Everyone thinks they know the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table.

The fact is they don’t know sh*t.

Arthur? An over-promoted gangster.
Merlin? An eldritch parasite. 
Excalibur? A shady deal with a watery arms dealer. 
Britain? A clogged sewer that Rome abandoned just as soon as it could.

A savage and cutting epic fantasy, equally poetic and profane, By Force Alone is a magical adventure and a subversive masterwork.

So, retellings. I probably have more experience with them than I’m thinking, but not a lot are coming to mind. But I love the concept of retellings & what can be done with them. I’ve also had some interesting conversations lately with some friends about them, and whether or not it’s ok to just go in with no more than some baseline (or even less) knowledge of the source material.

By Force Alone is a book that came across my Twitter timeline & I was immediately intrigued, especially by the blurbs from folks like M. R. Carey & Adrian Tchaikovsky. It basically sounded like the grimdark version of King Arthur, and in the end, that’s kinda what this book is like. I can’t claim to know much more than the bare bones of the Arthurian legend, but based on what I do know, Lavie Tidhar hasn’t so much retold the tale as he has shoved it into a wood-chipper and collected the shredded, bloody remains.

What if Arthur was a street-level drug dealer, slowly building an empire?

What if Merlin was a bisexual shapeshifting fae & master manipulator?

What if Guinevere were the boss of a group of traveling bandits?

WHAT IF LANCELOT KNEW KUNG-FU?!

What if The Green Knight was…hmm, I’ll let you find out about The Green Knight if you read this!

It’s hard to describe the plot of By Force Alone, because it’s not a heavily plotted story. And that’s not a drawback to the book at all, it’s just how it is. Things unfold in a very linear way over time, and the structure of this novel feels different from a lot of fantasy novels I’ve read. You’ll spend a significant amount of time with a particular character, and then you might not see them again for 100 pages, and/or they become more of a background character. Or in the case of Guinevere, she doesn’t appear until well into the book.

By Force Alone is a compulsive & addictive read, for sure. The dialogue is frequently hilarious & gloriously profane. This is not a knights-in-shining-armor & damsels-in-distress kind of deal…this is the grimy, stabby, sexy, weird magic version of the Arthurian legend, and I was enthralled with it. This was just a fucking blast!

Huge thanks to Tor Books for the copy!!