Sword and Sorcery'’s Next Big Thing Interview with - James Enge

"Also, in This Crooked Way, you take the story from various view points, giving it a mosaic feel that’s very unlike most classical Sword and Sorcery. Why did you chose to do this? What were you trying to accomplish?

I think you’re right that the shifting point-of-view is very different from classic S&S, which has normally been restricted 3rd person. Maybe Fafhrd is the POV character in one story and the Gray Mouser in another, but I usually doesn’t switch between 1st person narrators. (Zelazny’s Amber series is sort of an exception here, but Zelazny is always exceptional.) But I wanted to look at Morlock from different angles, see him and his actions through different eyes and, frankly, to hear other voices. (Morlock doesn’t talk much, at least when he’s sober.) It was an interesting technical challenge to tell a story with different members of the cast stepping forward to take a solo, as it were. And some readers have liked this and some have really hated it, even people who ended up liking the book.

The episodic nature of THIS CROOKED WAY is more traditional, like Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser books, or Vance’s Dying Earth series or Moorcock’s Elric stories (which I first read in the fix-up versions DAW published inthe 70s; it’s been interesting to reread them in the restored Ballantine editions). I badly wanted to write an episodic novel. There’s something satisfying to me in a story that has a series of plot arcs, each of which has a culmination, but all of which are part of a bigger arc which has its own resolution."


4.5 out of 5

http://pauljessup.com/2010/10/11/interview-with-james-enge-sword-and-sorcerys-next-big-thing/