Book Review: Wolfheart by Richard A. Knaak

I strongly recommend that you read my other review on Knaak’s book Stormrage before reading this one, as I use it as a reference point multiple times.

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Mild spoilers for Wolfheart by Richard A. Knaak below! If you want to approach this book with no preconceptions, avoid this blog post.

As may be apparent by the timing of this review, I’ve taken to reading the World of Warcraft novels in chronological order, and after reading Stormrage I moved on to Christie Golden’s The Shattering, which takes place shortly after the events of Stormrage. However, I didn’t write a book review for The Shattering as I didn’t feel like I had much to say about it. As usual, Christie Golden delivered an enjoyable reading experience which, whilst not surpassing the masterpiece of Arthas: Rise of the Lich King or War Crimes, was still a wholeheartedly wonderful novel.

I was less apprehensive when I then started Wolfheart than I was with Stormrage, though I’ll admit I didn’t expect the former to trump The Shattering. But in my opinion, it did, and it definitely surpassed Stormrage and avoided most of the issues I had with that book.

Getting right into it, Wolfheart is set not so long after the events of Stormrage (during the events of the World of Warcraft expansion Cataclysm), and features many of the same characters, albeit under somewhat different circumstances. Not to give too much away, war has now officially broken out between the Alliance and the Horde, both of whom are still reeling after the cataclysm wrought by the mad black dragon Deathwing, leaving much of the world in a state of peril. The repercussions of such an event heightened the need for resources and opened new opportunities for taking territories, and has such led to the re-ignition of old rivalries.

This novel focuses mostly on the Alliance side of matters, with a few different sub-plots. In the city of Darnassus, the recently forgiven Highborn night elves who have been welcomed back into night elven society are being murdered, in a series of attacks which threaten to destabilise the summit called to debate the introduction of the Worgen into the Alliance. This in itself is a separate plot point, one which focuses on human King Varian Wrynn, who is trying to come to grips with the two halves of himself warring within. And finally, the war for Ashenvale, which is told mostly through the eyes of Haldrissa, also plays a key role in the novel.

The concept of a World of Warcraft murder mystery written by Knaak was probably the least appealing plot line to me before I started the novel, largely because as a WoW player I already knew the answer to the whodunit riddle. Despite this, though, Knaak delivered a fully intriguing narrative that not only keeps the reader guessing, but also does a superb job of introducing the Highborne and the still largely unwelcome Worgen into the overall narrative, as well as introducing Jarod Shadowsong as a very well likeable character.

Whilst I was originally not all that fussed with him, it was after reading War Crimes (set after the events of Mists of Pandaria, roughly two years ahead of this novel) that I became a huge fan of the character of Varian Wrynn, a thoroughly complex character who goes through a myriad of character development over the years and truly shines in the latest expansion. (May I direct you to this trailer? Spoilers in the comments.) The events of Wolfheart depicted a massive turning point for his character, and it was not one that Knaak took lightly. This was a shining gem of the novel to me, and for that I commend him.

The war for Ashenvale took a while to warm up, for me, which is admittedly a criticism I had with the previous novel Stormrage. But it was a slow burn, and it truly paid off from the middle to the climax of the novel. One thing that I discovered in Wolfheart was Knaak’s ability to write a clearly understandable and enjoyable battleground, with sound tactical decisions and believable hindrances. Tying into this, Knaak is a master of the fight scene, with numerous skirmishes being described in crystal detail, and one particular fight in Darnassus during the novel’s climax that I hold above all other fight scenes in writing. Perhaps this is more of a comment on my ability to imagine than it is on writing, but I find it a rare occurrence that I am able to completely visualise every move and blow of a fight and how it leads into the next. As invested as I was in this point of my reading session, it felt more like I was watching a Monty Oum animated fight scene that reading a book.

I may have evaluated the different plot lines separately in this review, but do not for a moment believe that this is a fractured narrative. These plot lines often meet and diverge, influencing each other, and by the end of the story they’ve converged into a most natural coalescence. The only issue I have with this novel is that the actions of one of the character’s doesn’t line up with how they are betrayed in the wider World of Warcraft story later on, but I firmly believe that Knaak is not to blame for this. This novel has kindled my faith in him as a writer and I look forward to reading his other works.

