{"id":73,"date":"2021-01-11T08:52:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-11T08:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/minimal-kritikak.hu\/?p=73"},"modified":"2025-04-19T21:37:28","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T19:37:28","slug":"blood-will-follow-snorri-kristjansson-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minimal-kritikak.hu\/en\/2021\/01\/11\/blood-will-follow-snorri-kristjansson-book-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Blood Will Follow by Snorri Kristjansson – Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"Blood<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In the Name of Christ \u2013 with an Axe<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

King Olav Tryggvason has decided to unite all of Norway in the holy name of Christ.<\/strong> 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 \u2014 stubbornly clinging to their traditional, low-maintenance religion \u2014 are planning to whack King Olav on the head right back<\/em>, also with an axe. So yeah\u2014forget the word of Christ. Blood Will follow<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first book in Snorri Kristjansson\u2019s trilogy, Swords of Good Men, was a pretty decent historical novel \u2014 though you might\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything Clashes With Everything Else<\/h2>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The real problems start in Blood Will Follow<\/em>, the second book in the series. It\u2019s as if every minor flaw from the first volume has been blown up to full size.<\/strong> The relationships between characters become wildly inconsistent, and their actions start contradicting\u2026 well, everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Take two characters who supposedly died<\/em> in the first book\u2014suddenly they\u2019re back, alive and kicking, only to be killed off AGAIN just a few pages later due to some embarrassingly dumb twist. WTF?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014and, surprise surprise, it blows up in their faces. WTF!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let\u2019s 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!!!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could This Possibly<\/em> Get Any More Boring?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

And that\u2019s just one<\/em> of the storylines. Meanwhile, the other one has two of Blood Will Follow<\/em>\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019d already started to get the creeping suspicion that Blood Will Follow<\/em> had lost its grip on historical storytelling, well\u2014now it\u2019s stomping straight at you in steel-toed boots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And wait for it\u2014get this: those two wandering characters? They also die at different points in the story. But magically, they somehow don\u2019t. 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\u2019t know. And frankly, there is no force on this Earth\u2014or in Valhalla\u2014that could convince me to keep reading this amateurish nonsense<\/strong> to find out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rating: 4\/10<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Blood Will Follow<\/em> (The Valhalla Saga #2) by Snorri Kristjansson
308 pages, Hardcover
Published in 2014 by Jo Fletcher Books<\/a>
—
You may also like:
The Empty Throne by Bernard Cornwell<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Name of Christ \u2013 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[22,282,232,14,40,81,59,28,130,281,149],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book","tag-adventure","tag-christianity","tag-dark-ages","tag-fantasy","tag-historical","tag-magic","tag-medieval","tag-military","tag-mythology","tag-vikings","tag-war"],"yoast_head":"\nBlood Will Follow by Snorri Kristjansson - Book Review - minimal-Critiques<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the name of our Lord Christ\u2014wielding an axe. 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