Reviews
Adore Leiber's stories and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser never fail to delight as sword and sorcery anti-heroes just trying to make their way through an insane and dangerous fantasy world.
One of the classics. I think this must have been a big influence on Pratchett. Early sword and sorcery. In this volume, we get Fafhrd origin story, the Grey Mouser's origin, and their first adventure together. I may have read this decades ago, or maybe it was some other of their adventures, but I rather liked it all better this time around.
The first two stories are origin tales for Teen Conan and Medieval Baby Batman. They had their own flavor, I was kinda digging them. The third tale, which brings the two characters together, was a real buzzkill. There's an annoying streak of real petty misogyny-- that sad flavor of macho that comes from a guy who has never had a female friend and gives shit to guys he knows that do. Aside from that, though, the pacing is a drag, partly because Leiber doesn't know when to lay off the over-detailed descriptions, and partly because he's got the two brotagonists on a bromantic date getting drunk for a bizarre number of pages. TBH I might read another one in this series, just to see if Leiber lets Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser make out, like Kos of the Dooms clearly intended.
