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Under My Skin
- anyone who reads the right book has an ally
Here is the right book. Under My Skin, K.J. Parker’s superb new collection, includes almost 700 pages of novelettes and novellas, some appearing here for the first time anywhere, with one completely new novel-length tale, Relics.
These stories are everything readers have come to expect from Parker, populated by con men and kings, magicians who don’t do magic and messiahs who don’t offer redemption, by holy men and holy fools. But be warned, not only is all perhaps not what it seems, all can usually be counted on to not be what it seems. Parker’s unruly and unreliable narrators, who sometimes fool themselves even more than they fool us, stride along muddy paths through lonely hills or across marble floors in grand palaces, always finding trapdoors opening beneath them.
In The Thought That Counts, for example, a man who claims to have been magically granted the wisdom of the world finds that he’s not wise enough to recognize a figure from his past who may prove that wisdom isn’t enough in every situation. In My Beautiful Life, a man who starts life as the son of a village prostitute rises as high in his world as anyone can, only to find that tumbling from such a height makes for a long, long fall. And in the epistolary novel Relics, readers are offered not just one unreliable narrator but two, as an archduke and a relic hunter describe their highs and lows to one another in a series of missives that even the writers don’t necessarily fully believe, much less the recipients.
K.J. Parker first came to prominence with The Engineer Trilogy. Since then, the author has gone on to pen dozens of novels, novellas, and short stories, winning a couple of World Fantasy Awards along the way and earning legions of fans. Subterranean Press is proud to offer this third collection from a modern master, a true ally guiding us through an uncertain — but endlessly fascinating — world.
Contents:
- The Return of The Pig (2018)
- The Thought That Counts (2018)
- Mightier than the Sword (2017)
- All Love Excelling (2023)
- Many Mansions (2020)
- My Beautiful Life (2019)
- Stronger (2021)
- Portrait of the Artist (2019)
- Prosper’s Demon (2020)
- The Best Man Wins (2017)
- Habitat (2020)
- The Big Score (2021)
- Relics (2023)
Cover illustration by Vincent Chong
Here is the right book. Under My Skin, K.J. Parker’s superb new collection, includes almost 700 pages of novelettes and novellas, some appearing here for the first time anywhere, with one completely new novel-length tale, Relics.
These stories are everything readers have come to expect from Parker, populated by con men and kings, magicians who don’t do magic and messiahs who don’t offer redemption, by holy men and holy fools. But be warned, not only is all perhaps not what it seems, all can usually be counted on to not be what it seems. Parker’s unruly and unreliable narrators, who sometimes fool themselves even more than they fool us, stride along muddy paths through lonely hills or across marble floors in grand palaces, always finding trapdoors opening beneath them.
In The Thought That Counts, for example, a man who claims to have been magically granted the wisdom of the world finds that he’s not wise enough to recognize a figure from his past who may prove that wisdom isn’t enough in every situation. In My Beautiful Life, a man who starts life as the son of a village prostitute rises as high in his world as anyone can, only to find that tumbling from such a height makes for a long, long fall. And in the epistolary novel Relics, readers are offered not just one unreliable narrator but two, as an archduke and a relic hunter describe their highs and lows to one another in a series of missives that even the writers don’t necessarily fully believe, much less the recipients.
K.J. Parker first came to prominence with The Engineer Trilogy. Since then, the author has gone on to pen dozens of novels, novellas, and short stories, winning a couple of World Fantasy Awards along the way and earning legions of fans. Subterranean Press is proud to offer this third collection from a modern master, a true ally guiding us through an uncertain — but endlessly fascinating — world.
Contents:
- The Return of The Pig (2018)
- The Thought That Counts (2018)
- Mightier than the Sword (2017)
- All Love Excelling (2023)
- Many Mansions (2020)
- My Beautiful Life (2019)
- Stronger (2021)
- Portrait of the Artist (2019)
- Prosper’s Demon (2020)
- The Best Man Wins (2017)
- Habitat (2020)
- The Big Score (2021)
- Relics (2023)
Cover illustration by Vincent Chong
673 pages, Hardcover
First published March 30, 2023
About the author
K.J. Parker
126 books1,491 followersK.J. Parker is a pseudonym for Tom Holt.
According to the biographical notes in some of Parker's books, Parker has previously worked in law, journalism, and numismatics, and now writes and makes things out of wood and metal. It is also claimed that Parker is married to a solicitor and now lives in southern England. According to an autobiographical note, Parker was raised in rural Vermont, a lifestyle which influenced Parker's work.