Book Review: Stormrage by Richard A. Knaak

Let’s try something new. This will be my first ever book review.

Mild spoilers for Stormrage by Richard A. Knaak below! If you want to approach the book with no preconceptions, avoid reading this blog post.

Stormrage, it must immediately be noted, is a novel that takes place within the game World of Warcraft, and, like the other WoW books I’ve read, successfully expands the narrative outside of the confines of the initial game. In the case of Stormrage, it depicted an event within the narrative which I was not previously aware had even occurred, and thus added to my enjoyment and knowledge of the game world as a whole. As with the other WoW books I’ve read (namely War Crimes, Illidan, and Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, in that order), it has been an enjoyable fantasy novel for me, but not one that I’d consider recommending to somebody who isn’t already acquainted with the Warcraft universe, as there are often many settings, character relationships and events which have been conceived and developed outside of the book series.

Out of the aforementioned Warcraft books I have read, Stormrage is that first I’ve read that has been written by Richard Knaak, the others being written by either Christie Golden, or newcomer to the series William King. Having heard some previous criticism of Richard Knaak’s writing, I entered into my reading with caution, and indeed did find some criticisms which I shall note further on.

Stormrage, then, is a novel which depicts events taking place between the World of Warcraft expansions Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. The Emerald Dream has long been an alternate plane of existence in which the blueprints of a perfect Azeroth could be experienced, with no demonic or otherwise sentient meddlings shaping the world. Maintained by the druids of Azeroth, it has long been a place of paradise and prosperity. However, when an unearthly mist starts causing the citizens of Azeroth to fall into a comatose state, it becomes clear that all is not well, and it soon becomes apparent that Arch-Druid Malfurion has been captured within the Dream, which is rapidly becoming tainted by what is soon to be known as the Emerald Nightmare.

If I had to describe this book in one word, it’d be ‘long-winded’. I’ll immediately emphasise that I did enjoy the book, and I don’t regret reading it, but the malign forces which beseech the characters keep growing in stature, and when reading about setback after setback it might soon occur to the reader that the narrative might be shorter and sweeter should a few of these setbacks fail to occur. I found myself somewhat lost in the geography of the story arc when almost exactly midway through, I began reading what felt like a (hard-fought) climactic struggle. The narrative also suffers from the task of portraying too many abstract concepts, such as the barriers between Azeroth and the Emerald Dream breaking down, and a druid (whom I shall not name) wielding powers of global proportions sometime in the narrative.

One thing this novel does right, though, is provide an excellent platform through which to explore the characters we have already seen in-game, and challenge their deepest fears as they face the onslaught of their worst nightmares. Tyrande, in particular, is noted as fearing her evil predecessor as leader of the night elves, and the corruption which threatened to lead her people into darkness. Stormrage also introduces lesser characters such as Broll Bearmantle, whom I severely hope will make an appearance in an upcoming World of Warcraft expansion. Furthermore, as previously mentioned, Knaak is tasked with portraying some very abstract concepts which I feel many writers would choose to avoid if given the chance, whereas Stormrage, being in the rare position of depicting events of what is typically a visual and interactive world, must make do attempting to describe them; Knaak’s writing, whilst imperfect, never left me clueless as to the events unfolding before me. I do feel the need to make an example of some of his stiff writing, however:

The vision had so troubled her today that Shandris could no longer sit still. Hoping to clear her thoughts, she had personally begun patrolling the length and breadth of the capital, wending her way from the fortified bastion of the Warrior’s Terrace down into the commercial sections of the Tradesmen’s Terrace, on through the mystic Temple of the Moon and across the lush, sculptured islets of the garden. There, she had made a detour to the industrious Craftsmen’s Terrace before returning to her quarters in the Warrior’s.

