DREAD Reviews 11
Dad Reads and Examines Authors While Distracted
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Most issues of DREAD have a lot of words in this first part.
I intended to include this mention in the last issue of DREAD. But then I got distracted. Here it is now:
Victor Jimenez came up with the idea of creating a tag list exclusively for serials of all types. If your thing is more than one thing then promote it with all these other writers’ things that are multiple things by tossing in your name (I’ll link his list and mine to which I added a few extra names):
Unlike DREAD, Graeme’s reviews read like actual reviews. The way he describes what he reads makes already-enjoyable works even more so. He has six of these little gems out so far and offers tidy bookmarks for each. For your convenience and pleasure I’ve linked his latest below:
We’re a chain-smoking bipolar ex-jock who’s one bad day away from starring in a lifetime movie. Fortunately, our psychotic ex girlfriend’s dog cures our mental health issues:
One can soften the devastating blow of guilt and shame by turning their evil nature into a hobby. This way we can convince ourselves that being “good” at being evil is a healthy and rewarding lifestyle.
But then come these dang ghosts. The head of our murdered son dances all over our tidy ledgers now. Yeeted into a haunted carousel by our unrelenting psyche, we realize one of villainy’s side effects far too late - unleashing your inner evil genius does not the most balanced lifestyle make:
I feel the urge to join the ranks of apocalypse preppers. But I also don't want to hide like a @#!$_&-* coward. B Stings suffers this same manly dilemma:
Mandatory mention: “They killed Kenny!”
Blizzard bandits vs an abominable frost muncher. This is half western, half bigfoot sighting. Early on you can tell these three outlaws are doomed to a bad time - they seem like the type to be deep in the planning stages of a bank heist only to veer off into an argument over who gets to ride the cushiest saddle. The dialogue in this is so salty it could season a steak:
This is chapter 24 of Nicole’s book The Triple World. Do you ever give a five star review on some digital device and then it asks some follow up questions to rate things like “atmosphere” or “your server’s kindness/professionalism” and find yourself going “huh, maybe those five stars weren’t deserved after all?”
Five stars for Stalin, zero stars for his succession plan.
Call me crazy but that’s what I thought of as Yana wakes up into another dreary day of apocalypse-turned-dystopia-turned-apocalypse-again. The big bad boss may have sent us to bed starving every night but at least he honored his feudal protection obligations. But his succession plan? The pits.
Hate and fear Stalin all you want, but he kept the gulags humming even in the frozen wastes. He could orchestrate a purge like nobody’s business and somehow still find time to doodle menacingly in the margins of the Politburo meeting minutes.
You’d think some guy like Laventiy Beria would come along and save you in Paton’s world. As a secret police chief and connoisseur of terror someone like him could easily replace Laz - then again, the real Beria didn’t last 6 months past Stalin’s death with all his rivals scrambling to gang up and off him. That dude was too scary, even Stalin trembled a bit in his presence.
Yana doesn’t get to see the drama in the government, but she probably got left with someone like Nikita Khrushchev, just like our poor Russian friends did in real life. Kruschev, the supposed “reformer,” - oh, please. This guy shows up with his bald head and his corn obsession, banging shoes on tables like a toddler throwing tantrums at the UN. Where’s the gravitas? Where’s the chilling stare that says, “You’re next, comrade?” Stalin could make you confess to crimes you hadn’t even dreamed of committing; Khrushchev’s grandest achievement is getting you to confess to eating his last pierogi.
I don’t know who tried to replace Laz, but I bet he was another Kruschev, trying to de-Stalin - I mean de-Laz everything. Big mistake. Laz’s system was a well-oiled machine of dread. With no one to replace him we now suffer these lame bandit raids:
If this is what renting becomes in 2050, imagine what HOAs will be up to! Mandatory brain implants that scan license plates and enforce parking codes, doors locking you out automatically when the grass hits 2.1 inches, and drones zapping your dog then issuing $500 fines when his barking violates community decibel limits:
I’m going to try and write this with a straight face:
A man gets lost on the moon and finds himself trapped with a herd of voluptuous rabbit girls. They squeal in delight, rubbing their hands over his chest, exploring his body. He later sees a bunch of them bathing naked in a pool. They squeeze his head between their thighs, spy on him while he pees, and constantly describe his physical appearance in admiring tones. Through all this, he remains faithful to his wife.
He doesn’t return unaffected, however. As soon as he gets home he sires five kids. We imagine his wife never knew what hit her.
My face may be red now, but technically my straight face challenge ends in success. Now, please excuse me while I step out and cough for a minute:
François Truffaut tells us that regardless of a director’s intentions, all accurate war films inherently glorify war. He argues no matter how much one displays war’s horrors, we humans are somehow keyed for awe at combat and tooled to embrace examples of tear-jerking camaraderie.
Steven Spielberg has the opposite opinion - all accurate war films are inherently antiwar, that by depicting war convincingly, a viewer cannot help but hate it.
