#david ferring

Back when I read Ignorant Armies and Wolf Riders, I commented that several of the short stories they included felt almost like backstories for a tabletop roleplaying game characters. “Here is how this normal boy got a bit of skills and decided to head out into the wide and dangerous world for some adventures!” Reading Konrad feels a little bit like a novel-length version of one of these short stories. Our protagonist (named Konrad, unsurprisingly) is a young man living in the psudeo-early-Rennessance world of Warhammer Fantasy. Never having known his parents, he works for the local tavern-keeper, barely better than a slave, and knows of nothing beyond his small village and the nearby forest where he sometimes hunts for firewood. He does, however, have something that sets him apart from others, and that is a sporadic ability to foresee imminent danger. When he uses this gift to save the life of a nobleman’s daughter, she rewards him with a bow and arrows of his own, and these tools (and the friendship he forges with her) set him on a path to both adventure and danger. The biggest issue with Konrad is that it feels like reading half of a story, and not in a satisfying way. We spend plenty of time with Konrad in the village and follow the event that pushes him to leave his home (which is a pretty decent setpiece, to be fair) in detail, but once he meets up with his mentor figure, the plot shifts into high gear while simultaneously stalling. Ferring skips over years worth of downtime, handwaves a lot of relationship development and character maturity, and then, apparently realizing he’s almost out of page space, suddenly throws the characters into an adventure that’s introduced, begun, and resolved in less than thirty pages, giving little time for real tension or intrigue. As I said in the opening, it feels more like reading the backstory for a Dungeons and Dragons character (or, to be more technically accurate, a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay character) than a fleshed-out story. Other, smaller gripes included a few moments that I felt were a bit unbelievable (how is Konrad good enough to win several knife fights without having been in melee combat before?) and an excessively high reliance on the protagonist simply narrating his feelings to the audience or someone bluntly explaining facts about the story’s world instead of showcasing action or character development in a more dynamic way. The story isn’t all bad, though – Wolf, Konrad’s mysterious mercenary mentor, was entertaining and intriguing and as I mentioned earlier, the series of scenes that finally forces Konrad to leave the village was quite fun. The prose is unremarkable, but not distractingly bad, and despite his blank-slate quality, Konrad was rather likable in his earnestness. I didn’t hate this one, but I really do wish that we could have gotten an extra 50 pages so that it could feel like a proper adventure. Warnings: Like most Warhammer Fantasy novels, the book features a fair amount of gory violence and what I like to call “general low-fantasy unpleasantness” – unjust executions, mistreatment of the poor, slavery, etc. There are also some references to child abuse and to torture, although neither are given graphic descriptions.