The only purpose this paragraph serves is to portray Shandris’ uneasy state of mind, and there are much faster ways with which this could have been achieved. Knaak’s description of her patrol through Darnassus was, whilst descriptive, an entirely futile endeavour, and I regret to say that the novel is riddled with similar such passages. The other pet peeve I have is the way Knaak will hint at a character’s discovery, discuss it at length, but fail to inform the actual reader what the character is talking about until at least a few pages later. All this does is make me feel lost and irritated, rather than in suspense, as is likely the intention. Perhaps if the novel was not dealing with such abstract concepts, this style of writing would be more forgivable.

If you are a World of Warcraft fan, though, I recommend this book nonetheless. One of the upcoming raids of the next expansion has players actually fighting in the Emerald Nightmare, so this will be some good background reading, and despite my criticisms of Knaak’s writing, he does the job of providing an entertaining narrative featuring some fan-favourite characters. I must admit that I prefer other works within the series from Christie Golden and William King, but I’ll certainly not shy away from reading other Knaak books.

The Short Story and Me

After happily giving feedback to a good friend’s piece of writing, I felt inspired to finally pick up the digital pen and get to writing fiction again. I needed some time to recover after university picked me up like some sort of creative lemon and squeezed me dry, but as creative lemons are wont to do, I soon ditched this nonsensical metaphor and got down to writing a good old fashioned short story.

When I first started writing, as a child, I didn’t really consider the idea of short stories at all. I’m not sure I knew they existed. I was, after all, a child, and thought that three or four pages in my literacy book might have amounted to much more in the format of a paperback. But the reality is, I started out with short stories, as I’m sure many people do. Our Year 2 literacy teacher asked us to write a story of whatever length, about whatever we could think up, and all I can really remember was that it had something to do with a magical flying island and a woman who’d found it by diving into a well. My teacher thought it was excellent, and showed other teachers, got me to record an audio reading of it, the whole shebang, and to this day I believe that this is what really kickstarted my ambition to become a writer, which is somewhat amusing considering the likely less than publishable nature of my childhood magnum opus. In fact, it was simultaneously as damaging as it was uplifting, for it planted a seed of arrogance that survived until university put me straight. But hey, each to their own hubris.

Well anyway, I did some writing on and off, but it wasn’t until I was around eleven or so that I really began to write more. At the age of twelve I started writing New Recruit (or: The Life and Times of Reluctant Teenage Vampire Jack Chimcholi) as we saw in last week’s blog post. This was, of course, more of an attempt at a novel, being split into chapters and updated over the course of about a year. And, as mentioned in last week’s blog post, I thought that it was quite the successful story at the time. But even then, I was aware of the lack of plot and structure from not thinking ahead, and would therefore resort back to the short story as a mode for storytelling, more from laziness than from anything else. One short story I remember writing was about a man who was chased down by an evil, self-driving bus in the dead of night… and now that I come to think of it, my Year 2 story probably made a lot more sense than whatever that was. Regardless, I brought it into school, and my tutor told me it was brilliant, further solidifying my sense that I was something special, maybe even a prodigy when it came to writing.

As I grew over the next few years, my writing turned to poetry, the like which many developing writers probably have somewhere hidden under their floorboards, if they haven’t burned it already. Much of this poetry will never see the light of day, and the light of day will thank me for it. (Picture an insecure 15 year old with a dark past who was convinced he was stuck in the ‘friendzone’, and you can cringe even without the source material.) Despite the mounting horror I feel whenever I turn my mind towards these works, they were still integral to my development as a writer, and even helped shape the way I would approach short stories when I later returned to them.

