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Kindling
A ravening horde of barbarians from the East, the Mosul Empire, in unholy alliance with the Teutons and the Mameluke warlords and led by the brutal theocracy of the Zhaithan, has subjugated the Land of the Franks and the Hispanic Peninsula. Setting their sights on the New World, they have already conquered the Republic of Greater Carolina and the Virginia Freestate. Only the Kingdom of Albany still stands, aided by the Norse Alliance of Britain and Scandinavia.
Four youngsters from very different backgrounds are brought together to form The Four -- a supernatural entity that becomes the last-ditch hope of the Free World.
Four youngsters from very different backgrounds are brought together to form The Four -- a supernatural entity that becomes the last-ditch hope of the Free World.
416 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Mick Farren
71 books87 followersFarren was the singer with the proto-punk English band The Deviants between 1967 and 1969, releasing three albums. In 1970 he released the solo album Mona – The Carnivorous Circus which also featured Steve Peregrin Took, John Gustafson and Paul Buckmaster, before leaving the music business to concentrate on his writing.
In the mid-1970s, he briefly returned to music releasing the EP Screwed Up, album Vampires Stole My Lunch Money and single "Broken Statue". The album featured fellow NME journalist Chrissie Hynde and Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson.
He has sporadically returned to music, collaborating with Wayne Kramer on Who Shot You Dutch? and Death Tongue, Jack Lancaster on The Deathray Tapes and Andy Colquhoun on The Deviants albums Eating Jello With a Heated Fork and Dr. Crow.
Aside from his own work, he has provided lyrics for various musician friends over the years. He has collaborated with Lemmy, co-writing "Lost Johnny" for Hawkwind, and "Keep Us on the Road" and "Damage Case" for Motörhead. With Larry Wallis, he co-wrote "When's the Fun Begin?" for the Pink Fairies and several tracks on Wallis' solo album Death in a Guitar Afternoon. He provided lyrics for the Wayne Kramer single "Get Some" in the mid-1970s, and continued to work with and for him during the 1990s.
In the early 1970s he contributed to the UK Underground press such as the International Times, also establishing Nasty Tales which he successfully defended from an obscenity charge. He went on to write for the main stream New Musical Express, where he wrote the article The Titanic Sails At Dawn, an analysis of what he saw as the malaise afflicting then-contemporary rock music which described the conditions that subsequently gave rise to punk.
To date he has written 23 novels, including the Victor Renquist novels and the DNA Cowboys sequence. His prophetic 1989 novel The Armageddon Crazy deals with a post-2000 United States which is dominated by fundamentalists who dismantle the Constitution.
Farren has written 11 works of non-fiction, a number of biographical (including four on Elvis Presley), autobiographical and culture books (such as The Black Leather Jacket) and a plethora of poetry.
Since 2003, he has been a columnist for the weekly Los Angeles CityBeat.
Farren died at the age of 69 in 2013, after collapsing onstage while performing with the Deviants at the Borderline Club in London.
In the mid-1970s, he briefly returned to music releasing the EP Screwed Up, album Vampires Stole My Lunch Money and single "Broken Statue". The album featured fellow NME journalist Chrissie Hynde and Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson.
He has sporadically returned to music, collaborating with Wayne Kramer on Who Shot You Dutch? and Death Tongue, Jack Lancaster on The Deathray Tapes and Andy Colquhoun on The Deviants albums Eating Jello With a Heated Fork and Dr. Crow.
Aside from his own work, he has provided lyrics for various musician friends over the years. He has collaborated with Lemmy, co-writing "Lost Johnny" for Hawkwind, and "Keep Us on the Road" and "Damage Case" for Motörhead. With Larry Wallis, he co-wrote "When's the Fun Begin?" for the Pink Fairies and several tracks on Wallis' solo album Death in a Guitar Afternoon. He provided lyrics for the Wayne Kramer single "Get Some" in the mid-1970s, and continued to work with and for him during the 1990s.
In the early 1970s he contributed to the UK Underground press such as the International Times, also establishing Nasty Tales which he successfully defended from an obscenity charge. He went on to write for the main stream New Musical Express, where he wrote the article The Titanic Sails At Dawn, an analysis of what he saw as the malaise afflicting then-contemporary rock music which described the conditions that subsequently gave rise to punk.
To date he has written 23 novels, including the Victor Renquist novels and the DNA Cowboys sequence. His prophetic 1989 novel The Armageddon Crazy deals with a post-2000 United States which is dominated by fundamentalists who dismantle the Constitution.
Farren has written 11 works of non-fiction, a number of biographical (including four on Elvis Presley), autobiographical and culture books (such as The Black Leather Jacket) and a plethora of poetry.