According to the biographical notes in some of Parker's books, Parker has previously worked in law, journalism, and numismatics, and now writes and makes things out of wood and metal. It is also claimed that Parker is married to a solicitor and now lives in southern England. According to an autobiographical note, Parker was raised in rural Vermont, a lifestyle which influenced Parker's work.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
March 26, 2023
Lovely example of KJ Parker writing very near the top of his form. A con-man meets an artist. Neither is what they seem. Hijinks ensue. Wonderful story: 4.5 stars, rounded up. Story link: http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.co...
Don't miss!
My review is solely for the title story. I haven't (yet) seen the collection. Which is not held by any of our libraries, boo hoo, not even as an ebook.
Don't miss!
My review is solely for the title story. I haven't (yet) seen the collection. Which is not held by any of our libraries, boo hoo, not even as an ebook.
Want to read
January 16, 2023The Return of the Pig - ⭐⭐⭐.5
This one is fine, with Parker's wonderful writing style. The wizard stories, however, just never end up being my favorites at all. This one is about where you come from and how you actually hate your best friends lol
I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to read more before its release due to the really bad formatting in the e-arc.
This one is fine, with Parker's wonderful writing style. The wizard stories, however, just never end up being my favorites at all. This one is about where you come from and how you actually hate your best friends lol
I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to read more before its release due to the really bad formatting in the e-arc.
July 2, 2023
My idea of reading enjoyment. Thirteen stories, novellas, novelettes, whatever, in 700 pages by K.J. Parker. I’d read three previously but they passed the reread test easily and the rest were almost all excellent. And very good value for money in the ebook format!
The author’s full length novels rarely feature magic and are often only just this side of the fantasy/historical fiction dividing line. However, his shorter stories, as in this book, can include some magical or supernatural aspects. A handful of these do. If I recall correctly every story is in his frequently used first person style. Rather chatty, and intimate with the reader, as though the reader and author were in one to one conversation in a pub, for example. And the unreliable narrator style features too.
Several of the stories have very clear pseudo-Byzantium Empire backgrounds, the worldview that the author commonly likes to build upon for his fantasy tales. Having recently read a potted history of 1000 years of Byzantium history I saw links between a couple of storylines and genuine, if bizarre, history. For example, a general marrying his actress/prostitute lover before they both become a successful Emperor and Empress team (Justinian and Theodora in early Byzantium history); the good looking brother of the Chief Eunuch who marries an aging empress after they’ve assassinated the emperor. And the new emperor makes a decent job of being emperor - based on actual history!
My favourite is probably the last story, previously unpublished, Relics. A Duke whose commoner best friend undertakes journeys, far and wide, to buy Holy Relics (a popular activity in the Byzantium Empire - no proper church or holy order could be without some saint’s bones). They communicate only through letters. But the story, revealed through their letters, slowly expands far beyond cataloguing the buying of relics…
The only downside to my read is that you can have too much of a good thing in one serving. There is a common ‘voice’ in this first person narration style, the voice of the author, and a distinctive feature of his writing. A fairly similar personality behind each of the stories. And, although the stories have been written and published over some years, you occasionally come across similarly expressed phrases that wouldn’t have been apparent unless these separate stories had been collected together into one book as here. About halfway through my reading I solved that issue by not reading each story consecutively but by leaving a couple of days between them to keep things fresher.
Overall, all the usual enjoyment I get from reading this author, Wry humour, clever, original, observations and quotable phrases, mild cynicism, fine prose, etc. Just maybe the warning that it’s probably better to space the stories out when you read them rather than attempt them in one go.
Quotes:
“ All Love Excelling Page 181”
Eudo reckoned my mother started the argument, and that sounds right. My father didn’t start quarrels. He created the circumstances whereby quarrels happened but never actually spoke the first angry word; a bit like a canny general who gets there first, digs in, cuts all the bridges and clears the brushwood away from the road to give a clear field of fire, then waits to be attacked.
“Portrait of the Artist. Page 366”
You’ll recall that Saloninus proves, mathematically and by examples drawn from great art, that the divide between beautiful and ugly is almost exactly a quarter of an inch—fifteen sixty-fourths of an inch, to be precise. Take the most beautiful nose you can think of, and shorten it, or lengthen it, one quarter-inch. Result; ugliness. Same goes for lips, chins, distance between eyes, all the geometrical relationships that make up the human face. Seven thirty-seconds longer or shorter you can get away with, but fifteen sixty-fourths is the killer. It’s an absolute rule, infallible, inflexible.
(SK - I’ve always been at least half an inch out…)
“Prosper’s Demon. Page 395” (The tale of an exorcist).