I chose English Literature as an A-Level because, hey, study what you know, right? And eventually our teacher (let’s call him Mr. Howard) asked us to write a short story about a subject of our choice, so long as it adhered to the genre of Gothic that we’d been studying. Much like that fabled Year 2 task a decade earlier, but uh, more Gothic, obviously. By this point, however, I’d grown an appreciation of the darker side of storytelling, and proceeded to write a short story which is possibly the first one I’m not ashamed to discuss in this blog post, though it does still show a hint of the immature, overactive, nonsensical teenage mind that brought us Jack Chimcholi. This short story, scrawled quickly in the space of an hour, was named Human Harvest, and followed the flight of our stereotypical Gothic damsel in distress and she attempted to flee from the hands of her lifelong tormenter, the owner of this stereotypical Gothic castle who forced her to eat human flesh for her meals. I won’t reveal the entire narrative, but there was a nice grisly twist at the end and it almost even made sense. To my great relief, Mr. Howard was impressed with it, though he argued against the name, which wasn’t originally Human Harvest but instead something else that I don’t quite remember. (Also, I just looked up the title Human Harvest, and it’s a movie that was released in 2014. I wrote my story in 2012. I was the original, damn you!) And the reason I mention all of this was because it was the next great step as a writer, coercing me to return to the short story as my preferred choice of narrative.

I wrote many short stories thereafter, publishing many of them on my personal Facebook page for want of a better place. Many more of them stayed on my PC, and have since been lost to time, for I was a non-Dropbox using fool. There was some good stuff in there, though. Well, maybe not good, bur some salvageable concepts at the very least. These short stories, typically first drafts that would be abandoned to the mercy of my terrible attention span, acted most simply and most effectively as experience. There’s a theory that it takes 1,000 hours to perfect your craft, and that if you want to get good at something, you’ve got to spend hundreds of hours being awful at it first. Whilst there’s no perfecting writing, I’m very glad that I spent much of my time creating these works, even if they are lost to time or are otherwise rubbish.

And then I started my BA in Creative Writing, and finally began to realise that I wasn’t the only person in the world to write half-decent stories. Good job, Kristian.

I learned some of my most valuable lessons about short stories in my first semester. Mainly that they were not, as I had previously considered, simply short novels that could be used as a platform to practice writing. In fact, all that short stories really have in common with novels is that they’re both pieces of prose. Some people believe that short stories are closer to poetry that they are novels, and I’m inclined to agree. The more I look back on my time as an emo teenage poet (oh god), the more I’ve come to realise that I never put my fictional narrative development on hold during those years; I merely explored it from another perspective. I came to understand that short stories have to be short stories for a reason, and that many of my previous (and future) faults were (and would be) writing a short story that would prefer to be a novel. I mean, sure, people can still enjoy a short story about a man who has an imaginary friend that follows him everywhere he goes, ruining his relationship with his parents and girlfriend and driving him to the point of insanity, but when you try to squish that into anything less than 4,000 words it begins to feel very crammed. And that example was from a piece of coursework that I handed in last year, because simply knowing how to write a short story isn’t good enough. You have to stop your imagination getting away from you.

So I’m going to continue writing short stories. I’m going to write them until I have tons of the things, and publish them into some sort of collection that you can do a nifty little read of on Amazon and hopefully enjoy. That’s the plan for the next few years. But I also need to practice my novel writing separately, and that’s something that I have precious little experience in. So I’m gonna go suck at it by myself for a little bit. Maybe turn 4,000 words into 40,000, more, who knows. And if my short story collection or this fabled novel ever sees the light of day, I’ll be sure to let you know right here.

You Can’t Keep a Good Book Down

You should always read a good book twice.

The first time around, of course, everything is new. Well, it should be, provided the plot hasn’t been spoiled for you in any way. It can be a little daunting, especially, I find, in works of fantasy, to be introduced to new characters, new ideologies, and sometimes whole new worlds with expectation that you are able to keep up. But in good books (the term ‘good’ here is down to the reader’s discretion, of course) you will eventually find that moment where you comfortably slip into the world, and the rest is history. Well, unless you’re reading sci-fi. Then it’s probably the future.

The benefits of reading a book for the first time, of course, are that you’re in a constant state of speculation as to what happens next. Mysteries presented to you are mysterious, plot twists surprising (if done well), and tragedy heartbreaking. I’m currently starting a new series which I will disclose later, when I’m safe from spoilers. It’s been a while since I picked up a new book (as I’ll detail later) and I’ve found it very refreshing to not actually know what happens next. And, to be fair, it is a pretty damn good book. So far.