Me? I’m impressionable. And I think whatever those two men are arguing about is attributable to all forms of media, not just film. So I read Josh Datko’s poem three times: first on its own, second while listening to epic heavy metal, and the third time listening to Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.”
First read: “Wow what a great poet!”
Second read with heavy metal: “Heck yeah, put that in your pipe and smoke it!”
Third read with horror ambience: “Oh no… Humanity is going extinct and we all deserve it.”
Conclusion? I don’t know who is right: Truffaut, Spielberg, or both. I’m just a leaf on the wind:
I don’t know what everyone else gets from this poem but what I see here is the American Dream at work. Or at least the part where you sit on your porch while blood trickles from a wobbly tooth and you stare at your neighbor thinking: “Man, I wish I had that.”
In G. K. Allum’s version of keeping up with the Joneses it isn’t specifically the grass that’s greener, it’s that the guy next door is dying a saint while you’re just a schmuck with a midlife crisis and a dental problem:
Often times just as you think you’re about to come of age someone comes and smacks you in the face with a Bible. Oh well, hormones, better luck tomorrow:
We found a key labeled Plot twist ahead and thought: “Guess it’s Narnia time!” We’re smart, see, but we never suspect this might land us in the harem of a Saudi Prince or perhaps a Russian oligarch. Fortunately for us neither of these are normally found in magical wonderlands (other than in the form of metaphors suitable for kid-reading sometimes):
My top spot originally went to another work. Then, suddenly, Eric’s knightly charge thundered in and wiped it out. What was that first nominee again? I think I took a blow to the head. Ah, well… to the victor go the spoils!
I enjoyed Eric’s historical article immensely and I agree: we haven’t yet seen a good R-rated movie depicting heavy cavalry charges as they really were. A medieval knight can concentrate 55,000 joules of force at the tip of his lance. For those of you unfamiliar with how powerful that is, imagine this: take a modern .50 caliber sniper rifle and multiply its lethality by about 2.5x. Also note that a bullet will not continue to charge along swinging a weapon past its initial impact!
French Gendarmes, the penultimate evolution of medieval heavy cavalry, are cited regularly wiping out 5 ranks of plate-armored foot soldiers with their charge alone before drawing hammers and axes to bludgeon the remaining now-scattered opponents to death. Just picture that initial collision - some victims would have flown a dozen yards into the air with this kind of impact, or further if the bits flying were first trampled to pieces. Like Saving Private Ryan, I think a historically accurate depiction of a successful knightly charge would be a memorable shock the first time the public witnessed it in theater.
While they’re at it, movie-makers could also accurately depict the effect of artillery innovations by the time of the US Civil war. Oftentimes considered “the last of the Napoleonic wars,” weapons technology had outpaced the tactics and strategies employed on the US Civil War’s battlefields leading to that conflict’s surprisingly high casualty rate. An accurate depiction of the effects aerial-burst shrapnel shot and double-canister shot have on tightly-packed ranks of men would potentially be worse than an R-Rated production and rise to the level of obscene. But sometimes history is obscene. Tangent within a tangent here: If both sides in the US Civil War had employed WWI-era trench and fortification tactics, the war might never have ended, and the Confederacy might still be around today (there’d be no need for improvement in technology, they had the means already). Luckily (for the Union, anyway), Grant enjoyed something of a monopoly on this forward thinking in the form of men like McPherson, William F. Smith, and other top Union engineers. These men built trenches and hardened supply lines not just on defense but also offensively, saving blood with sweat and shovels (Union blood, anyway). Their engineering feats at battles like Chattanooga and… Vicksburg (shudder)… gave us haunting early examples predating the horrors of WWI soon to come.
But back to heavy cavalry:
Cavalry have no inherent superiority on battlefields. They dominated mostly in societies that had a weakened or nonexistent middle class. War is downstream from politics, and politics is downstream from culture. One can easily guess the prosperity of a nation by inspecting at the armies it fields. Men well-accustomed to prosperity and freedoms prevail over any type of cavalry in a stand-up fight.
Like anything, there will be exceptions to this rule. The foot soldiers could be poorly led or come from a civilization lacking in martial virtues. As Eric mentioned, one also suspects some inaccuracy in the recounting of some battles, nobles regularly being part of an equestrian upper class and thus overemphasizing the importance of their contributions to victory. For the big battles historians can normally sort this out, but not always.
The supremacy of cavalry in Europe and elsewhere arrived at times when material sciences remained solid while other hard-won types of knowledge flagged - usually after societal disruption or collapse. Poor governance and hard times created footmen hardly better than fodder, while good times made the battlefield more egalitarian.
Horses were generally smarter than their riders and most would not charge into a thicket of spears or pikes. The breeding of war horses helped alleviate this, culminating in some fearsome charger breeds. These breeds sadly no longer exist (turns out modern breeders don’t enjoy dealing with psychotic murderers in their stables). Most knights would be grateful if their horse didn’t come to a sudden stop and catapult them, minus horses, onto walls of sharp points. Four many centuries, however, knights could be confident their foes had no real stake in the battle, with peasants illogically dropping their weapons to flee (and then become easy pickings). These peasant-conscripts were already looking for the first chance to desert before the battle started. The only reason they’d still be present at the moment of contact would be the fear of the whip or the noose under the watchful eyes of their feudal lord’s trusted sergeants. It turned out most heavy cavalry charges were scarier than swinging from a rope, but no matter - no medieval commander truly expected their footmen to do more than slow down and absorb the enemy’s charge.
I in no way mean to diminish the importance of cavalry. The legendary Gendarmes of France continued to land crushing blows and win major battles for France deep into the age of early firearms. They remained an important force for half a century even past the Battle of Pavia (1525) where French Gendarmes met annihilation under Spanish pike and shot. Cavalry are maneuverable: as a general, if you couldn’t use terrain to guard the flank of your army, you better hope your cavalry arm prevailed over the enemy’s, otherwise your opponent’s horsemen would crash into the rear of your lines at the worst possible moment and initiate a bloody rout.
Cavalry in other forms continued to play an essential role for hundreds of years past medieval times. A famous example were the feats of Union cavalry commander John Buford in the US Civil War. His cavalry engagements against Lee's Confederate advance established the shape of the battlefield, securing favorable ground that proved pivotal at the following Union victory at Gettysburg. These cavalry exchanges occurred a full day before the footmen fired a single shot. If not for Buford, Pickett wouldn’t have had to make his ill-fated charge and history might have been quite different.
Minor additions to Eric's otherwise accurate (and visceral) depiction of the effect of knightly charges and spears on horse:
Spears - until late middle ages, horses were not sufficiently bred to be willing to charge into a wall of spears (if they held). Normally horses would wheel about in this situation. Sometimes they would dig their hooves into the earth and pitch their rider (usually to his unfortunate demise). Some charger breeds were famous for correcting this problem, man finally instilling in his beast an imitation of his own selfless stupidity, and these horses might cooperate with an oblique charge into a spear formation (but never directly into spears). But this came with the negative side effect that chargers, due to their wont to bite and kick, caused more casualties to their own side in peacetime than they did to the enemy in war (thus these meaner branches’ extinctions in modern times).
Speed - light spear cavalry in early Renaissance might have the training and equipment to maintain formation at high speeds, like Polish Hussars, which maximized speed and lethality over armor and staying power. But before this, heavy cavalry normally maxed out around 25 mph at the final gallop. The sacrifice in speed ensured the strength and uniformity of a block-shaped charge (particularly important considering the next point).
Defense in depth - spearmen can apply a minimum of 3+ spears from just the front rank against a charging cavalryman. Foot formations are denser than horse formations especially if the footmen are prepared and stationary. All other things being equal, footmen’s polearms (2 handed, braced against ground) will be much longer and sturdier than horseman polearms (1 handed, stabilized for riding). Multiple ranks of foot soldiers behind the front row will also have their spears in reach of a charging knight before his lance comes into range of anyone on foot. This means one knight has to somehow get past 6 to 15 spears before he makes contact with one footman (potentially even more if his formation has dispersed in the final charge, a common issue). Giving further evidence to the idea horses are smarter than men, a cavalryman’s impact is easily absorbed should the spearmen hold, with a good spread of old planet earth absorbing their mass, as the spears are braced, not thrust. It requires little strength or training to kill a horseman this way, though rote, drill, dedication, and perhaps a bit of general education in logic and civics are necessary to convince the spearmen to hold the line.
The driving concern of Eric’s post holds despite the above additions, however, and I in no way mean to undermine any of his points. Cavalry ruled the battlefield for many centuries. Knights unleashed generations of terror on poorly trained and noncommittal foot soldiers. And we haven’t once touched on horse archery yet.
An interesting final anecdote: in movies and strategic video games, cavalry are normally shown to have higher movement speed across the world than foot soldiers. This is historically inaccurate. While horse-equipped soldiers can go further and faster than footmen in short bursts, for any travel lasting longer than a couple days humans outperform horses even in terrain well-suited to the latter (flat, easy grazing opportunities). We hominids have indomitable endurance hardly matched anywhere in nature. And logistically we are much easier to supply and care for:
My current serial set in the Deupawn universe continues to get stranger. In part 4 some of you might figure out what’s going on. Answers arrive, but the mysteries pile on. The difficulty of Nyl’s trials grow to the point of implausibility. Where is her breaking point, and what happens when she reaches it?
Part 1 emphasized Nyl’s strength and ability to prove herself. Part 2 exemplified Nyl’s valor and teamwork. In part 3 Nyl experienced love and loss. Part 4 sees a return of combat at epic scale but remains deep and personal, exploring themes of redemption and identity:
Thanks for reading!
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Thank you so much for the inclusion! So very happy to see some friendly faces coming the crowd as well!
I absolutely the clever descriptions, had me giggling for quite a while haha.
This was a big surprise today! Thank you for the review. Glad you enjoyed it!