Grïgnyr the Ecordian by Geoff Bottone

A while back I decided that I should blog about each book I read. Some of the other bloggers I enjoy do that, and it seems like a great way to both share your “reviews”¹ and to keep track of your reading².

Then that drifted to become only the fiction books: I pretty-much alternate between fiction and nonfiction in my reading. And then that drifted into… well… forgetting about it entirely and blogging about other things instead³

So let’s see what I can remember of the year’s fiction so far, starting with… Grïgnyr the Ecordian: A Retelling of The Eye of Argon, by Geoff Bottone. Which probably takes some explanation all by itself.

Back before we had kids, the rest of my polycule and I spent a few years (e.g. 2011, 2012) hosting what we called Argh! It Burns! Night on or near Burns Night. Burns Night, of course, is an opportunity to eat haggis, drink whisky, and tell stories. Argh! It Burns Night, by contrast, was an opportunity to eat haggis, drink whisky, and… read out terrible fanfiction to one another.

In advance, each participant would spend a while trawling fanfiction.net or somewhere similar to find the worst fanfiction they could find, and then read an excerpt to everybody present. The “winner” – whether because of their choice of fic or their delivery – was declared the winner. It was a simpler time, before we had kids.

Anyway: I can only assume that it was these events that had been top of mind for the person who gave me this book as a gift.

The Eye of Argon is not fanfic. But it is awful. Published as a novelette in 1970 and more-recently distributed electronically as “abandonware” to widen its reach, it’s full of spectacularly overblown (and frequently misspelled) prose like this:

hand over hand, feet braced against the dank walls of the enclosure, huge Grignr ascended from the moldering dephs of the forlorn abyss. His swelled limbs, stiff due to the boredom of a timeless inactivity, compounded by the musty atmosture and jagged granite protuberan against his body, craved for action. The opportunity now presenting itself served the purpose of oiling his rusty joints, and honing his dulled senses.

Since the 1980s, students have sometimes had parties where they take turns trying to read pages from it without laughing. See what I mean about Argh! It Burns! Night. Same energy.

And I’d… never read it. I’d somehow never even heard of it until I got this book.

The book contains a complete copy of The Eye of Argon, which I read first, agonisingly working my way through what is, genuinely, some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. It comprises the second half of the book, presumably under the assumption that, unlike me, you’d have read it before.

It’s. So. Bad.

But Bottone’s thesis is that as terrible as The Eye of Argon is, there’s the bones of a good story within it. He goes on to extract this; the first half of the book is his re-telling of the tale, which he re-titles Grïgnyr the Ecordian.

I can’t fault it for being better. Unlike the original, it feels a lot more like somebody trying to tell a compelling story… and not at all like somebody ate a thesaurus and them vomited it back out again. And it’s… okay. I’m not convinced that it’s as good as Bottone seems to claim, but it’s certainly a huge improvement upon the original while remaining true, for the most part, to the core beats.

I’m not sure I’d have chosen to read either story, nor would I necessarily recommend it, but I’m glad that it exists, and I’m glad that Geoff Bottone made the effort to make the best of the trash fire from which he started in order to produce something that’s… not terrible. Perfectly enjoyable, in the feel of pulpy 70s swords-and-sorcery.

Had the story been originally written in this form, it wouldn’t have become infamous. It wouldn’t have become famous at all. And for fiction like this, that’s probably the best praise that’s possible.