I have an idea you aren’t going to like me very much. That may prove to be the only thing we’ll have in common, so let’s make the most of it. I do terrible things. I do them to my enemies, to my own side, to myself. In the process, I save a large number of strangers (on average, between five and ten a week) from the worst thing that can happen to a human being. I’d like to say I do it because I’m one of the good guys, but if I did that, you’d see right through me.
“ The Big Score Page 588”
Books make you happy, angry, peaceful, discontented, reassured, justified. A book can make me forget who and what I am, for a little while. A book is somewhere I can go and not have to take myself with me.
“Relics. Page 603”
Thank you ever so much for the shin-bone of Corsellus of Radua, the tibia of Herennius, the three vertebrae of the Blessed Virgin of Ans and the jaw of Rubo the Paraclete. At this rate, pretty soon I shall have enough bits and pieces to build my own saint.
“Relics - Page 715”
One of the skills I have and you don’t, because you did Logic in Second Year and I did Rhetoric, is the art of the insincere apology. Basically, you start off declaring your intention to apologise, and then you make the actual apology so involved and long-winded that the other guy gets bored and stops listening; at which point, you can subtly backtrack on your apology, and make out that in fact you were right and he was wrong, and he won’t even notice… I got an A + in that module.
The author’s full length novels rarely feature magic and are often only just this side of the fantasy/historical fiction dividing line. However, his shorter stories, as in this book, can include some magical or supernatural aspects. A handful of these do. If I recall correctly every story is in his frequently used first person style. Rather chatty, and intimate with the reader, as though the reader and author were in one to one conversation in a pub, for example. And the unreliable narrator style features too.
Several of the stories have very clear pseudo-Byzantium Empire backgrounds, the worldview that the author commonly likes to build upon for his fantasy tales. Having recently read a potted history of 1000 years of Byzantium history I saw links between a couple of storylines and genuine, if bizarre, history. For example, a general marrying his actress/prostitute lover before they both become a successful Emperor and Empress team (Justinian and Theodora in early Byzantium history); the good looking brother of the Chief Eunuch who marries an aging empress after they’ve assassinated the emperor. And the new emperor makes a decent job of being emperor - based on actual history!
My favourite is probably the last story, previously unpublished, Relics. A Duke whose commoner best friend undertakes journeys, far and wide, to buy Holy Relics (a popular activity in the Byzantium Empire - no proper church or holy order could be without some saint’s bones). They communicate only through letters. But the story, revealed through their letters, slowly expands far beyond cataloguing the buying of relics…
The only downside to my read is that you can have too much of a good thing in one serving. There is a common ‘voice’ in this first person narration style, the voice of the author, and a distinctive feature of his writing. A fairly similar personality behind each of the stories. And, although the stories have been written and published over some years, you occasionally come across similarly expressed phrases that wouldn’t have been apparent unless these separate stories had been collected together into one book as here. About halfway through my reading I solved that issue by not reading each story consecutively but by leaving a couple of days between them to keep things fresher.
Overall, all the usual enjoyment I get from reading this author, Wry humour, clever, original, observations and quotable phrases, mild cynicism, fine prose, etc. Just maybe the warning that it’s probably better to space the stories out when you read them rather than attempt them in one go.
Quotes:
“ All Love Excelling Page 181”
Eudo reckoned my mother started the argument, and that sounds right. My father didn’t start quarrels. He created the circumstances whereby quarrels happened but never actually spoke the first angry word; a bit like a canny general who gets there first, digs in, cuts all the bridges and clears the brushwood away from the road to give a clear field of fire, then waits to be attacked.
“Portrait of the Artist. Page 366”
You’ll recall that Saloninus proves, mathematically and by examples drawn from great art, that the divide between beautiful and ugly is almost exactly a quarter of an inch—fifteen sixty-fourths of an inch, to be precise. Take the most beautiful nose you can think of, and shorten it, or lengthen it, one quarter-inch. Result; ugliness. Same goes for lips, chins, distance between eyes, all the geometrical relationships that make up the human face. Seven thirty-seconds longer or shorter you can get away with, but fifteen sixty-fourths is the killer. It’s an absolute rule, infallible, inflexible.
(SK - I’ve always been at least half an inch out…)
“Prosper’s Demon. Page 395” (The tale of an exorcist).
I have an idea you aren’t going to like me very much. That may prove to be the only thing we’ll have in common, so let’s make the most of it. I do terrible things. I do them to my enemies, to my own side, to myself. In the process, I save a large number of strangers (on average, between five and ten a week) from the worst thing that can happen to a human being. I’d like to say I do it because I’m one of the good guys, but if I did that, you’d see right through me.
