Realfic Review: AugieDog's "The Blood Jaguar" · 6:45am Feb 11th, 2015
Clever and indefatigable fanfic author AugieDog, a.k.a. Writeoff Association wizard Baal Bunny, just squared off in a duel with the big five-oh (though knowing him, it's probably more like a quiet poetry competition over tea and croissants).
And here I am without the presence of mind to bring a gift. So, unprepared and inadequate, I'm going to do my best to whip something together on the spur of the moment that's worthy of this momentous occasion. Given that last night I just finished reading his published original fiction The Blood Jaguar (available via Amazon; via the publisher), at least I'm squaring the segue to the book's premise.
Blood Jaguar is ... an odd beast. It was Augie's first published novel (I'd hoped to pick up a copy of his new Rat's Reputation, but there have been some publishing delays, and this one is what the bookseller at the con had available). It was written back in the halcyon days of nineteen-ninety-yes-I-know,-stop-making-us-feel-old. There are some ways in which the book shows its age, but it's still full of delightful moments.
Plot
This is the story of Bobcat, a ... ehrm ... bobcat, who is a hero in approximately the same way Terry Pratchett's Rincewind is: i.e., accidentally, on his beeline away from something else. In this case, the "something else" is the life-long catnip bender that has endeared him to the wastrels and weed-pushers of Ottersgate, and pretty much nobody else. Then local oddball Skink, a skink, develops a case of the jibblies over having lost his luck, and warns Bobcat about
(in almost exactly those words). Bobcat, naturally, laughs him off, at which point the titular Blood Jaguar, the living embodiment of Death, injects her mental presence straight into his brain along with vivid hallucinations of the devastation of everything he's ever known.
Well, that's a buzzkill.
Bobcat shakes as much of the story out of Skink as Skink knows, which is that there's a warning passed down from his grandmother to go talk to the local shaman if he loses his luck and bad things happen to a bobcat. So they go talk to Fisher, who's ... a mustelid of some sort fisher (*edit: this is a type of marten, an animal closely related to weasels and otters. See comments). And so starts a quest to save the world from the Jaguar — even though nobody has any idea how, except for one distant lead which Fisher manages to piece together from family history.
Skink turns out to be something of an itinerant priest; both he and Fisher immediately begin rounding up the help of as many of the local pantheon as they can contact, and soon Bobcat is getting flung into vision after vision of gods that he doesn't even believe in but can no longer effectively deny. They soon realize that this isn't just a quest, but a capital-S Story, a cyclic retelling of one of the world's myths with a fate that nobody's sure they can even change.
As if that weren't enough, it turns out most of the rest of the world knows more about this Story than the heroes do. Unfortunately, what most of the rest of the world knows is that a bobcat, a skink, and a fisher traveling together is the animalworld equivalent of Pinkie Pie getting a twitchy everything. This means that a not insignificant fraction of the world is out to kill our heroes to make the bad omens go away, and they have to cross the world to ricochet from ally to ally in a race against time.
And, of course, everything that everybody knows is wrong.
First Impressions
The book starts out, unfortunately, as something of a tough read. We're introduced to Bobcat, Skink, Fisher ... and Garson Rees the rabbit, Jaybird the store-owner, Lorn Gedolkin the mayor, etc. Naming consistency is not one of the book's strong points, and we're dumped right in the deep end of the setting pool. We also learn that Bobcat and Garson are cross-species sweethearts, and in their first meeting Garson jokes about rabbit stew, which has some unsettling implications about the dietary habits of a world of mixed carnivores and herbivores. (This is not, I should note, a furry novel in the sense of the [Anthro] tag; these are actual animals, more like Redwall or My Little Pony.)
To its credit, almost everything that initially makes no sense does get later explained. The plot reconciles some of the crucial elements -- like what's going on with the twelve ambiguously mythical Curials (gods) that have no place in the naturalistic universe Bobcat knows, but whom they keep meeting in person -- but a lot of it seems to unkink itself and unfold into internal consistency as the story progresses and we see more of the world. (All the protagonists share meals of nut-based oatmeal, for example, and a much later scene explores Garson and Bobcat's past, which frames the "rabbit stew" reference in a perfectly sensible context.) In that way, Blood Jaguar feels a great deal like Augie's later work on the webcomic Terebinth, but softer around the edges and with more room to breathe -- kind of a Terebinth Lite.
