by Orrin Grey

Bullington, Jesse. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart. Orbit, 2009. US $14.95. ISBN 978-0316049344.

I was going to start this review by saying that The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart was a “perverse Dark Ages anti-Candide” (not the exact words I was going to use, but close enough), but Kirkus beat me to the punch, damn their oily hides!

I was also going to make some rather lame and obvious comparisons to Quentin Tarantino and grindhouse cinema, but I’m sure somebody else has already done that, too, so I’ll just get right into the meat of this review.

The path that The Brothers Grossbart took to publication is the stuff of legend in certain circles, as the book was championed early on and vocally by none other than Mr. Jeff VanderMeer himself. Reading it, it’s easy to see why.

The story is a strange, fearless, wild, rough-and-tumble ride through a world that we all know, in our secret hearts, is what Europe was really like in 1364. It’s a world of witches and demons, plague and violence, living saints and Road Popes, where some of the most sympathetic characters are cannibals and madmen. It isn’t exactly a horror story, nor precisely a fantasy (in the usual sense), nor, probably, like anything you’ve ever read before.

There are many deft supernatural touches, and I have a particularly soft spot for the brilliant creature designs, which meet a middle ground between Guy Davis and actual medieval bestiaries. But through it all, the two eponymous brothers remain the most larger-than-life figures in a world full of monsters and demons. Hegel and Manfried Grossbart are brigands, graverobbers, murderers and blasphemers, equally at home debating theology (or etymology) as they are at cracking open tombs or skulls. They’re also devoutly dedicated – at least in their own minds – to the Virgin Mary, and to finding their way to the rich tombs of “Gyptland”, toward which Grossbarts have traveled since time immemorial.

It’s a great book, but it’s also not one that’s going to be for everybody. Consider this your warning. The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart is disgusting, violent, and filled to the brim with cursing, blaspheming, great quantities of bodily fluids, and just about every manner of degeneracy, and it takes some getting used to. If that doesn’t sound like your brand of vodka, there’s a good chance that The Brothers Grossbart won’t be for you. That said, it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that’s generally for me, either, but after getting my sea legs, I found it to be wonderfully written, clever, funny, and ultimately, brilliantly itself. It’s a debut novel of a kind we rarely see, and I think it’ll divide a lot of people, and get a lot of much-deserved attention. So, if that all sounds like something you can roll with, then you could do a lot worse than to give The Brothers Grossbart a chance.

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