“ The Big Score Page 588”
Books make you happy, angry, peaceful, discontented, reassured, justified. A book can make me forget who and what I am, for a little while. A book is somewhere I can go and not have to take myself with me.
“Relics. Page 603”
Thank you ever so much for the shin-bone of Corsellus of Radua, the tibia of Herennius, the three vertebrae of the Blessed Virgin of Ans and the jaw of Rubo the Paraclete. At this rate, pretty soon I shall have enough bits and pieces to build my own saint.
“Relics - Page 715”
One of the skills I have and you don’t, because you did Logic in Second Year and I did Rhetoric, is the art of the insincere apology. Basically, you start off declaring your intention to apologise, and then you make the actual apology so involved and long-winded that the other guy gets bored and stops listening; at which point, you can subtly backtrack on your apology, and make out that in fact you were right and he was wrong, and he won’t even notice… I got an A + in that module.
March 13, 2024
K J Parker liefert!
Für wenig Geld bekommt man hier eine Sammlung von Kurzgeschichten die in einem erfundenen mediteranen Raum spielen, mit Imperien, Kaisern und einer Religion, die nicht unsere ist aber ihr ähnlich.
Die Protagonisten: Ich Erzähle und Genies allesamt, und alle sind sie Getriebene, egal ob es Künster, Kaiser oder Generäle sind.
Dieses Buch bläst hinfort den Moder, der mir normale Fantasy so vergällt, den dummen Mittelaltermief. Statdessen: Menschen die in einer zynischen und amoralischen Welt leben.
Schöne Sache.
Für wenig Geld bekommt man hier eine Sammlung von Kurzgeschichten die in einem erfundenen mediteranen Raum spielen, mit Imperien, Kaisern und einer Religion, die nicht unsere ist aber ihr ähnlich.
Die Protagonisten: Ich Erzähle und Genies allesamt, und alle sind sie Getriebene, egal ob es Künster, Kaiser oder Generäle sind.
Dieses Buch bläst hinfort den Moder, der mir normale Fantasy so vergällt, den dummen Mittelaltermief. Statdessen: Menschen die in einer zynischen und amoralischen Welt leben.
Schöne Sache.
December 29, 2023
TL;DR: Some good, some bad, and a big dose of WTF.
Parker's 2023 collection contains the following:
The Return of the Pig
The Thought That Counts
Mightier than the Sword*
All Love Excelling
Many Mansions
My Beautiful Life*
Stronger
Portrait of the Artist
Prosper's Demon*
The Best Man Wins
Habitat
The Big Score*
Relics
The marked novellas were all previously published in standalone editions which I've already reviewed separately. (Mightier than the Sword was a bit underwhelming, but I gave the other three five stars when I read them.) Relics is a new novella for this collection. I think the remainder were published in various magazines or anthologies, but were new to me, all of those were shorts, single session reads.
Of the new to me stories, the standout was "The Thought That Counts" which is a Saloninus story. I'd give that one five stars.
"The Return of the Pig" features a sorcerer who is forced to go back to his home town in the sticks on a mission and isn't happy about it.
"All Love Excelling" - What if your dad was the messiah. Sometimes funny, but I was put off by the heavy pseudo-christian stuff.
"Many Mansions" - A scholar, who is definitely not a wizard, goes out to deal with a reported witch. I liked this one, one of the stronger stories in the collection.
"Stronger" - This one started out strong, but soon got boring and the ending sucked. I'd call this the second actual bad story I've read by Parker.
"Portrait of the Artist" - One of the very few Parker stories with a woman as the POV character. (The artist who appears in a few other stories as an antagonist.) This one was good.
"The Best Man Wins" - A predictable, yet still very enjoyable story of a blacksmith hired to make a sword by a strange young man.
"Habitat" - This was a surprise. One of the things I really liked about Parker's stories when I first discovered them was the absence of magic. Sadly, magic has crept into some of them over the years, but this one features a dragon. I saw in an interview after I read this that dragons were one of the things he'd initially decided never to do when he first started writing fantasy, but then the prohibition became a sort of challenge and here we are. This was one of the better stories in the book, and I believe the shortest.
Finally "Relics". An epistolary novella, possibly the longest thing in the collection, mostly told in letters between the current ruler of a smallish state, and one of his friends from his college years who now travels the world acquiring relics on his behalf. (Some other charcters enter the mix later on in the story.) While I generally like epistolary stories, this didn't feel like it was going anywhere until about halfway through and it lacked the charm of Purple and Black.
