/lit/ - Literature

>>12933199
It's not good. It's great. Bakker's prose is above and beyond just about anything else I've read in fantasy; and while his writing can be dark to the brink of being edgy, he pulls its off convincingly; and presents some of the more complicated characters in grimdark today.

Not for the faint of heart, though, if you don't like a story where no one is necessarily the good guy, and where horrible stuff happens to just about every character even vaguely likeable.

Is Donaldson worth reading, gents? I'm coming to the end of LOTR for the first time, so my fantasy knowledge is quite limited. I only know that I've a penchant for grimdark stuff such as Martin and Bakker.

I've heard Lord Foul's Bane is exceptionally dark fantasy for its time. Is that true?

>“Valrissa!” Aengelas screamed. “Valrissssaa!” Holding her by the throat, the thing languorously picked her clothes away, like the skin of a rotten peach. As her breasts fell free with soft-pink nipples, a sheet of sunlight flickered across the horizon and illuminated her lithe curves . . . But the hunger that held her from behind remained shadowy—like glistening smoke.

>Animal violence overcame Aengelas, and he strained at his leash and gagged inarticulate fury.

>And a husky voice in his soul said: We are a race of lovers, manling.

>“Pleaaassee!” Aengelas wept. “I don’t knoooowww . . .” The thing’s free hand traced a thread of blood between her legs across the plane of her shuddering belly. Valrissa’s eyes regarded Aengelas, thick with something impossible. She moaned and parted hanging legs to greet the abomination’s hand. A race of lovers . . .

>“I don’t know! I don’t! I don’t! Pleaase stop! Pleaasse!” The thing screeched like a thousand falcons as it plunged into her. Glass thunder. Shivering sky.

>She bent back her head, her face contracted in pain and bliss. She convulsed and groaned, arched to meet the creature’s thrusts. And when she climaxed, Aengelas crumpled, grasped his head between his hands, beat his face against the turf. The cold felt good against his broken lips.

>With an inhuman gasp, the thing pressed its bruised prick up across her stomach and washed her sunlit breasts with black seed. Another thunderous screech, woven by the thin human wail of a woman.

>And again it asked the question.

>I don’t know . . .

>These things make you weak, it said, tossing her like a sack to cold grasses. With a look, it gave her to the Sranc—to their licentious fury. Once again, it asked the question.

>The abomination then gave his weeping son—sweet, innocent Bengulla—to the Sranc, and once again asked the question.

>I don’t know what you mean . . .

>And when the Sranc made a womb of Aengelas himself, it asked—with each raper’s thrust, it asked . . .

>Until the gagging shrieks of his wife and child became the question. Until his own deranged howls became the question . . .

>His wife and child were dead. Sacks of penetrated flesh with faces that he loved, and still . . . they did things