Slayers Volumes 1-3 Collector's Edition by Hajime Kanzaka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Bandit Killer. The Queen of the Dead. The Black Witch.
This 15-year-old prodigy sorcerer has one hell of a reputation preceding her. But who wouldn't conjure a sphere of dark magic to blast away an idiot mercenary or a corrupt public official? Lina Inverse is the type of girl to let others down. She's also the kind of girl who doesn't mind stepping into the thick of things, when the chips are down, after everyone else has run away, and the situation looks its bleakest. Vengeance-driven priests? Cantankerous wizards? Trolls? Homunculi? Flying fish people? Bring it on. Lina's ready. (And Gourry too, for what it's worth.)
SLAYERS Omnibus #1 is a must-have for longtime enthusiasts of the pint-size lady known to channel (and challenge) the gods of darkness. Kanzaka's first three volumes charting the adventures of Lina, Gourry, and the gang carry readers through warm villages, sparsely populated farmlands, miasma-filled forests, and more. It's a grand adventure. The occasional kernel of backstory certainly doesn't hurt either (e.g., Lina comes from a family of merchants; she was born in a town in Zephilia, a land far to the north; and although young, she held a post in the regional sorcerer's council).
However, these early novels are not perfect. Intersecting plotlines frequently tangle before they straighten. The author's skill with environmental design and detail waxes and wanes. And a burgeoning cast weakens the dynamics of the protagonists. These novels are terribly entertaining, but for readers who haven't already fallen in love with the title's heroes, villains, places, and conflicts of note, the books are a bit of a rough ride.
Lina is a hilarious mess. She's only 15, but is an experienced traveler and expert spellcaster. She curses a lot, is constantly starting all manner of fights, and doesn't blink when faced with the threat of death from an unknown enemy. Her fateful encounter with the handsome but exquisitely dim-witted swordsman Gourry is one for the ages. Gourry, the caretaker of a legendary blade, has pride in spades and possesses extraordinary talent. Notably different from his animated counterpart, Gourry is a delightful smartass. It's no wonder he and Lina hit it off right away. Lina is a critical thinker who loves trouble; Gourry is an easygoing brute whose cheekiness belies his love of a good time.
The first of the omnibus's three novels, The Slayers, initially a standalone effort, is rough around the edges but gets the job done. Kanzaka was clearly packing everything he could into a tiny little box labeled "fantasy adventure." To be blunt, the book is coarse and idiosyncratic, but holds so many solid, original twists and turns, in plotting and narration, that it's extremely difficult to put down. The author's knack for writing killer chapter introductions is particularly charming (e.g., "Well, our visitor sure looked suspicious," p. 52).
In The Sorcerers of Atlas, the second novel, Lina and Gourry stumble into a regional feud between two petty but powerful sorcerers. There are more characters. More demons. A lot more spellcasting. And several, sometimes awkward plot twists. The fight scenes in the second book are excellent, contrasting Lina's gift for conjuring new and inventive ways to use her magical skill against a growing gallery of difficult and anonymous baddies.
SLAYERS Omnibus #1 is an increasingly comfortable encyclopedia of mysticism, courtesy of Lina's narration. Fans of the franchise will recognize many of the girl's more common spells, like diem wing (shockwave of air), freeze arrow (subzero arrow), dynas blas (lightning crashes from every angle), mega brand (rupture of the earth), and more. The big spells, like dragon slave and giga slave are much, much rarer. Lina's personal sketch of giga slave is equally amazing and terrifying. The spell, which calls upon the Lord of Nightmares, is described as a swirling void, "darkness darker than the dead of night," and "the complete and total absence of light" (p. 127).
This is where the franchise has always outperformed its genre contemporaries: spellcasting. For all of the anime programming out there about magical girls, mystical shounen adventurers, and more, none can hold a candle to the spellcasting animation exhibited in Slayers (1995). To great relief, the novels, particularly the second and third installments, yield close to this intuition. When Lina demands the giga slave heed her call and take the form of a blade? Badass. When Zelgadis provides an intricate but lay explanation of the difference between black magic, white ("shamanistic") magic, and elemental shamanistic magic? Flawless. SLAYERS Omnibus #1, true to expectations, is a corpus of mid- to high-fantasy spellcasting that grows increasingly dangerous and increasingly complex with the knowledge base of its daring practitioners.
Not to say there aren't plenty of new spells or new information for readers to pick up. Freeze bullid is a spell Lina invokes to cancel out a fireball, a trick she taught herself. Vrave howl, one of Zel's spells, is absolutely treacherous: "a spell that turned a patch of ground into a boiling lava flow" (p. 376). Meanwhile, van layl is perhaps the most tactically brilliant, casting veins of ice over the wall, floor, and ceiling, spiraling about its opponent and freezing them instantly. When readers realize the amount of study and practice necessary to learn, memorize, and even invent some of these spells, it truly hits home how much of a prodigy Lina Inverse really is.
The incorporation of Zelgadis, it should be mentioned, is impossibly fun and expertly handled. One tends to wonder how these extended protagonists find their way into the main narrative. Fortunately, Kanzaka found Zel's voice early in the novel series. Zelgadis, interestingly, isn't just part golem, he's part "rock golem," part "brow daemon," and part human. Insane. The man's attitude (tenacious and officious) and temperament (taciturn and privileged) are a fun contrast to Lina's goofy genius and Gourry's genius goofiness. At one point, he essentially tells the demure Sylphiel to shut the hell up ("Explanations later," p. 359), given the urgency of healing a gravely injured Lina. Readers don't know much about Zelgadis beyond his role as the "mad swordsman" of the red priest, but the character's prickly, closed-off nature is anything but off-putting. It's perfect.
The third title, The Ghosts of Sairaag whittles the dynamics between Lina and Gourry by building out the cast to include a number of allies, pseudo-allies, and named villains. The pacing is a little rushed, which is less than ideal, but the heightened stakes and increasingly complex battle planning and spellcasting still make for an entertaining read. And whereas environmental description is a weakness of the earlier novels, the third book makes good on the author's need to build out a livable world, as with the following description of the Miasma Forest outside of Sairaag: "The forest was eerily quiet, smothered by a strange chill and a raw smell of greenery so strong that it was almost overpowering. The leaves of the trees were so richly colored they were almost black" (p. 317).
SLAYERS Omnibus #1 has its flaws, most of which serve as nervous, grasping extensions of a fantasy franchise seeking its place. The first volume moves in fits and starts, the overlapping subplots of the second book unnecessarily complicate reader uptake, and the frenetic pacing of the third book, while not debilitating, is more noticeable here than elsewhere. Nevertheless, the characters arise almost fully formed from the start, the novel series' fantastical worldbuilding grows and builds on itself, and reader familiarity will surely only contribute to the comedy, the drama, and the resulting chance encounters with beings so eager to wipe humanity off the face of the planet.