Worse, whereas Parker's stuff typically has a lot of Byzantine and other historic parallels, this story had some echoes of more current events that occasionally jarred me right out of the story and then there's this:
Um, excuse me?! Note that the word "slave" appears around 35 times in this story. The relic hunter and some others refer to themselves as "slave to" the Archduke in the headings of all their letters, though I don't think that's their legal standing. There's a lovely "aren't we all slaves, really?" type line, and something to the effect of "I knew some slaves back home, they seemed happy".
Now, I'm not the most observant reader in the world when it comes to symbolism or certain types of subtext and I really have no idea wtf he's saying, or trying to say, or unconsciously saying with regards to slavery in this story, but the fact it includes this bizarre dis on MLK and Obama, and is coming (for me) on top of some uncomfortable Israel parallels in Inside Man, and the apparent racial trainwreck that was the Sixteen Ways/Siege series, is raising some questions.
As I read through this entire collection, given my lackluster response to a lot of the stories, I was wondering if I've started getting bored of Parker. It was always the voice for me, more than the plots, and the novellas over the shorts or novels, his stories seem more right-sized at that length.
I'm going to go ahead and give this four stars, as on balance I enjoyed enough of it. But after "Relics", I don't know where I go from here with Parker. I already own a bunch of his other books I haven't read, but I don't know.
Parker's 2023 collection contains the following:
The Return of the Pig
The Thought That Counts
Mightier than the Sword*
All Love Excelling
Many Mansions
My Beautiful Life*
Stronger
Portrait of the Artist
Prosper's Demon*
The Best Man Wins
Habitat
The Big Score*
Relics
The marked novellas were all previously published in standalone editions which I've already reviewed separately. (Mightier than the Sword was a bit underwhelming, but I gave the other three five stars when I read them.) Relics is a new novella for this collection. I think the remainder were published in various magazines or anthologies, but were new to me, all of those were shorts, single session reads.
Of the new to me stories, the standout was "The Thought That Counts" which is a Saloninus story. I'd give that one five stars.
"The Return of the Pig" features a sorcerer who is forced to go back to his home town in the sticks on a mission and isn't happy about it.
"All Love Excelling" - What if your dad was the messiah. Sometimes funny, but I was put off by the heavy pseudo-christian stuff.
"Many Mansions" - A scholar, who is definitely not a wizard, goes out to deal with a reported witch. I liked this one, one of the stronger stories in the collection.
"Stronger" - This one started out strong, but soon got boring and the ending sucked. I'd call this the second actual bad story I've read by Parker.
"Portrait of the Artist" - One of the very few Parker stories with a woman as the POV character. (The artist who appears in a few other stories as an antagonist.) This one was good.
"My father always reckoned his sons moved at the speed of narrative; they could cover a thousand miles in the space of some time later they arrived at their destination."
"The Best Man Wins" - A predictable, yet still very enjoyable story of a blacksmith hired to make a sword by a strange young man.
"Habitat" - This was a surprise. One of the things I really liked about Parker's stories when I first discovered them was the absence of magic. Sadly, magic has crept into some of them over the years, but this one features a dragon. I saw in an interview after I read this that dragons were one of the things he'd initially decided never to do when he first started writing fantasy, but then the prohibition became a sort of challenge and here we are. This was one of the better stories in the book, and I believe the shortest.
Finally "Relics". An epistolary novella, possibly the longest thing in the collection, mostly told in letters between the current ruler of a smallish state, and one of his friends from his college years who now travels the world acquiring relics on his behalf. (Some other charcters enter the mix later on in the story.) While I generally like epistolary stories, this didn't feel like it was going anywhere until about halfway through and it lacked the charm of Purple and Black.
Worse, whereas Parker's stuff typically has a lot of Byzantine and other historic parallels, this story had some echoes of more current events that occasionally jarred me right out of the story and then there's this:
"If you were the sort of leader who hops up on a barrel and yells I have a dream, yes we can, I'd yawn and walk away, because I'd know you're full of it and all you'll ever succeed in doing is making things worse."
Um, excuse me?! Note that the word "slave" appears around 35 times in this story. The relic hunter and some others refer to themselves as "slave to" the Archduke in the headings of all their letters, though I don't think that's their legal standing. There's a lovely "aren't we all slaves, really?" type line, and something to the effect of "I knew some slaves back home, they seemed happy".