Since 2003, he has been a columnist for the weekly Los Angeles CityBeat.
Farren died at the age of 69 in 2013, after collapsing onstage while performing with the Deviants at the Borderline Club in London.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 12, 2023
Confession: I find books of institutional brutality very hard to read, especially when it is using violence towards women to make its point. This seems to be a thing with Farren, painting a world of sheer unpleasantness with such ferocity. But unlike the DNA Cowboys or The Texts of Festival, he is reaching towards meaning with mature purpose instead of a punkish need to shock the audience. I'm not sure if it achieves this: it is somewhere between the audience-goring ugliness of Doctor Adder and the sophisticated messaging of The First Law, both of which required much loin-girding to see them through.
The closure of his ideas awaits the second of the series. It could go either way at this point.
The closure of his ideas awaits the second of the series. It could go either way at this point.
May 4, 2009
Feels like he couldn't decide if he wanted to write a shitty sci-fi novel or a shitty porno novel.
March 16, 2013
If nothing else Mick Farren cured me of my thinking I was burned out on alternate universe story telling. This was because of my utter uncaring attitude towards picking up the two or three Cherie Priest AU books that I haven't read after reading the first three.. Now i think that is a combination of choice of history point and writing.
Which makes how much I enjoyed this book even more surprising. I've liked the two Farren vampire books I've read, but they were dense reads, slightly plodding to be honest. This was a fairly quick read, and Farren made some things work that often don't for me in a novel. The story is told from four different points of view, Raphael, Argo, Cordelia, and Jesamine. Each from a different culture and while the characters may not be fully three-dimensional Farren does give each their own voice. Shifting points of view doesn't always work for me
The next thing Farren made work, that often falls flat for me, was the sex in the book. Philip Jose Farmer often used sex in his books, but frankly it almost made A Feast Unknown laughable and unreadable, and I'm far from a prude. While the amount of sex in Kindling might seem excessive, it does serve a purpose as it is used to arguably defines two, if not three of our main characters.
Farren is also known for metafiction, and it appears he is referencing his DNA Cowboys a little here (I have not read those yet). We get a mix of fiction and real life references, as John F. Kennedy is the prime minister of one of the democracies left in the Americas.
The setting appears to pre-World War I. What is the U.S. here, is a grouping of separate confederations and free states. Albany which appears to be the Northeast is a constitutional monarchy, and the last part of the Easter seaboard that has not fallen under the grinding heel of the Mosul.
The Mosul swept out of Africa about 300 years before and conquered all of Europe except the Norse Union (England, Ireland, Sweden, Netherlands and a little more). Covertly the NU is supplying Albany with more advanced arms than the Mosul have as the NU and Mosul are in an uneasy peace.
The Mosul worship a twin god, but in the lands they conquer women are second class citizens, all other religion and witchcraft are outlawed and punishment is unrelenting by whipping, hanging or burning.
Some would call this a fantasy, but having read two other Farren tales I thin is more a use of paranormal and science fiction.
The start of a series that I think would hook many.
Which makes how much I enjoyed this book even more surprising. I've liked the two Farren vampire books I've read, but they were dense reads, slightly plodding to be honest. This was a fairly quick read, and Farren made some things work that often don't for me in a novel. The story is told from four different points of view, Raphael, Argo, Cordelia, and Jesamine. Each from a different culture and while the characters may not be fully three-dimensional Farren does give each their own voice. Shifting points of view doesn't always work for me
The next thing Farren made work, that often falls flat for me, was the sex in the book. Philip Jose Farmer often used sex in his books, but frankly it almost made A Feast Unknown laughable and unreadable, and I'm far from a prude. While the amount of sex in Kindling might seem excessive, it does serve a purpose as it is used to arguably defines two, if not three of our main characters.
Farren is also known for metafiction, and it appears he is referencing his DNA Cowboys a little here (I have not read those yet). We get a mix of fiction and real life references, as John F. Kennedy is the prime minister of one of the democracies left in the Americas.
The setting appears to pre-World War I. What is the U.S. here, is a grouping of separate confederations and free states. Albany which appears to be the Northeast is a constitutional monarchy, and the last part of the Easter seaboard that has not fallen under the grinding heel of the Mosul.
The Mosul swept out of Africa about 300 years before and conquered all of Europe except the Norse Union (England, Ireland, Sweden, Netherlands and a little more). Covertly the NU is supplying Albany with more advanced arms than the Mosul have as the NU and Mosul are in an uneasy peace.
The Mosul worship a twin god, but in the lands they conquer women are second class citizens, all other religion and witchcraft are outlawed and punishment is unrelenting by whipping, hanging or burning.