Depth
I should pause for a moment to talk about Terebinth, because I think it's the closest thing we're ever going to get to opening AugieDog's head and staring directly into his brain at the hidden language that his internal thoughts use before they're shaped into Earth's inadequate and clumsy speech. Take a look at this sample page; representationally speaking, the artwork is a trainwreck, with Trogdor birds and impossible anatomy and busy multilayered design. But it's not meant to be representational, not so much as it's meant to be emblematic, with a consistency that worms its way into your brain and slowly dislodges the real world. After a hundred pages of looking at the hypnotic parabolic arc that is Terebinth characters' kneeling legs, it no longer even looks wrong: it's just the way that world is, the same way that doorknobs in My Little Pony no longer even register in our brains because we've been watching the show so long.
Yup. Makes perfect sense.
Similarly, Blood Jaguar makes extensive use of that slow, layered, emblematic storytelling, a process which I think I might have to start calling "accretive worldbuilding": something which hits you in the face on first read, but starts to accumulate into a deeper and different sort of sense than you could have imagined. Not all of it, unfortunately, pulls in the same direction -- the naturalism/religion dichotomy that recurs throughout the book, for example, feels awkwardly tacked on to the animal world, with some rather modern scientific ideas that everyone takes on background despite the low-tech, high-fantasy feel of the rest of the setting. However, the world itself takes on a quite vivid shape despite the nonexistent character descriptions (and the illustrations in the new printing fill in some of the gaps quite nicely).
Terebinth's grandiloquent Kestrel has a clear precursor in Skink's occasional logorrhea, and if you've read enough of Terebinth to watch it dive into unrepentant poetry, then there are some scenes in Blood Jaguar which will make you squeal with undignified glee. One of them is when Skink poetry slam-fights a cobra, with the cobra trying to hypnotize his companions with the rhythm of his speech, and Skink speaking in intentionally syncopated meter to break the effect, which is just about the most brilliant use of novel prose that I've seen since the telepathic party crosswords in Alfred Bester's Demolished Man. The other one of which I'm not even going to talk about in spoilertext, save to mention the bison, and that it doesn't come from where you'd expect.
One of the other, perhaps unintentional, themes of the book is travel. There's an occasionally awkward focus on the mechanics of their hike across the continent, with lots of attention paid to their meals and their backpacks and the silence or the conversation of their long days and nights, but Augie does do a good job on the whole of breaking up that monotony with a series of interesting encounters and unfortunate events. It does help provide a concrete sense of the routines and the geography of the world, but turning the page to see them brew coffee for the 30th time might rub some readers the wrong way.
That's a pacing fault, essentially, but as noted, there's plenty of interesting stuff going on in the journey. My biggest complaint about Blood Jaguar's pacing was actually at the end -- the denouement was easily a chapter too long, strolling back across the entire continent. I think Augie's learned a fair bit about pacing in the intervening decades, because his pony stories like Collaborators just grab you by the neck and don't let go despite their similarly relaxed structure.
The pacing in general reminded me somewhat of a pleasant drug trip: a long and restless buildup to the cool things; a unique, surprising, vivid and dissociative experience in the middle; and then a bit of fatigue as you break back through into reality at the end. It really caught me midway through chapter 3, and held me through the end of chapter 10 (out of 12), with some interesting bits also at the edges but nothing like the core experience.
Overall
This probably shouldn't be your first exposure to AugieDog's work -- his more recent material, including the RCL-featured In Their Highnesses' Clandestine Corps, is much more approachable (and the things you can read here on FIMFiction also have the benefit of being about ponies). Blood Jaguar definitely feels like an older, less polished work.
However, if you're already a fan of Augie's, it's worth a couple of bucks to spring for the Kindle version, to luxuriate in more of the languageplay and accretive worldbuilding and engaging storytelling that he does so well.
Recommended for AugieDog fans
Don't feel ignorant. In spite of that range map I've never heard their existence so much as referred to on our coast.
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Aha! Mystery solved. Thank you.
(Fishers are in the genus Martes, which makes them a species of martens, though not one I've heard of. And martens are not exactly well-known mustelids to begin with, not compared to badgers and weasels and otters.)
What I learned today: Auggie's real name is Michael H. Payne.
Man I have an itch to read "real" books now.
Wat.
A fanfiction author with real fiction?!
Preposterous!
Lies!
Delete any mention of it before I go blind with jealousy!
In all seriousness, that's pretty freaking cool. I mean, I kinda already knew he was published (since his bio says so), and I doubt he's the only one on this site, but actually seeing it here, in front of me, is totally different and kind of surreal. Like a drop of reality in the middle of a dream, or in this case, real life in the middle of the internet.
I avoided most of your review, sorry to say, simply because spoilers. Not that you gave anything big away, but I've learned over the years that anything could become a potentially hazardous spoiler for me. It sucks.