Reading a book the second time holds, I believe, just as much merit as reading it for the first. It’s a different reading. When I was younger I used to find it boring, as I already knew what was going to happen, but I discovered that once I’d left it for a few months or years, when it was no longer fresh in my mind, I could revisit the book or series and discover not only a story half-forgotten, but a story enriched by the foreknowledge of what’s to come. Foreshadowing became juicy, inevitable betrayals tasted tantalizing before their harvest, and tragedies were all the more bittersweet. Such foreknowledge allows a peek at the machinations of the author. What’s more, I find that on a second reading I’m no longer rushing to see what happens at the end, and am therefore free to explore the text at a slower pace, noting intertextuality, symbolism, and the occasional typo.

Of course, revisiting a book or a series more than twice is perfectly good, too. You may pick up on even more than you did on the second reading, though I do think that the second reading is where you’re most likely to make the most discovery regarding the craftsmanship of the fiction. If anything, on your further readings you’re probably likely to take away different messages from the story depending on where you are in your life. I just finished re-reading Darren Shan’s Demonata series for the fourth(?) time and took to heart messages about maturing and doing things you don’t want to have to do in life. (Perhaps not specifically the need for squishing heads, though coursework can sometimes incite such feelings.)

Speaking of which… reading past young adult fictions that you loved as a teenager, but from an adult perspective, is something I wholly recommend. I recently binged on all of Darren Shan’s works from my childhood, starting with the Larten Crepsley saga, working my way through the Saga of Darren Shan and then through the Demonata series. As an adult, I’ve been more readily able to appreciate narrative techniques used throughout these series and have thoroughly enjoyed refreshing these stories in my mind. As mentioned in the above paragraph, I also took away life lessons as I would from any other book, making this even more worth my while. And also, they’re just cracking good stories, to be honest. As an adult, I’m encouraged to read stories about a newly wed couple in the sixties nervous about getting down to business on their wedding night, but sometimes all I wanna read about is a scorpion demon popping eyes and laying eggs within, or about the war between two clans of vampires and the inevitable end of the world. Does that make me a child? No. Perhaps it just means that I prefer “readerly” fiction to “writerly” fiction, as Barthes would deem them.

So go read a book! Or re-read an old one! You may learn something, from both. Or you may just enjoy staring at blotches of ink on paper for hours on end.

Self-Reflection

For as long as I can remember, I’ve believed that the key to becoming a better person lies in one’s ability to see the world and themselves from many different perspectives. This way, they can avoid ignorance, unnecessary offense, and generally be kinder to others.

Sometimes, we don’t follow our own rules. I had to remind myself this morning that no matter your philosophies or beliefs, self-reflection and re-adjustment are always necessary, or you’ll find yourself slipping into another person who you might not entirely like. On Twitter this morning, I came close to creating a game, which, should it have taken off (which I’m sure it wouldn’t have), could have potentially offended many authors.

The premise of the game was to tweet the hashtag, conjure up the name of a pretentious-sounding novel, and then search for it in Google. If it was a real novel, you gained a point. If it was also a movie, you gained two. I rather quickly deleted these tweets after realising that creating a game that is literally about judging a book based on its cover is one of the dumbest and most ignorant things I could do.

The concept of being pretentious is, from my understanding, the act of claiming to have a high standard of morals and acting like you support charities and movements, but only so that you can gain some sort of moral upper-hand over your friends and be revered and admired by the people around you; so that they can call themselves a better person than you.

Basing an author’s ideals on the name of their book, therefore, is a rather dense thing to do. It could be a lovely book; it could be good, and simply not my cup of tea. It could even be autobiographical and highly self-critical. And that is why continual self-reflection is important, else I would not have realised this.

Sorry this blog post has been rather self-centric today. Coming up I hope to be making some blog posts about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and writing comedically, and the rise of storytelling in videogames such as those found in Telltale Games’ creations. Also, maybe a thing or two about cats, and why they shall become transcendent beings.