A review of The Iron Wolves

This grimdark old school fantasy book could have been written at the dawn of time it's so formulaic and chockfull of cliches. Evil mage queen Orlana is of course deadly and beautiful, with a formidable sexual appetite - do evil queens come any other way? The men are all brutal, misogynist monsters, with the possible exception of General Dalgoran, described as so massively muscled it's a wonder they don't go around squashing all the poor wilting women like bugs. Dek, Ragorek and Narnok, three of the eponymous Iron Wolves fighting squad, are so interchangeable I frequently had to go back a couple of paragraphs to try to figure out which one that was again. There are two warrior women in the Wolves as well, Trista and Kiki, and - no prizes if you guessed it already - they're both deadly and beautiful as well. 

These Wolves, led by Dalgoran and joined by the only male Wolf who's not cut from the exaggerated-blacksmith/viking cloth, Zastarte, come together to beat off a new threat to their country. Years earlier, they were instrumental in defeating a dark wizard and his army of mud-orcs. Now, evil mage Orlana has risen up from the "Furnace" and, wouldn't you know it, gotten straight on with raising her own army of mud-orcs along with her "splice", creatures derived from grotesquely mutilating or mashing together men, horses, lions, insects, etc.

Andy Remic has never met a metaphor he didn't seem to want to torture to within an inch of its life and the term "flowery descriptions" might have been invented just for him. Every act of brutal violence is described with as many similes, analogies and adjectives as possible, particularly in the first half of the book, with clunky expositional interjections to fill in the back story. Things get marginally better in the second half of the book, when Remic judges we have enough of the characters' history to be getting on with and the pace picks up considerably, but the plot continues to be the same fantasy story we've read a thousand times before, with very few additions or deviations to spice things up.

There are those that will settle into The Iron Wolves as a decent (re)telling of a grimdark tale, with all the cruelty and vile intent that hardcore fans of the genre enjoy. But others, like me, will find the cliches just far too much to bear and the lack of originality leaves the sex and violence feeling a bit gratuitous, like you somehow happened upon an X-rated fanfic of The Lord of the Rings.