The Barest Branch

In the late 9th century, Danish fisherman Dagfinn leaves his village to join one of the Viking crews sailing for England to join the great army of Guthrum in the conquest of Wessex. He finds England to be a strange land, and is never quite at home among the English, or indeed among the other Danes. Then, on a tax raid to the coast of East Anglia, Dagfinn and his mates encounter a village with an absurd fortune in gold. Where does it come from and how did they get it, and what price did they pay?

James Holloway is perhaps the greatest, possibly the only, proponent of the Gonzo style of history, which consciously abandons any attempt to portray people in history as basically like us but with better hats. At the same time, Gonzo history embraces the modern vernacular as preferable to coarse or flowery approximations of antique language or the dry language of science.In his own words:

"...fuck all attempts to portray the past in this reassuring light, because your ancestors were not just like you. They were in some ways, but in other ways they were huge fucking weirdoes, and the sooner you begin the process of trying to get your head around that, the smarter you’ll be, especially if you’re able to come to the conclusion that you also are a giant weirdo and half of what you do makes no sense whatsoever."

And that's basically the same approach Holloway's first novel takes, not just to history but to its other influence, the work of HP Lovecraft. Holloway's Vikings are brutal killers and - in some cases - casual rapists, but speak in a rugged modern dialect, while the first person narrative eschews the intellectual asceticism of the Lovecraftian voice in favour of the same tone, while maintaining the thematic hallmarks of alienation, isolation and identity.

While at first glance an axe-happy, weatherbeaten, foul-mouthed Viking sailor seems as far from Johnny Lovecraft-Protagonist as you could get, Dagfinn's origin as a beardless, slave-born bastard set him apart as much as a sense of obsessive historical romanticism, and the early sections of the book in which he contemplates with awe the cyclopaean relics of the Romans (not that Holloway resorts to using any of the touchstone words - cyclopaean, squamous, non-Euclidean) are actually more effective in terms of creeping, cosmic dread than the later sections with the actual monsters, although in the latter he does a good job of maintaining the appropriate sense of desperate futility in the face of armed and physically capable protagonists.

The Barest Branch is not going to be for everyone. It will not appeal to anyone who likes their Vikings pseudo-Shakespearean or their history clean, and it defies both of the predominant classes of Mythos protagonist - the wilting victim and the muscular hero. It is also very seriously not for anyone who has a problem with the word fuck. It could also use a final pass from an editor, but that's the nature of self-publishing. With those provisos, it is a well-written novella which manages to be effective both as Lovecraftian horror and as Gonzo history, and it's only a couple of quid on Amazon or DriveThru.