Sure looked like a good review, though!
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Huh, I actually didn't know about that connection (serves me right for not really reading the wiki link I posted), or really much about martens in general. Guess I'll go read up on theoh my gosh martens are adorable!
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If only more people read Mossflower, they'd all know about the pine ones, at least.
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I know AestheticB is working on a non-pony fantasy novel, but just wait until you hear about Skywriter.
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Well, I knew they existed and had a sense of what they were, thanks at least to His Dark Materials. But I didn't know -- and wouldn't have, from prose -- that CUTE!
"Trogdor Birds and Impossible Anatomy" sounds like the title of a hilarious and self-deprecating autobiography.
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Oh yeah, I forgot about Skywriter. Woops! I've been following him for over a year now, I think. I've actually never read any of AestheticB's stuff, but I've seen it around quite a lot.
2787266 People who aren't biologists rarely see them, and think they're a big weasel if they do. I've only seen one fisher in my life.
Best birthday present ever!
My standard response when people ask me about Blood Jaguar is to say, "It's a fantasy novel about the scientific method," but that's not entirely accurate: it's also my response to the ancient Roman national epic poem The Aeneid which I read multiple chunks of during my years getting my Latin 'n' Greek degree. But the two questions I get most often about the book are: "What's a fisher?" and "What's a satchel?"
As for Rat's Reputation, all I can offer folks right now is the audio version with the following caveats: it's me reading the thing live on my radio show four-and-a-half years ago, so the recording quality's not the best and I trip over words a couple times; it's the version before the editors at Sofawolf Press gave me their notes, so it's missing a few things that will appear in the final published novel; and the less said about the music, the better.
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I've never been very good at keeping secrets.
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Mossflower, The Bellmaker, and Pearls of Lutra are the three Redwall books I recommend to folks when they ask me at the library. 'Cause those are the only ones where someone of a "villainous species" turns out not to be entirely evil.
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I first heard of fishers in the mid 1980s in an episode of the old PBS series Wild America called "Fishers in the Family" where the show's host finds a dead fisher by the side of the road, follows her tracks back to her nest, and takes her two orphaned kits home to raise them alongside his own daughter. Adorable is not a strong enough word.
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I had to look up Trogdor because I never did get into Homestar Runner...
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I think bookplayer's non-Pony fantasy novel is still scheduled to be published from a small-press outfit this year, and Daetrin's got a non-Pony fantasy novel available right now on Amazon.
Mike
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AugieDog is a total badass. Here's his Wikipedia page. Half the Day is Night, his "big" ponyfic that got him attention in the fandom (at least from my perspective), is listed in his bibliography along with all his "real" work.
2788127
I'm sensing a trend here. And I like it!
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I see how it is, trying to make the rest of us look bad is he? Two can play at that game!
I can't play at that game.
In all seriousness, that's pretty neat. ^.^
Has no-one read Tales From Dimwood Forest? The Poppy books? No-one?
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AugieDog has a Wikipedia page holy goodness
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Both of these things make me want to read this
storybook. (wow what a weird thing to write, book, no-one talks about books here)Oh wow..... I actually bought a copy of Blood Jaguar when it first came out. and I still have it. I had no idea the author was here.
I barely remember any of it since I was so young at the time (I remember I liked it enough to keep it), but I just might have to re-read it now.
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At some point while talking about 4th District Court and/or the Versebreaker anthology, I mentioned that I was sure I'd borrowed the idea of Versebreakers from someone, but couldn't figure out who. Rereading this review, it hit me between the eyes: Skink's poetry slam-fight with the cobras was the idea that grew into Versebreakers in my head.
So, thank you! I'll be certain to give you proper credit in the anthology for the inspiration.
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Synergy!
Now I really wish I'd had time to put something together for the collection. I'll be looking forward to reading it, though!
Mike
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It's not too late. Another 48 hours or so to go!
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Well:
I've gotten nearly 400 words written, and the characters are about halfway through the musical number, so it looks like I might have something for your consideration after all. I'll let'cha know!
Mike Again
What I read here about "accretive worldbuilding" sounds like the science-fiction principle of "refer to things the way your characters would refer to them, as if they're everyday things". Think they're similar?
3562905 (cc: 2957872)
Hm. Certainly related! That's a part of it, maybe? Taking for granted the story's differences from our reality rather than walking the reader through them. But I think what I'm thinking of as "accretive worldbuilding" also involves a willingness to power through cognitive dissonance via force of repetition: presenting it in such a way that it forces your brain to adapt and begin to take it for granted in order to make sense of the story.