Now, I'm not the most observant reader in the world when it comes to symbolism or certain types of subtext and I really have no idea wtf he's saying, or trying to say, or unconsciously saying with regards to slavery in this story, but the fact it includes this bizarre dis on MLK and Obama, and is coming (for me) on top of some uncomfortable Israel parallels in Inside Man, and the apparent racial trainwreck that was the Sixteen Ways/Siege series, is raising some questions.
As I read through this entire collection, given my lackluster response to a lot of the stories, I was wondering if I've started getting bored of Parker. It was always the voice for me, more than the plots, and the novellas over the shorts or novels, his stories seem more right-sized at that length.
I'm going to go ahead and give this four stars, as on balance I enjoyed enough of it. But after "Relics", I don't know where I go from here with Parker. I already own a bunch of his other books I haven't read, but I don't know.
July 3, 2023
Under My Skin is the third collection of short stories and novellas by K.J. Parker. This collection showcases Parker's wit, style and flare for both shorter forms of writing. All the stories are of a high quality and my favourites are, Many Mansions, Best Man Wins and Relics. Parker is highly recommended and this is one of his best collections to date.
December 19, 2022
5* short fiction
Available here:
https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.c...
A short Saloninus story! With links to The Things We Do for Love from The Father of Lies Jackpot.
Learn who you are dealing with first in:
- Blue and Gold
- The Devil You Know; and
- The Big Score
I read it together with https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.c... which is a clever play on the myth of the Minotaur. Loved both!
PS: super thrilled about and looking forward to: https://subterraneanpress.com/under-m...
Previous anthologies are one of the best books I own:
- Academic Exercises
- The Father of Lies
Available here:
https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.c...
A short Saloninus story! With links to The Things We Do for Love from The Father of Lies Jackpot.
Learn who you are dealing with first in:
- Blue and Gold
- The Devil You Know; and
- The Big Score
I read it together with https://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.c... which is a clever play on the myth of the Minotaur. Loved both!
PS: super thrilled about and looking forward to: https://subterraneanpress.com/under-m...
Previous anthologies are one of the best books I own:
- Academic Exercises
- The Father of Lies
March 26, 2023
“A life of honest endeavour; well, why not? Everyone ought to try it at least once before he dies.”
Popcorn for fantasy lovers. Engaging short story about getting what you wish for. Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #250, April 2018.
'“If He says it, obviously there must be something to it. No disrespect, but you don’t carry that weight. You haven’t earned that right to be listened to. It’s not the same.” Annoying, because the Him they were talking about was, of course, me.'
Popcorn for fantasy lovers. Engaging short story about getting what you wish for. Originally published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #250, April 2018.
'“If He says it, obviously there must be something to it. No disrespect, but you don’t carry that weight. You haven’t earned that right to be listened to. It’s not the same.” Annoying, because the Him they were talking about was, of course, me.'
December 27, 2022
This is a superb collection of lengthy K.J. Parker stories, including a novel-length new work. If you know Parker, you know what you will get: wry, first person narration by clever characters, who aren’t so clever that they can’t be outsmarted in an unexpected way. Most, but not all, of the stories feature less than entirely honorable central figures, but they always engaging, rogues or not. If you are new to Parker, you are in for a treat, as he is consistently perspicacious and his sardonic wit is perfectly voiced. I do recommend this volume for fans new and old. What I do not recommend is to read it in one go. Savor the stories and spread them out, better to enjoy as individual morsels of cleverness.
July 12, 2023
It's a bizarre but widespread myth that only heroes have good qualities, and the only qualities heroes have are good; villains are, by definition, all bad. Bullshit. (from "Prosper's Demon")
I dearly love KJ Parker stories: everyone is some shade of grey and they're all doing something morally questionable for impeccable reasons. The difference between his heroes and his villains is all a matter of perspective.
Received via NetGalley
I dearly love KJ Parker stories: everyone is some shade of grey and they're all doing something morally questionable for impeccable reasons. The difference between his heroes and his villains is all a matter of perspective.
Received via NetGalley
May 8, 2023
None of these stories were as good as my favorite of Parker's novels, but I just find the narrative voices so consistently *interesting* and such entertaining company, even when I'd hate it if the people I know in real life were anything like that. His work reminds me a bit of the Screwtape Letters in that way.
CN: All sorts of horrible violent things, small and large scale, far more often mentioned in technical context or alluded to than described gruesomely. Betrayals, many.
CN: All sorts of horrible violent things, small and large scale, far more often mentioned in technical context or alluded to than described gruesomely. Betrayals, many.
