When I was a kid, I simply found (and still do find) certain things just cool, rad, awesome—like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Super Mario Brothers, or Garbage Pail Kids—and I couldn’t tell you why. The coolness of these things was just a fact of my small universe. Although I would never have put it this way then, I was making an authentic, spontaneous, and “disinterested” aesthetic judgment. “Disinterestedness” in aesthetic judgment is essential, at least if you trust Immanuel Kant: in his Critique of Judgment (1790), he argues it’s a necessary precondition for any valid aesthetic judgment.
What does Kant mean by disinterestedness? Essentially, our judgments of beauty (or “pure judgments of taste”) must be free from personal interest, practical benefit, or moral considerations. If we praise a work solely because our friend made it, that’s personal interest. If we value it because it imparts historical knowledge, that’s a practical benefit. If we celebrate it for its moral lessons, that’s moral utility. None of these, Kant says, are purely aesthetic grounds.
In other words, for Kant, the only explanation you can really give for why something is beautiful or art-worthy is that it’s “cool.” By that logic, a little kid shrugging his shoulders and blurting out “I like it because it’s cool” is making one of the purest aesthetic judgments possible. That thought kept popping into my head while I read To Walk on Worlds. The anthology's key melody, if you will, is precisely this kind of puerile, no-nonsense love for the material.
To Walk on Worlds features a variety of stories that have been published elsewhere. I assume these stories have been revised and polished for this release, but beyond obvious cosmetic changes, they read the same as when I encountered them in their original venues. There are also stories published here for the first time.
On the one hand, the anthology is an eclectic, patchwork mix featuring a wide variety of characters and scenarios; on the other hand, there are recurring characters and themes running through the collection, so it is fair to call it cohesive and unified. In contemporary sword and sorcery, Matt John is a presence. He is one of the hosts of the Rogues in the House podcast, a contributor to Savage Sword of Conan and other official contemporary Conan-related properties (e.g., various versions of the Conan RPG). Matt’s oeuvre extends to organizing a vital Facebook group, the Conan Gaming Group. This isn’t the place to fully rehearse Matt’s nerd credentials: suffice it to say, he is a productive, active, and authentic fan, creator, and even influencer.
Full disclosure: I consider Matt my friend (which is why I am using "Matt" rather than the more formal "Mr. John"), have gamed with him, have been on panels with him at GenCon and Robert E. Howard Days, and have sometimes moonlighted on his podcast as an anxious, stuttering guest. But the credentials and compliments enumerated above aren’t mere flexing and flattery. I believe they are part of the appeal of Matt’s anthology. How so? As stated above, there is a palpable love of the material, the worlds, the characters, and the themes treated in this anthology that saturates every page. I dare say that enthusiasm and joy like Matt’s cannot be faked. It shines through in every story, and, through some Meddler’s dark magic, it is contagious, infects you, compels you onward.
Let me briefly touch on some of the stories.
“To Walk on Worlds” is an interesting tale about Maxus, the world-jumping and body-jumping sorcerer who plots and schemes against a king. Maxus is organizing his worldly affairs before becoming extra-worldly. The character Maxus will return again and again throughout the anthology. He is a fascinating force in the story, an archetypical nasty evil sorcerer who you kind of grow to love and hate: a little Skeletor, a little Mumm-Ra, spiced with the surprising Pinhead vibes. Strangely, Maxus’s sorcerous potency, knowledge, and intractability reminded me of—excuse the analogy—a sword and sorcery version of Rick from Rick and Morty.
“A Simple Errand” introduces Matt’s barbarian warrior, Lachmannon the Kael, who gets wrapped up in the schemes and machinations of Maxus. Lachmannon is the terra firma to Maxus’s cosmicism. The barbarian’s relationship to the sorcerer is intriguing and often hilarious: Maxus needs help with this or that cosmic challenge beyond the ken of the humble Kael, and Lachmannon provides the necessary brawn while observing how bizarre things are, often cursing about the bizarrerie of it all. In this way, Lachmannon is something of an ocular stand-in for the reader, giving us distance from the sorcerous and cosmic doings. He’s the Morty to Maxus’s Rick.
