The Grey Bastards: A Novel (The Lot Lands) Hardcover – June 19, 2018

I read this book based on a recommendation for grimdark fantasy novels. I ultimately found this recommendation was a bit off, as I found The Grey Bastards to be more of a roughhouse comedy than a grimdark fantasy.With characters bellowing out cheesy lines like "Live in the saddle! Die on the hog!" while riding around on giant pigs and engaging in long discussions (or displays) about the size of their manhood, this is not a novel that should be taken seriously, nor takes itself seriously.Ultimately I was entertained, but I'm not placing the sequel very high on my to read list.

First of all, I bought this by mistake and then didn't return it. It started out so strong, I love the idea of half orcs and before you read any further, I will read the sequel. Why is it not a 5 star review? The plot is just not as worked out as it could be, the characters are not as developed as they could be. I found myself skipping over many pages of fillers and I am so over the word "COCK". I have no problem with filthy language, but I think if I counted how many times the author used COCK in this book, I'd find it is the most used word in the book.With that said, it is a debut and I hope that book two will be better.

Writing a review without swearing is going to be a challenge for me here, because I effing loved this book. It’s definitely one of those books that I loved so much that I’m pretty sure that this review is going to be mostly incoherent, so forgive me if this gets a little off-topic.I love a book that is full of swearing and sex, well, this one starts out in a brothel. Fetch, Jack, and Oats are characters that I instantly rooted for. The plot is never plodding, there’s plenty of action, there’s all kinds of banter and the plot isn’t predictable. I got surprised. More than once! That’s always great.I wasn’t expecting to get emotional at all in a book about half-orcs shagging and fighting their way through life in the badlands but stuff happens in this book that made me everything from angry to sad to laughing out loud. There are consequences to character’s decisions. I was rooting so hard for one of them that I didn’t even realize he screwed up until he had it explained to him.The whole plot wraps up nicely. Things that happened begin to make more sense. All the threads come together to form an exciting climactic finish. Fantastic! It even leaves room for further exploration in the world if the author so chooses, without leaving anything from this novel wide open. Loved it!

Protection for local businesses via extortion.Long rides on the hog, looking for trouble or patrolling territory.A fraternity of brothers who will fight for each other, die for each other.Welcome to GTA V’s newest motorcycle club DLC! Join MC Grey Bastards and you’re sure to have a romping good time. Roam your holdings on fully customizable hogs. Fight other gangs who encroach on your turf. Head to the local whorehouse to...get a drink. Once you’ve ridden long enough with the club, you can even earn your very own MC name: Jackal? Nope, taken. Polecat? Nahhh, try again. Fetching? Already reserved for our only female member! Oats? We could have two of those, unless you want to be called Barley.Joking aside, The Grey Bastards was one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in a long time. Our loveable MC gang is actually filled with scarred, powerful half-orcs who ride literal hogs! The characters are well developed; the prose, while not beautiful, is appropriately filled with expletives (I counted 217 unique entries of “f*ck”) and effectively advances the story. The plot starts slowly and in a very narrowly defined world but quickly escalates in scope keeping you reading and wanting more. There were a few predictable twists, but that didn’t matter too much for me because the characters were so well developed I wanted to see it through with them.Many of you probably haven’t heard about this novel, but those of you on r/Fantasy have seen it pop up frequently. It’s Mark Lawrence’s 2017 SPFBO winner, and rightly so given the competition in the finals. (But I won’t discount the other great novels from the finals either…you should all check them out! Paternus by Dyrk Ashton, The Path of Flames by Phil Tucker, and Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft [even though it didn’t even make the finals!] are all worth the read.) As a reward for his efforts, Jonathan French was picked up by a proper publisher, so you all may have to wait to read this book. But I can tell you, the wait is totally worth it!