January 16, 2023
Under My Skin by K. J. Parker is a massive collection of his more recent short fiction. This is the third such collection, and I enjoyed this book as much as the previous 2 collections. Most of his stories are in a very loosely connected history centered around a college of magic, but magic is used very lightly in these stories. In a Parker story, you can never be sure who is good and who is not, but the journey is a lot of fun, he writes with a sardonic dark humor that I find irresistible, these stories are compulsively readable.
My 2 favorite stories in the book are the first and last stories. “The Return of the Pig” is full of reversals, with the narrator trying to solve a seemingly insoluble magical problem, while trying to distinguish between allies and enemies, and the final entry is a series of letters mostly between an archduke and an old friend who is hunting down sacred relics for him. Again, dark and funny, sometimes at the same time.
Under My Skin is an excellent collection by an outstanding fantasy writer. Well worth reading.
This e-ARC was provided by NetGalley for review.
My 2 favorite stories in the book are the first and last stories. “The Return of the Pig” is full of reversals, with the narrator trying to solve a seemingly insoluble magical problem, while trying to distinguish between allies and enemies, and the final entry is a series of letters mostly between an archduke and an old friend who is hunting down sacred relics for him. Again, dark and funny, sometimes at the same time.
Under My Skin is an excellent collection by an outstanding fantasy writer. Well worth reading.
This e-ARC was provided by NetGalley for review.
April 2, 2023
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.
K.J. Parker's fiction is a marvel— his smart, wry, unreliable narrators always entertain me. This is a big collection that gathers many of his short pieces and one novel-length work together, including Prosper's Demon. Marvelous.
I'm a huge fan, but it took me a surprisingly long time to get through this. Here's the problem: because the stories are first-person narrated but mostly different people— different people who are smart, wry, and unreliable narrators— it is a hard to tell their voices apart. The similarity also lessens the impact of each one. The solution I finally landed on was to just read something else in between as a palette cleanser (or as Evan Ladouceur beautifully put it in his review, spread the stories out to enjoy as "individual morsels of cleverness"). I would have loved a short intro to each story to break this up a little bit. Similarly, I wish the volume had an intro telling us a little more about the author.
My other objection, perhaps unfair, is the dust cover illustration, which would knock a half star off my rating if I took this into account. There is— eventually— a minotaur in this book, but the cover and its violence really aren't representative of the contents. Vincent Chong's done loads of beautiful work, but this one is a total miss for me. Since I already own my favorite story in print and I'm a shallow creature who judges books by their cover, this may dissuade me from purchasing a hard copy for my collection.
K.J. Parker's fiction is a marvel— his smart, wry, unreliable narrators always entertain me. This is a big collection that gathers many of his short pieces and one novel-length work together, including Prosper's Demon. Marvelous.
I'm a huge fan, but it took me a surprisingly long time to get through this. Here's the problem: because the stories are first-person narrated but mostly different people— different people who are smart, wry, and unreliable narrators— it is a hard to tell their voices apart. The similarity also lessens the impact of each one. The solution I finally landed on was to just read something else in between as a palette cleanser (or as Evan Ladouceur beautifully put it in his review, spread the stories out to enjoy as "individual morsels of cleverness"). I would have loved a short intro to each story to break this up a little bit. Similarly, I wish the volume had an intro telling us a little more about the author.
My other objection, perhaps unfair, is the dust cover illustration, which would knock a half star off my rating if I took this into account. There is— eventually— a minotaur in this book, but the cover and its violence really aren't representative of the contents. Vincent Chong's done loads of beautiful work, but this one is a total miss for me. Since I already own my favorite story in print and I'm a shallow creature who judges books by their cover, this may dissuade me from purchasing a hard copy for my collection.
December 30, 2022
Under My Skin has some excellent stories and short novels previously published that I read and reviewed at the time like the top-notch Mightier than the Sword (empire short novel) and the excellent My Beautiful Life (empire short novel) among others, but the new short novel (110+ pages) Relics (empire short novel) with which the collection ends is the piece of resistance and is an epistolary narration in the style of Purple and Black between a duke, leader of a small nation at the crossroads of powerful imperial states and his former college chum who is now buying relics for the duke, with of course a few interludes that explain what is really going on; just superb stuff and among the best of
Also the shorter All Love Excelling and Stronger are original to this one, one a sort of Christ parable in the KJ parker style and another a Minotaur one also in the author's interpretation, so one can expect dark irony, twists, and all that made the author such a favorite of mine; and both are fairly good.
