Book Review: Bohun - The Complete Savage Adventures by Steve Dilks - PART THREE

I continue my detailed review of Bohun - The Complete Savage Adventures by Steve Dilks:

The third tale, By Darkness Enthroned, was first published in Schlock! Webzine issues 24 and 25 earlier this year.  

 After already ratcheting up the eeriness in these Bohun stories Steve Dilks goes for the dark sorceries of two contesting sides in this tale with an absolute vengeance. 

Still recovering after the events in The Horror from the Stars, our Damzullahan warrior enlists in a mercenary army, perhaps longing for what he sees as the cleaner, more straightforward life of soldiering. Little does he realise occult forces have already been stirred into action by those opposing the army he has joined and that he too will soon be drawn into the machinations of another insidiously supernatural force. This longer tale is viewed from the perspectives of both sides, in which even some of those we would instinctively see as the villains have their doubts and pricks of conscience. In this it reminds me of the kind of tale Karl Edward Wagner was a master at creating in his Kane stories – and By Darkness Enthroned is no less redolent of his colourful and vivid language.

Book Review: Bohun - The Complete Savage Adventures by Steve Dilks - PART TWO

        After this thrilling introduction to Bohun, The Horror from the Stars opens at a slower pace but is no less menacing as our hero is warned “…evil is abroad in Al-Siwar” by a strange old man, who inexplicably disappears soon after. But Al-Siwar is where Bohun is heading and no dire warnings will stop him from going there because its sultan, Akim Harrad, possesses Bohun’s wife, Dana, as one of his harem slaves and Bohun is determined to free her.

If there was no sorcery in the first story, Dilks more than makes up for it here, with a particularly nasty creature which is probably an alien entity of some kind, that feeds off people’s life forces and intends to replicate itself in an especially nauseating way. Bohun is pushed to the brink in this tale – and in some ways beyond it. His life is not an easy one, nor is it bereft of grief. It’s a tough, heartless world in which he lives and in the end it takes all of his resilience and fortitude to survive, both mentally and physically.

Book Review: Bohun - The Complete Savage Adventures by Steve Dilks

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

amazon.co.uk

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.)

The Forbidden City of Cyramon

The complete story can be read online for free courtesy of Tule Fog Press: The Forbidden City of Cyramon

Later this year Tule Fog Press will be laujnching a kickstarter to publish all of my Welgar tales, which will include Sorceries in Assabarr, The Dark Priestdom (Savage Realms Monthly), and Welgar the Cursed (Swords & Heroes), plus others.  

Childe Rolande and Elak, King of Atlantis

Published by Futura 1989

It's curious how Fate sometimes works in small ways. There are two books I reviewed some years ago which had been published by other imprints than my own - Futura Books and Pulp Hero Press respectively - which I never thought at the time I would eventually reprint as Parallel Universe Publications books.

The first was Samantha Lee's Childe Rolande, which Futura published in 1989 and which I reviewed on amazon in March 2022, not realising I would be reprinting this later that year. This is a link to my original review on https://www.amazon.com/Childe.../dp/1739832655/ref=sr_1_1....

The other, of course, is Adrian Cole's Elak, King of Atlantis, which I reviewed for Phantasmagoria magazine not long after the book was first brought out by Pulp Hero Press. https://davidandrewriley.blogspot.com/.../my-review-of...

I don't know whether this will ever happen again, but twice, I'm sure, is strange enough.

 

Published by Pulp Hero Press 2020

 

Published by Parallel Universe Publications 2022

Published by Parallel Universe Publications 2024