Hot take: Orcs are bitchin’.
Big, tough, ripped, brutal badasses, for years they’ve been the go-to choice in fantasy for evil power players in need of intimidating mooks. More recently, modern fantasy has granted them a PR boost, both in reimaginings and in original stories. Black-and-white morality is out of fashion, shades of gray are in, and this gives orcs the opportunity to take the powerful, intimidating, dangerous image they’ve cultivated through decades of villain status and turn it toward nobler (or at least more sympathetic) pursuits.
No character is more interesting than the reformed villain. Put simply, orcs are the bad boys of the fantasy world.
And the warhog-riding half-orc bikers of The Grey Bastards are the bad boys (and girl) of the orc world.
Mix Sons of Anarchy with Shadow of Mordor and you’ll get a world similar to the Lot Lands of Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards, where gangs of orc-human hybrids ride monstrous swine called barbarians as they patrol their anarchic wasteland, keeping the humans of Hispartha safe on one side by fending off the raiding parties of full-blooded orcs that routinely probe their lands from the other.
Although, confession, I don’t know how accurate this analogy still is when it comes to quality, because I’ve never actually seen Sons of Anarchy or played Shadow of Mordor. I’ve heard pretty good things about both, though, which makes me think the comparison still holds up. Because I have read The Grey Bastards, and yeah, it’s good. It’s really, really good.
Another confession: We know the author of this one personally. My wife and I first met Jonathan French at the inaugural CONjuration in 2014, back before The Grey Bastards was published or our own writing careers had taken off. We’ve kept in touch and followed Jonathan’s career since then, we meet up about once a year now at each new CONjuration, and we consider him a friend, a writing compatriot, and a mentor in helping us break into and navigate the world of self-publishing, where he’s got a few years of experience over us.
What all this means is that this review may come off as slightly biased, since the author is someone we know and like rather than a faceless name we’ll never actually meet. I mention all of this for transparency’s sake; we’re going to be reviewing more self-published and indie books here for a while, which means more books by people we’ve personally met and are probably friendly toward, or at least cordially acquainted with. But friend of the authors or not, we’re still going to be as honest and unbiased as we can while we do this.
With The Grey Bastards, though, it’s a moot point, because I don’t need a personal bias to tell people that this is a damn good book worth any reader of fantasy’s time.
So long as you’re a grown-up reader, anyway. Because Bastards is definitely, and aggressively, aimed at an adult audience. Sex, violence, swearing, racism, misogyny, sexual assault, slavery, torture, and the occasional poop joke: Bastards doesn’t shy away from any theme or content in pursuit of its gritty, brutal story.
Said story follows Jackal, a member of the titular half-orc brotherhood the Grey Bastards, as he plots a rise to power to unseat the Claymaster, the Bastards’ plague-infested and increasingly tyrannical leader. At Jackal’s side are Oats, a massive wall of muscle who’s more orc than human; Fetch, the only female rider in any of the Lot Lands’ half-orc gangs; and Hearth, Jackal’s faithful war hog.
But an increasing number of complications soon stand in the way of Jackal and friends’ coup planning, including a jolly and mysterious half-orc sorcerer, a swamp-dwelling cadaver cleaner called the Sludge Man, a pregnant elf woman rescued from captivity, the approach of an anarchic blood moon that sends murderous centaurs rampaging across the wastelands, and the enigmatic cult of the Master Slave that provides vital support against said centaur rampage — for a price.
If that sounds like a lot of ideas tugging a lot of different threads out of the story, that’s because it is. The overall conflict, the impetus that spurs Jackal and friends’ actions, changes a lot, often unexpectedly. It’s a dynamic plot verging on chaotic, but it also feels natural and believable given the world presented and the players therein, and it all coalesces expertly into a tense, surprising, and suitably badass climax that pays off all of the disparate, sometimes seemingly unrelated steps that it takes to get there.
The criteria for plotting seems to be no good idea left behind — if it sounds cool, shove it in and make it fit. It’s an approach to storytelling I’m particularly fond of when it works, and it works here.
A big part of why it works are the characters, all of whom are endearing in a violent, assholish, doing whatever it takes to survive kind of way. Orcs as a race used as coding for undesirable “others” isn’t a new take — that aspect has been there since their unironic evil mook days — but Bastards doesn’t shy away from fully exploring that aspect of orcishness and how it would manifest in a believable society.
The full-blooded orc raiders assailing Hispartha and the Lot Lands are your typical “brutal, savage invader” flavor of bad guy orcs, but the half-blooded spawn they leave behind with the victims of their raids inherit a more complicated place in the world, for obvious reasons. Since nearly every half-orc alive in the Lot Lands is the product of rape, they’re not exactly wanted or looked on kindly by the other races that bear them; but since they inherit a good deal of the strength and durability of their orcish fathers, but diluted to a more civilized and controllable level, they’re still useful, especially when turned against the orc raiders who sired them.
This positioning as maligned second-class citizens who could effortlessly tear the first-class citizens limb from limb if they had a mind to puts the cast of Bastards in an interesting, complicated area of moral grayness that manifests believably in the characters we meet, from half-orc children forced to get real tough real early in life to different gangs of half-orc riders with different degrees of pride in the barbaric heritage inherited by their absent fathers. It’s the “rape as backstory” trope extrapolated across an entire race and culture, but handled surprisingly well, infusing the book’s grimdark tone without getting as tasteless or sexploitative as the use of that trope seems on paper (and usually becomes in practice).
That said, the “our protagonists are all products of rape” angle is a useful watermark to measure whether The Grey Bastards is the right fit for any given reader’s sensibilities. Like I said earlier, it’s an aggressively mature book that sells itself as much on the appeal of its dirty, vicious, blood-and-sex-and-fighting tone as it does on its story. If you prefer tamer themes to your fantasy, Bastards doesn’t have any. It has colorful, engaging characters and tense, exciting moments in an expertly woven narrative, but the darkness and grit and profanity are key ingredients baked into its bones.
But if you can handle a raw, unapologetic, lascivious fantasy — or better yet, if you prefer one — then The Grey Bastards will take you on a wild ride.