Some would call this a fantasy, but having read two other Farren tales I thin is more a use of paranormal and science fiction.
The start of a series that I think would hook many.
July 30, 2012
Turns out I'd read this ages ago and thought it was goofy. And I still think that.
November 27, 2018
Uh, wow book.
I picked this up in a local library and sped through about the first 75 pages when I decided enough was enough.
So it's alt history right? But it's alt history in the wild west where a weird evil empire takes over much of europe and is on the cusp of overwhelming the Americas. This part of the plot is kind of plodding as it jumps between like four different perspectives or so.
Except every single character had a creepy sex thing going on. Our first perspective character is fourteen and has his first encounter in the woods, no fire, on a cold night with a woman about five years his senior. Not great! Not good at all!
One character is a literal sex slave who describes having been beaten repeatedly while pleasuring her literal master and how she'll use sex to keep getting favors from another of his servants. Also pretty wrong! No thank you!
Both of the above are basically one right after the other and have left such a bad taste in my mouth I'm no longer paying attention to the plodding, grimdark worldbuilding and am more or less on the look out for creepy sex stuff.
Page 75 is where we get a hint that a lady around her late teens early twenties (or older I can't be bothered to check) has the hots for a man in his seventies and that she maybe agreed to do things with him later. And I put the book down and resolved to take it back to the library, further story unread.
Sex is fine, I have no problem with sex. Sex in stories are fine too, even stories not focusing on sex or even in a surprising way. It's not wrong to like sex: gay sex, straight sex, sex with a loving partner, sex for fun with people you don't plan on pursuing a relationship with, I'm alright with it, as long as it's legal and everybody consents.
Those last two are the most important part there: everybody is able to consent and does consent. As long as that's fine I'm fine. If it's well written, I don't even mind a huge age gap between people involved as long as it's legal and everybody consents.
This was not well written. The sex was so sudden and so uncomfortable as to border on absurdity. I put the book down not because of the age gap but because I endured two very disturbing accounts of sexual relations and really didn't expect this out of nowhere hints at a liason between an old general and a younger woman to go well at all.
Admittedly this is a first, dropping an alt history book because of creepy sex problems instead of creepy ideological problems.
I picked this up in a local library and sped through about the first 75 pages when I decided enough was enough.
So it's alt history right? But it's alt history in the wild west where a weird evil empire takes over much of europe and is on the cusp of overwhelming the Americas. This part of the plot is kind of plodding as it jumps between like four different perspectives or so.
Except every single character had a creepy sex thing going on. Our first perspective character is fourteen and has his first encounter in the woods, no fire, on a cold night with a woman about five years his senior. Not great! Not good at all!
One character is a literal sex slave who describes having been beaten repeatedly while pleasuring her literal master and how she'll use sex to keep getting favors from another of his servants. Also pretty wrong! No thank you!
Both of the above are basically one right after the other and have left such a bad taste in my mouth I'm no longer paying attention to the plodding, grimdark worldbuilding and am more or less on the look out for creepy sex stuff.
Page 75 is where we get a hint that a lady around her late teens early twenties (or older I can't be bothered to check) has the hots for a man in his seventies and that she maybe agreed to do things with him later. And I put the book down and resolved to take it back to the library, further story unread.
Sex is fine, I have no problem with sex. Sex in stories are fine too, even stories not focusing on sex or even in a surprising way. It's not wrong to like sex: gay sex, straight sex, sex with a loving partner, sex for fun with people you don't plan on pursuing a relationship with, I'm alright with it, as long as it's legal and everybody consents.
Those last two are the most important part there: everybody is able to consent and does consent. As long as that's fine I'm fine. If it's well written, I don't even mind a huge age gap between people involved as long as it's legal and everybody consents.
This was not well written. The sex was so sudden and so uncomfortable as to border on absurdity. I put the book down not because of the age gap but because I endured two very disturbing accounts of sexual relations and really didn't expect this out of nowhere hints at a liason between an old general and a younger woman to go well at all.
Admittedly this is a first, dropping an alt history book because of creepy sex problems instead of creepy ideological problems.
August 28, 2017
A sword and sorcery mix in an alternative time line. A nasty middle eastern dictator, with help of magic and evil hordes, is all set to conquer the last pockets of freedom in North America! In to this mess steps the 'Four', for different people who can come together to wield magic. With their help and lots of violence, the bad guys are defeated.
Not bad, but little that is surprising. Farren has written better.
Not bad, but little that is surprising. Farren has written better.
January 19, 2008
This book is borderline okay. It was not impressive enough to continue reading the next book(s) in the series. I can't recommend this one.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews