This review requires a sad preface: “Rosemary Edghill” (there’s some uncertainty about her actual name) died of sepsis on April 7 of this year, at the age of only 69. But on a positive note, with 91 distinct works listed on Goodreads, she left behind a considerable body of speculative fiction; and judging by what I’ve read of it so far, it’s a legacy in which she could take genuine pride.
Published in 2002, this stand-alone novel draws significant inspiration from the popular TV series
Xena: Warrior Princess, which ran from 1995-2001. (I was a fan myself back in the day –or as much of a fan as my work schedule allowed for TV viewing– and I’d surmise that Edghill was as well.) Our protagonist here, Glory McArdle, plays Vixen the Slayer, star of a wildly popular (fictional) TV show now wrapping up its first season, which has a lot in common with Xena, including a fervent international cult fan base, and a six-foot-tall heroine hailing from Down Under. (Lucy Lawless, who played Xena, was from New Zealand.) There are some differences; for instance,
The Incredible True Adventures of Vixen the Slayer (“TITAoVtS,” for short) is set in Elizabethan England, and incorporates some qualities of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and unlike Lawless, Glory –who got her role after going to an audition as an extra in the shooting of a pilot for a different series– was a former Phys Ed teacher, and before that a member of the Aussie Olympic gymnastics team. But the
Xena parallels are significant; and just as real-life author Greg Cox wrote the real book
Battle On! An Unauthorized, Irreverant Look at Xena: Warrior Princess, here he’s said to have also written the (imaginary) book
Vixen the Slayer: The Unofficial Journeys.
In our first chapter, Glory (who’s in Hollywood taping a short MTV promotional for her series) gets an unexpected knock on her trailer door, while she’s waiting in costume for another take. Her visitors are three rather short people in fantasy-world costume. But they’re not, as she initially thinks, actors, or fanatical fans dressed up and acting out a fantasy. They really are mages from another dimension. You see, in their world, 1,000 years ago the great mage Cinnas the Warslayer chained an evil entity called the Warmother; but now she’s been loosed, and is wreaking havoc. To save their people, they’ve scoured all the other worlds they can reach for a “hero” (like the writers of the
Xena series teaser, they don’t grasp the grammatical distinction of hero/heroine, but I digress), and been turned down by all the prospects. Having read Cox’s book, their last hope is Vixen the Slayer. Sensing that these poor deluded people genuinely believe what they’re saying, Glory’s trying to explain that the book is fiction; but when a sudden burst of uncontrolled magic sends all four of them back into her visitors’ world, that attempt might be a bit moot….
The cover blurb/Goodreads description creates the impression that this is a light exercise in humorous fantasy; and it actually does have a lot of humor (I read it to my wife, and she laughed out loud in several places). Both
TITAoVtS and
Xena are shows that offer mostly action-oriented entertainment without a lot of serious content, which might also lead readers to expect the same here. However, The Warslayer has its unexpectedly deep and serious side. Glory can deliver a fair amount of wry humor; but we’ll also see her bleed, vomit, and cry. While there’s some intense physical combat going on here at times, the battles aren’t all going to be physical, and the author has some really important things to say. (I’m not going to try to summarize them, because the story is the message, and you need to experience it the way she wrote it.) Her plotting here is not at all predictable. (But it’s deeply satisfying!)
There’s no sexual content here, and no obscenity (and no use of the f-word; Glory started to say it on one occasion, but stopped herself). There is, though, a certain amount of vulgar and profane language, used by Earth natives (it’s not a feature of native culture in the fantasy world). While she’s a likable young woman with a kind heart and good instincts, Glory tends to have an earthy and irreverent speaking style; she was raised on her dad’s Outback sheep station, a milieu where speech isn’t very refined (and some of the Aussie slang here that I’m not familiar with might be expressions I’d rather not have translated!). The worldview here is not Christian per se, but like Glory herself, though she’s basically secular-minded and God-shy, it’s not anti-Christian or anti-theistic either. Trigger warnings are in order for brief descriptions of the ravaged corpses of a pony and a dog (the Warmother and her playmates aren’t nice entities!); but the biggest problem here is the improbability that all of the non-Earth natives converse in fluent English. (I deducted a half-star for this in my rating, but rounded up.)
As an added feature, the opening few pages of Greg Cox’s imaginary book on Vixen are “quoted” as a kind of prologue here, and as an appendix, we’re given his supposed “Episode Guide” to the 17 episodes of
TITAoVtS. (I’d guess that none of this is written by him, but that he gave his permission for the use of his name.) The deadpan humor of this material is a hoot; and as a suggestion to any TV producers who may read this, if anybody actually ever tried to make a real-life incarnation of this series, I’d be interested in checking it out. :-)
Author: Rosemary Edghill
Publisher: Baen, available
through Amazon, only as a physical book
A stand-alone novel.