It's not possible to talk about this book without acknowledging it owes a lot of debts to the Sons of Anarchy TV Show. I mean some of the main characters are even named similarly, Jackal vs. Jackson, Oats vs. Opie, The Claymaster vs. Clay, Mead vs. Juice, Beryl vs Gemma (That one is a slight stretch but a Beryl is a gem...) The author acknowledges those debts in the back of the book.This isn't just Sons of Anarchy with motorcycles played by hogs and guns played by crossbows though. This book is laid down on some pretty good worldbuilding, that delves into why the half-orcs are all arranged in gangs (hoofs) , and why their land exists at all. Like a motorcycle-spaghetti western-Tolkien mashup almost.A lot of people have commented on the cursing, but I don't really pay attention to that sort of thing. It does exist, but *shrugs*The story is the best part. This isn't a paint by numbers hero journey, or retelling of the hobbit. The story goes back and forth and makes you think about what it means to trust. Jackal makes mistakes. Sometimes he makes them knowing their mistakes but knowing he can't do anything else. I like that aspect.The book ends with our hero riding off into the sunset to pursue dastardly evil doers across the lonesome plain. Hopefully we'll get more adventures of the Grey Bastards.

I try to observe a rule not to read other people's reviews of something that I've read until after I have written my own, lest there opinions should colour mine. So I am writing this review of The Grey Bastards in some haste so I can freely indulge my curiosity about what other friends and reviewers have thought of this brilliant and fascinating tale.Of the last twenty books I have read, The Grey Bastards will be the fourth that I have been introduced to via Mark Lawrence's Self-Publishing Fantasy Blog Off. This is, I think a testament to the competition's success in lifting some very good books above the noise signal and anti-self-publishing snobbery that has hidden some remarkable talents from a wider audience.The Grey Bastards came first in the 2016-17 contest and is an extremely well polished book - even if its protagonists are as rough as sandpaper toilet tissue. The story's feet appear planted in the Dungeons and Dragons milieu of my youth - huge birds called rokh and amorphous digesting blobs called black sludges could have sat quite happily between the pages of the Monster Manual. The Grey Bastards are themselves a troop (or rather a hoof) of hog riding half-orc cavalry who we see and bond with through our point of view protagonist - Jackal. Jackal himself, is young, ambitious and - if not exactly handsome - at least less intrinsically ugly than others of his kin.Make no mistake, this is a brilliant book, that challenges the reviewer only in knowing where to begin tackling the task of describing it, much as one might wonder how to bring down Jackal's brother in arms the mountainous and formidable thrice blood - Oats.Thrice bloods are one of French's many linguistic, cultural or even biological developments that add a deep and rich additional dimension to what - in other hands - might have been a mere parade through a flat role playing campaign. The half-orcs are all bastards, beget by orcish rapes - fierce and formidable fighters the various hoofs have become part of the Empire's defense against orcish incursions. Thrice bloods are the most formidable half-orcs, born of a half-orc mother and an orc father. The half orc hoofs - and other re-purposed denizens of familiar myth - each patrol their own parcel (or lot) of the near lawless borderlands between the orcs and the empire. The lots are a barren dangerous place - home only to those who have no other place to turn to - a wild land that makes the wild west look like a kindergarten's playground - where the only safety is in the mutual loyalty and reliance of belonging to a group.I daren't say too much more of the plot - this is a book to discover for yourselves.It is perhaps fair to warn you that - from the very outset - the tone and language of our half-orc hero and his friends is beyond bawdy, beyond coarse and yet all the more believable for it. These are the roughest of rough soldiers bound by the close knit camaraderie and carnal preoccupations of many a troop of specialist mercenaries operating under near constant duress. I have seen the like of their crude language previously only in Jeff Salyards' coarse-tongued Syldoon soldiers who rode through the Bloodsounder's arc trilogy. However, the fluent variety of the Grey Bastard's cursing might raise a blush even in Lieutenant Muldoos.However, the story is no testosterone driven male monopoly. The female characters - Fetching (the half-orc warrior), Beryl (sometime nursemaid, sometime director of the half-orc orphanage), Delia (the whore who dares) amongst several others are all given agency and screen-time aplenty and you come to love and fear for them as much - if not more so - than for Jackal himself.French's half-orcs are eloquently, entertainingly, crudely, witty, but his writing is also skillfully evocative in its descriptions. Some of the lines that caught my eye include"... there was a threat buried in the thick folds of politeness.""The morning sky was newborn, still jaundiced before a proper sunrise.""... the wet defeat in her eyes betrayed she did not know how to proceed."The action scenes are gripping, the technicalities of hog cavalry warfare absorbing, the pacing brilliant. I consumed the last 43% of this book in a single evening - breathlessly borne along through a sequence of ascending climaxes (of the plot variety). The various threads of the story wound round and through each other to an ending that was so beautifully perfectly fitting that I put down the kindle with a sense of utter satisfaction.This is a tale of the fellowship, of the loyalty that each individual must bear to the greater whole - and in the final analysis due recognition must be and is paid to the one willing to sacrifice everything for the others,

