The Adventures of Brak the Barbarian Volume Two

2.5 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

First, opprobrium to Open Road Media for publishing an omnibus so illogical that I broke it into pieces for my library. This is the Brak #2, Brak #4, and two random Brak short stories. Why didn't they publish 1 and 2 together, 3 and 4 together, and 5 with the shorter stories?

Summary
Brak the Barbarian, trying to reach the rich lands of the far south, becomes mired in a local dispute between the lord and a sorceress. But maybe she has a link to his past after all?

Review
Most people are familiar with John Jakes through his historical novels, which I haven't read. I came to him through his 1969 short novel, Secrets of Stardeep, which I read as a child, and loved. I'm afraid the rest of his SFF work just isn't as good.

This second Brak novel was published in 1969, the same year as Stardeep, but you'd be hard pressed to believe it's the same author. While Stardeep was sensitive and reasonably subtle, this is a straight, and not very successful homage to Robert Howard's Conan stories. While I think that Jakes tries here to make Brak more believable, the result is that he's constantly stumbling into trouble, being captured, and escaping more through luck than prowess or wit. Other tropes of the genre – mysterious, poorly clad women, sorcerors, creatures, etc – are standard and unsurprising.

Much as I've tried to believe in Jakes, I'm starting to think Stardeep was the fluke. This novel is readable, but repetitive and simply not very innovative or interesting.

Summary
Brak the barbarian, captured and enslaved, finds himself in the midst of a war of muscle and sorcery.

Review
Though written a decade later, after Jakes was already well known for his other work, this fourth Brak volume unfortunately doesn't have much more to recommend it than the second (Brak the Barbarian versus the Sorceress) did. It's a similar familiar pastiche of Conan-lite tropes, except the Brak is far more likely to stumble in and out of trouble than Conan. I never found myself really warming to him. There's nothing terrible here, for the genre, but also nothing really eye opening. If you're a Jakes completist, pick it up. Otherwise, you're not missing much. It may tell you something that, just days after reading this, I had trouble remembering what it was about.

Summary
Two short stories about Brak the Barbarian.

Review
Brak works slightly better at a shorter length, in that it's easier to just focus on the story and ignore how familiar everything here is. There isn't the novelty of Conan, the sardonic humor of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, etc. Just familiar barbarian hero tropes stuck together in a story you've pretty much read before.