- Paperback: 304 pages
- Publisher: MAM TOR Publishing Ltd (10 April 2009)
- ISBN-10: 095499986X
- ISBN-13: 978-0954999865
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,432,645 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
Review
Four stars
Comic artist shifts job description to comic writer is a well-trodden path. Comic artists are, after all, visual storytellers. Comic artist becomes fantasy novelist however, is a far more unusual tangent. If you've been a fan of Liam Sharp's Frank Frazetta meets HR Giger-esque comic art - muscled barbarians mixed with Blade Runner neon and detritus-swept colour schemes - you'll know that this is a creator with a distinct vision, dedicated to creating tangible other worlds. God Killers is Sharp fleshing these fantasy landscapes out, giving them detail and life.
It's something he does remarkably well. The main strength of the prose and poetry collection God Killers, and its near 200 page central story, Machivarius Point, is how fully formed Sharp's fantasy feels. The different races, the descriptions of the architecture, the history of its worlds - Sharp's commits them with great confidence. God Killers does that most difficult thing in fantasy fiction. It absorbs its influences -China Mieville (who offers a praising cover quote and gave advice on the proof), Lovecraft and M John Harrison - but feels like a personal, unaffected realisation nonetheless.
That same strength is also its relatively minor weakness. Sharp sometimes gets caught up in descriptive passages when the plot should move on. He knows how to tease a reader though - Hergal, his warrior central character (a healthily macho, sword-skilled protagonist) travels across other worlds and inhabits other lives but can't recall why, and Sharp is skilfully economic in how he reveals the truth. When the finale comes it's suitably epic, dealing with eternity, nothingness and `vile space'. It would be too easy to describe God Killers as a promising debut. Sharp writes fantasy with the assurance of an otherworld-seeing prophet.
Rob Williams --SFX magazine, May 2009
Product Description
"God Killers" includes the novel "Machvarius Point" and four related works. It also has a selection of thematically related short stories in a more contemporary setting, and from which the book takes its name. "Machvarius Point": A man who cannot count his years moves between worlds living the lives of other men. A soul-less ebony giantess seeks freedom in warfare but cannot escape the tragedy buried in her forgotten past. An aging mercenary and non-believer may be the unwitting saviour of his - and all - times. A blinded war-hero barters for a mythical stone in the hope that it may restore his former glory. An undead God seeks an end to his torment by bringing about an end to all things. Machvarius Point stands at the centre of the city of Duhn - a phallic monstrosity in bronze. Ancient and defunct, shit-speckled and crumbling, it's many-headed effigies bear witness to all that transpires below. An ensemble piece of vast scope, the story delves into the fate of an ancient giant race, the Ornish, that left their ravaged homeworld 10,000 years earlier. There is no clear cut good or bad, and genre staples are subverted constantly. It is a vivid creation full of grown up themes, colourful language and questions about the nature of war, belief and existence - themes that feature prominently throughout Sharp's work. The imagery created is arresting, as one would expect from the author's background as an illustrator of the fantastic, but the narrative is thought-provoking, poetic and far more intense than one might usually expect from heroic fantasy. Whilst its start is akin to the work of Robert E. Howard, it quickly moves through territories more comparable to Michael Morcock, and soon echoes of China Mieville and M. John Harrison are apparent, making the work very contemporary, and closer to New Weird than the set-up might suggest. "God Killers" includes five short stories - one set in London, the rest in the author's home city of Derby - that wrestle with existential themes, joke along with Death, shuffle into the afterlife and contemplate other planes in which there may or may not be life..."God Killers" should be a delight to anybody enjoying the burgeoning possibilities on offer in contemporary genre fiction.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
God Killers: Cool as.......,
By
This review is from: God Killers: Machivarius Point and Other Tales (Paperback)
Liam Sharp's Godkillers is a return to " real fantasy". The main Novella of the piece " Machivarius Point" is an action packed, realistic and violent epic. The characters are all flawed, heroes and villians alike, and the settings are vibrant and exotic, bringing together the writers imagination and artistic temprement to vividly construct a scene to play out this drama.
This is not a typical fantasy novel, it has muscles, attitude and is unstoppable. From start to finish you are left spellbound as the writer tears down the walls of traditional fantasy and introduces us to a harsh dark world, where people die, where the good don't always win and where heroes are not always who they seem. Pick it up, read it, tell me i;m wrong. This is a superb debut novel, closer to the harsh realism of Gemmell than the works of Eddings. Top stuff.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The next King of Weird - Outstanding debut,
By
This review is from: God Killers: Machivarius Point and Other Tales (Paperback)
From the opening pages of Liam Sharp's debut, we are thrown in to a maelstrom of ideas that soak you to the very bone - like the ocean that tries to claim our main protagonist. Machivarius Point is a visceral tale full of testosterone - a contemporary, barbaric tale of forgotten self that reaches for the jugular and doesn't let go until its powerful climax.
If this novella wasn't enough to introduce you to Sharp's poetic vision, you are dipped head first in to an all familiar territory that only a British writer could do best - Derby's Demons and metaphysical entities have just made a small place much, much bigger. With fine prose that absorbs many influences, those who wish to compare his work to those at the top of their game may do so - because these very writers we compare him to already know how good his stories are. The epic universe of Machivarius Point is so densely layered that some readers may become lost in the world due to how much has been crammed in to such a short story - but it's hardly a negative point. You will cry for more - God Killers is perfect to absorb again and again - the beginnings of something even bigger. Read once for the prose alone, then peel away those memories and get under the skin of Sharp's main protagonist. You may not like what you see through his eyes, but it's one hell of a ride.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Impressive first novel,
By
This review is from: God Killers: Machivarius Point and Other Tales (Paperback)
An ambitious first novel that succeeds more often than it fails. Sharp's Machivarius Point, the main story (at 200 pages) in the book is what might have resulted if Robert E Howard and China Mieville had produced some strange offspring through eldritch means.
The main characters of Sharp's novel occupy the fictional space somewhere between David Gemmell's Druss and Ian Graham's Ballas. Much less heroic than Gemmell's flawed protagonists, Sharp's creations manage to be much more appealing than Graham's, both in terms of likability and with regard to the complexity of the characters. Never short of ideas, possibly the biggest weakness of the story is that the rich tapestry Sharp weaves is not as fully explored as it could be. On the flip side, the narrative approach he has taken forces the reader to engage with the book on a more intellectual level and to that extent what might be a flaw according to traditional storytelling is perhaps a fascinating and not unsuccessful approach to bring a different approach to constructing a heroic fantasy saga. At times a thoughtful meditation on the horrors of war, while simultaneously being a testosterone-fueled barbarian saga, the writing manages to transcend the apparent limitations of its genre and is one of the more literary approaches to this type of subject matter that I've read. Definitely not for the squeamish though, as should be expected from something with such a clear message that violence is not a pleasant business and certainly not a heroic one. The remaining stories that take up the final part of the book continue to showcase Sharp's literary ability and range from the broad comedy of Death and the Myrmidon to the M John Harrison-inspired weirdness of Metawhal Alpha.
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