“The Gift of Gallah” is where Matt gets more literary and flexes his prose-style credentials. This is a tragic story about a man searching for the eponymous Gift of Gallah, but getting what he wants isn’t what he expected. There were some compelling and beautiful passages in this story. I would even go so far as to suggest this story treats some of the themes of toxic masculinity, specifically regarding emotional dissociation during the grieving process.
“Cries from a Sleeping City” was quite horrific. It features Lachmannon plumbing the depths of a haunted city as a mercenary. There are elements of cosmic horror, Dungeons & Dragons, and Gothicism. I was even reminded of Karl Edward Wagner’s tales, specifically his masterpiece “Raven’s Eyrie.” There is a lot of worldbuilding in this one, and you get the sense that the world Lachmannon occupies is fully realized—a Bronze Age or early medieval Eurasia haunted (literally and figuratively) by antiquity.
“Man of Xerus” was one of my favorite stories, definitely horror-focused. It reminded me of scenes in Hellraiser 2, where the victims of the Cenobites venture into an Escher-like hellscape. In this story, the protagonist is enthralled by a hideous world and the dark pleasures it offers, and thus is terribly punished for their morbid curiosity. Once again, this story features Maxus, the alien puppet-master sorcerer who serves to remind the reader that all these tales are part of a larger tableau.
“A Final Errand” brings Lachmannon and Maxus together once again. Maxus has dragged Lachmannon out of a quasi-retirement and needs his slaying skills once more. There are a lot of worldbuilding reveals here that I won’t spoil. What sticks with you is how the relationship between Maxus and Lachmannon develops and matures. Matt also lands the ending here. Perhaps I was just in a sentimental mood when reading this, but I discovered tears in my eyes at the surprising conclusion.
“The Meddler” shifts the focus from the cosmic to the local: two ordinary people are pulled into the machinations of a sorcerer (I don’t think this sorcerer is Maxus, but I could be wrong). This story was really intriguing in how it shows the tension between ordinary lives and the dehumanizing effects of a sorcerer’s cosmic enterprises. The sorcerer character comes off as fully anti-human, preying on the ordinary person—a perennial sword and sorcery theme.
“A Fate Worse than Exile” is a great story featuring a Kael similar to Lachmannon and a rogue-rascal who becomes his temporary travel companion. The trope of the sword and sorcery duo, akin to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, is deployed here to interesting effect. There is one monologue by the barbarian Kael, describing his distrust of the “civilized,” that gets at a core theme of the sword and sorcery genre. This story ends on a haunting note.
“A Chance Burden,” originally published in Spiral Tower Press’s amateur zine, Whetstone, follows up on a previous character. It is an interesting meditation on the awkwardness of being a caregiver or parent.
The last entry is more of a vignette—an outré—and it really works: it ends with Maxus in all of his alienness, warning a humble farmer to steer clear of him.
This review is running long, so let me conclude with some comments about technique. John’s prose is very readable and polished. It’s paced wonderfully: full of momentum, balanced action, character building, a dash of introspection, and good plot structure. It would be wrong to say that Matt’s work isn’t artistically ambitious—his seriousness as a prose stylist is on display here—but there is a noir, minimalist quality to his storytelling technique, and that isn’t a bad thing (i.e. a literary touchstone might be Raymond Carver). Perhaps this is the kind of writing that will develop into further complexity in the future, but it doesn't need to, and I could imagine reading along with Matt in a novel-length narrative. Currently, Matt is, without a doubt, one of the best writers of contemporary sword and sorcery. His writing is unpretentious, and the genre is unpretentious, yet the lack of prose ornamentation doesn’t mean a lack of depth or feeling. Quite the opposite,
In my view, these stories deliver some of the perennial themes of the genre—tension between civilization and barbarism, the way extreme intelligence can become alien, the power of familial bonds in the face of danger, and the brutality of the civilized world—all while remaining fun. You can tell, as you read, that Matt is having fun, and you can’t help but be caught up in it. Because of this, I can honestly say, To Walk on Worlds is cool, man!
