In the Name of Christ – with an Axe
King Olav Tryggvason has decided to unite all of Norway in the holy name of Christ. And anyone unwilling to share his faith is going to get a good solid whack on the head with an axe. The various plot threads all come together beneath the walls of the city of Stenvik, where a bunch of old-school Vikings dissenters — stubbornly clinging to their traditional, low-maintenance religion — are planning to whack King Olav on the head right back, also with an axe. So yeah—forget the word of Christ. Blood Will follow.
The first book in Snorri Kristjansson’s trilogy, Swords of Good Men, was a pretty decent historical novel — though you might’ve lost your enthusiasm a bit with the overload of hard-to-tell-apart characters, the constant switching of points of view, and the somewhat clumsy start to the plot. Luckily, during the siege, the story picked up steam. Though the inclusion of fantasy-style blood magic in an otherwise historically grounded novel might have caused a few readers to raise an eyebrow.
Everything Clashes With Everything Else
The real problems start in Blood Will Follow, the second book in the series. It’s as if every minor flaw from the first volume has been blown up to full size. The relationships between characters become wildly inconsistent, and their actions start contradicting… well, everything.
Take two characters who supposedly died in the first book—suddenly they’re back, alive and kicking, only to be killed off AGAIN just a few pages later due to some embarrassingly dumb twist. WTF?
Characters who spent the entire first book scheming from the shadows kick things off by launching the most painfully obvious conspiracy in the history of ever—and, surprise surprise, it blows up in their faces. WTF!!
And let’s not forget the bumbling herbalist with no real power or status who suddenly starts puppeteering the formerly iron-willed king and takes over military operations. WTF!!!
Could This Possibly Get Any More Boring?
And that’s just one of the storylines. Meanwhile, the other one has two of Blood Will Follow’s characters wandering the roads of Norway, getting caught up in one duller-than-dull everyday situation after another. The low point here is probably the moment where one of them spends AN ENTIRE PAGE feeding a god-damn dog.
If you’d already started to get the creeping suspicion that Blood Will Follow had lost its grip on historical storytelling, well—now it’s stomping straight at you in steel-toed boots.
And wait for it—get this: those two wandering characters? They also die at different points in the story. But magically, they somehow don’t. The vibe is that maybe, just maybe, characters from Norse mythology are lurking in the background, and one of them might even be Odin himself? I don’t know. And frankly, there is no force on this Earth—or in Valhalla—that could convince me to keep reading this amateurish nonsense to find out.
Rating: 4/10
Blood Will Follow (The Valhalla Saga #2) by Snorri Kristjansson
308 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2014 by Jo Fletcher Books
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