I took a punt on this one solely on the premise of half-orcs on massive pigs. Absolutely not disappointed - tightly plotted with memorable characters who you'll actually be interested in. What sells it completely, in my opinion, is the world it is set in: a hybrid of Middle Earth and medieval Spain.The Grey Bastards themselves have a believable, cliquey, patois that works well and the various races are differentiated nicely - orcs are heavy, heavy infantry, the humans largely cavalry, the elves have stags and the half-orc have barbarians (the aforementioned massive pigs!).Highly recommended if you've even a passing interest in Grimdark, high/low fantasy or even just foul-mouthed adventure.

At the end of this book, Jonathan French acknowledges the cultural icons of our day that influenced his creation of these characters but, to me, this came as no surprise; they're evident all of the way through and all the better for it.This is, really, a tale of a motorbike gang transposed into a fantasy world. All of the biker gang traits are there, from tattoos to 'prospects' (slops in here) to 'chapters' (or 'hoofs' here) and even the beasts upon which gang members ride are 'hogs'. It isn't a subtle alignment! Perhaps the one missing biker element is that, unlike the real world, Mr French's 'hoofs' don't engage in criminal activity and their sexual aggression is turned only towards willing prostitutes (no rape from these characters thank you!).The complex world of orcs, half-orcs, humans, elves, centaurs etc is well drawn and affords an opportunity to explore racism, sexism and other modern issues in a fantasy context.The story itself fairly romps along at a fast pace with action sequences excitingly crafted. The pace is very good indeed with just the right mix of fast paced action and scene setting. The plot is convoluted, leaving the reader unsure who is, really, a villain, until the last moment and, even then, there is a lingering taste of ambiguity. The writing betrays the authors lack of experience but, if this is a first novel, then it bodes extremely well for subsequent works.This book is, very clearly, set up for a sequel (the afterword even includes it's title and synopsis) and I, for one, will certainly buy it.

In ‘The Grey Bastards’, Jonathan French has crafted something quite special. For once, ‘the frails’ don’t take centre stage. Our hero is Jackal, a half-orc living in a parched strip of land caught between the humans and the full-blooded orcs. It may not be much but it’s the only home he’s ever had and now something is very wrong. Someone needs to sort it out!This is a grim tale indeed, one of desperate survival in desperate times. Jonathan has created a world full of loveable rogues, wizards, centaurs and unspeakable horrors. Don’t climb on this hog unless you’re prepared to ride it ’till the bitter end! It contains language and themes unfit for younger readers but it grips you from the start. Thoroughly recommended for fans of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch.

I read first novels because I think I ought to and I remember when mine first came out a couple of decades ago and how much I wanted people to read it. Mostly, I loathe them, but once in a while something comes up that feels fresh and new, and inspiring - and it's well written. I mean the actual language leaves me thinking 'heck, that was clever'. And I realise that pretty much everyone else reading Grey Bastards is in it for the sexual innuendo and the male bonding and the half-orcs who can strike heads off with a single blow...and all of that is fun (and as a woman reader, particularly a not-straight woman reader, the beautiful dykey green half-orc is glorious and I hope she finds a really classy girlfriend in the next one) - but actually, I loved this for the writing as much as the gore and galumphing boar-mounts.Everyone else has written about the plot, so I won't, except to say that it's clever and it twists just when you think it won't, and it's clearly setting up for something as big and thoughtful as Donaldson's White Gold Wielder or any of the longer series by Guy Gavriel Kay. It doesn't quite match the latter for poetry, but then it's not supposed to. What it does do is create a fantastic sense of time and place and inhabit it with fully three dimensional characters who get out there and kick ass. And as pretty much the only person on the planet who has DMed a D&D game with both Terry Pratchett and Fay Weldon (not at the same time), I loved that sense of random outworld events pushed by a coherent character set. Oats and Jackal and Fetch and Claymaster all know why they're doing what they're doing. And it's wonderful, did I mention? Read this, your only regret on finishing is that the new one isn't out yet...