My Arizona book for December is 'The Troll King', an anomalous children's book by John Vornholt who mostly specialises in novelisations. It apparently worked very well for him, as the cover of the French edition boasts ventes of one million d'exemplaires. It also spawned two sequels, becoming a trilogy, and I'll follow this up with them now that John was kind enough to give me an ARC of the third book at TusCon 52 last month. I had the first two already.

As you might imagine, it's centred on trolls, though there are plenty of other fantasy species here to keep us busy, especially once Stygius Rex, General Drool and young Rolla take a sortie over the Great Chasm to visit the Bonny Woods. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Much happens before we get to that point and part of that explains why it's such a leap for a troll to visit the Bonny Woods, not just literally because the Great Chasm is indeed wide, but metaphorically because trolls have been indoctrinated for decades about how dangerous it is over there with its ferocious elves and fairies and pixies and whatnot.

Most fantasy novels for children are set in places like the Bonny Woods, where life is always happy even if people are poor and oppressed by their rulers. Maybe later they'll visit the dark forest or the jagged mountains or sail the tempetuous sea, as part of whatever their story has in store for them and we can relish in the danger. Here, Vornholt flips that around. We start in Bonespittle, a dark land ruled over for the past century and change by the one remaining sorcerer, Stygius Rex. In particular, we start in Troll Town, located in the Forgotten Forest deep in Dismal Swamp, where young Rollo, a fourteen year old troll, tries to avoid the ogre patrols.

Everything appears with 'Addams Family'-style contrary logic to highlight how we're in the darker side of this world. Ogres don't like to be up during the day. They love scents like rancid boar snout. They eat succulent vermin from grub buckets, if they're not spearing live frogs. Even Rollo, who's rather unusual for a troll in that he quite likes being awake at noon and smelling wild flowers, has a powerful crush on Ludicra, "the most spectacularly ugly troll in all of Bonespittle. She had ears like a donkey, fur like a yak, and incredibly beady eyes." What's not to love?

The trolls would happily go about their day, maintaining their bridges, carving cold damp hovels with cold damp sleeping pits out of the mud and avoiding the dangers of the quagmire below the swaying vines, but they're oppressed by the ogres and the ghouls and that's about to be doubled. Stygius Rex is the all powerful leader of Bonespittle, having poisoned every other sorcerer on his way to the top, but his people don't love him and, if there's anything a vicious dictator wants, it's for his people to love him. And they will, a dream informs him, if he builds a bridge over the Great Chasm to the Bonny Woods. So he decides to do that.

And that means putting bridge builders to work, which means trolls, so he visits Troll Town on the back of his giant toad, old Belch, to acquire three thousand trolls to build his bridge. You won't be surprised to find that Rollo is one of them and that he does very well, while somehow rubbing the ogre officer Captain Chomp the wrong way at every possible opportunity. In fact, he does so well that he's moved up the chain and becomes the troll whisked across the Great Chasm with Stygius Rex and his right hand ghoul General Drool to see what's on the other side.

There's a lot more going on, but that's where we need to get to and Rollo needs to learn that he's a very capable troll who's been lied to and oppressed his whole life. Something needs to change in Bonespittle and maybe this fourteen year old who doesn't have as much hair as most trolls is the one to make that happen. How does he do that? Well, you'll need to read this yourself to find out because I'm not going to tell, even if you should be able to guess some of it because Rollo is quite the archetypal lead for a children's fantasy novel, even if Vornholt flips a lot of that on its head.

He doesn't think of himself as a particularly brave troll, as the early scene skimming the hole ably depicts. This is a troll pastime, swinging on a vine over a particularly rancid pool populated by all sorts of deadly creatures and doing it so low on the vine that your rear end just about touches the surface. He doesn't want to do it but has to in order to avoid losing face in front of Crawfleece, his sister, and Ludicra, the love of his life, and naturally it goes horribly wrong. However, he's caught by an ogre, the very same Captain Chomp, and gets out of that cleverly. So he's a brave troll who doesn't think he's brave, which is a powerful combination.

He's also open to possibility. Sure, he knows that trolls are supposed to do all the stereotypically icky things they've done for his whole life, but he still feels the urge to smell wild flowers or chase dragonflies. Sure, he knows that fairies and elves and whatnot are vicious, deadly creatures who are thankfully a long way away on the other side of the Great Chasm, but he still talks to one when he finds himself right there in the Bonny Woods. And sure, he knows that trolls are the lowest of the low and the ogres and ghouls have every right to oppress them, but he still wonders why and of such mettle are heroes made.

There's not a lot new here but Vornholt has a heck of a lot of fun bringing life to the darker side of a fantasy world and growing young Rollo to the point that he's able to change Bonespittle for the better. The obvious comparison to make is to 'Shrek', which hit theatres a year before this novel made it to print, but was loosely based on a picture book published in 1990. However, there aren't actually that many similarities. This doesn't feel like a fairy tale, for one, and there aren't any of the recognisable fairy tale characters that 'Shrek' features in abundance. There's no quest, every character is original and the moral is a general one about not accepting anything just because it's how it's always been. That's a good lesson for any child to learn and any adult too.

Vornholt followed this up with 'The Troll Queen' and 'The Troll Treasure', both of them released in 2003, and I'll happily follow up with them over the next two months. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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