Alexander Palacio’s The Turquoise Serpent bristles with pure dynamism. The unstoppable protagonist thunders across the pages like another coming of the great pulp hero Conan of Cimmeria. There is no doubt, no pretentious philosophy, no inept plotting or tiresome moralizing. There is only blood, battle and glory!
Now to qualify all that.
The protagonist is unstoppable inasmuch as he is a mighty man of valor before whom lesser warriors tremble. The narration often places him in genuine danger. One sparkling passage plunges him into a perilous encounter with a monster in a drowned cave. In another passage, he is unexpectedly overcome by foul sorcery but, pleasingly, this turns out to be more than a convenient way to rescue our hero from unbeatable odds, since the sorcerer has excellent reason for taking him alive and we see the magic repeated later in the book. There are too many hack stories where the villain conveniently forgets or loses his power in the final act but Palacio does not fall into this trap.
Nor has he written The Turquoise Serpent as a didactic text. Not one whiff of tedious authorial self-justification floats up from the pages. This is most refreshing in a contemporary context where writers use their writing to signal political conformity rather than to tell stories. Palacio clearly does not consider his book sacred nor does he fret about his responsibility. He has fun and not in the howling bugman “ha, ha, so ironic,” way. If you don’t enjoy defeating demon worshipers through combat and cunning and then abducting their prettiest woman, you need to start lifting.
The woman, unfortunately, is not sufficiently objectified. Palacio has described himself as Zingaran Rite Catholic which precludes promotion of fornication. His characters inhabit such a setting that they cannot be explicit Catholics but the work on the whole must embody Catholic morality. So, if the strong warrior wants the woman, he has to keep her, which is more-or-less marriage. This in turn transforms the wandering adventurer into a stationary landowner which very much restricts the plot.
The book is quite short. 19th century propagandists wrote pamphlets longer than this. It is the first in a planned series but stands up quite well by itself. Unlike the bestselling works of popular fantasy, every chapter advances the plot and only takes a few pages to do so. Palacio knows what must be said and when to stop. Most refreshing.
The author published The Turquoise Serpent on Amazon. Not to be found in a bookshop. One suspects that the best books are self-published these days but that makes them hard to find. If you enjoy adventure at all, you’ll enjoy the Turquoise Serpent.