Damzullah. The last surviving warrior from its betrayed army, his sole mission now is to find and rescue his beloved wife Dana who was sold into slavery.
Having just escaped from the galley into which he had been imprisoned as an oarsman, we first meet Bohun soon after he has swum ashore and scaled the fortified walls of the coastal city of Tharnya where a squad of the city guard attempt to capture him. Minutes later, after a desperate fight which introduces us to his fighting skills, Bohun flees into the city’s labyrinthine streets, where he stumbles across a woman being attacked by a desperate gang of cutthroats who have already killed her bodyguards. Thus it is that Bohun finds himself plunged unwittingly into an insidiously dark world of deceit, treachery and deadly perils.
This was one of the first stories submitted to me as editor of Swords & Sorceries: Tales of Heroic Fantasy Volume 1 in 2020, and I would have accepted it there and then except, for all its action-packed pages, it didn’t involve any sorcery or magic, which was something of an important requirement for the kind of anthology I was putting together. Fortunately Steve was quickly able to rectify this when he submitted the next story in this volume, the superbly eerie The Horror from the Stars, which became the first Bohun story ever to be published. (The Festival of the Bull went on to appear in Savage Realms Monthly in January the next year.)
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