Additionally, there are other earlier stories and short novels like The Big Score (Saloninus short novel), Prosper's Demon (demons and priests short novel), The Best Man Wins, The Thought that Counts, Many mansions, Portrait of the Artist which are all very good, with only a couple of stories that didn't really tell me that much
This is probably the strongest KJ Parker story collection I've read and I highly recommend it
Also the shorter All Love Excelling and Stronger are original to this one, one a sort of Christ parable in the KJ parker style and another a Minotaur one also in the author's interpretation, so one can expect dark irony, twists, and all that made the author such a favorite of mine; and both are fairly good.
Additionally, there are other earlier stories and short novels like The Big Score (Saloninus short novel), Prosper's Demon (demons and priests short novel), The Best Man Wins, The Thought that Counts, Many mansions, Portrait of the Artist which are all very good, with only a couple of stories that didn't really tell me that much
This is probably the strongest KJ Parker story collection I've read and I highly recommend it
June 25, 2023
A really good collection. Relics was my favorite.
He does what he does so well, but it also feels like some of the novelty has worn off if that makes sense.
It is still well-written and enjoyable, but it is also more of what he has done before.
But this is just quibbling. His existing fans will enjoy it, but new folks I think should read his other work first.
He does what he does so well, but it also feels like some of the novelty has worn off if that makes sense.
It is still well-written and enjoyable, but it is also more of what he has done before.
But this is just quibbling. His existing fans will enjoy it, but new folks I think should read his other work first.
Read
October 18, 2023Going to rate these as I read them, so for now I'll leave the overall rating blank.
The Thought That Counts: 5 stars. Fantastic fun. I actually read this free on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website, and it's what convinced me to buy this book. I'd never read anything by Parker before, and I'm officially into his writing. He's very clever (like the main character in this story) and funny. (NOTE: If you want to enjoy this one, please don't read the summary for this book on goodreads. I just read it when I was looking for the book, and I can't believe the way they described this story. Infuriating. Defeats the purpose of reading it yourself and discovering everything on your own, and it isn't at all how I would've described it).
Stronger: High 4 stars. It would be higher, because I wholly enjoyed this, but I'm comparing it to my experience with the first story, and it didn't hit quite the same. Still fantastic.
The Return of the Pig: 3 stars. My least favorite story so far, but still a good read. Just not going to be one I think about.
The Thought That Counts: 5 stars. Fantastic fun. I actually read this free on the Beneath Ceaseless Skies website, and it's what convinced me to buy this book. I'd never read anything by Parker before, and I'm officially into his writing. He's very clever (like the main character in this story) and funny. (NOTE: If you want to enjoy this one, please don't read the summary for this book on goodreads. I just read it when I was looking for the book, and I can't believe the way they described this story. Infuriating. Defeats the purpose of reading it yourself and discovering everything on your own, and it isn't at all how I would've described it).
Stronger: High 4 stars. It would be higher, because I wholly enjoyed this, but I'm comparing it to my experience with the first story, and it didn't hit quite the same. Still fantastic.
The Return of the Pig: 3 stars. My least favorite story so far, but still a good read. Just not going to be one I think about.
November 26, 2023
650+ pages of Parker novelettes and novellas. The tone of these stories, particularly when taken cumulatively, tends ever so slightly more towards the grim than in Academic Exercises or The Father of Lies. The humour is more cynical. Nonetheless another outstanding collection.
February 20, 2024
Well written, and I'm sure it would be enjoyable to someone that enjoys this particular genre of lit. Wasn't for me.
October 16, 2023
- The Return of The Pig (2018) ****
- The Thought That Counts (2018) *****
- Mightier than the Sword (2017) -- letto
- All Love Excelling (2023) ****
- Many Mansions (2020) ****
- My Beautiful Life (2019) -- letto
- Stronger (2021) ***
- Portrait of the Artist (2019) ****
- Prosper’s Demon (2020) -- letto
- The Best Man Wins (2017) ****
- Habitat (2020) ****
- The Big Score (2021) -- letto
- Relics (2023) ****
- The Thought That Counts (2018) *****
- Mightier than the Sword (2017) -- letto
- All Love Excelling (2023) ****
- Many Mansions (2020) ****
- My Beautiful Life (2019) -- letto
- Stronger (2021) ***
- Portrait of the Artist (2019) ****
- Prosper’s Demon (2020) -- letto
- The Best Man Wins (2017) ****
- Habitat (2020) ****
- The Big Score (2021) -- letto
- Relics (2023) ****
June 1, 2023
Many of the included works have been available already. Just Relics, the final epistolary novel, alone makes this collection worth reading. A tour de force about entropy, friendship, religion, trust, personal development, and much more...
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