A collection of novellas featuring the same two characters set in various interesting fantasy and fantasy-adjacent settings. White Crow is Mary Gentle’s response to all the bad low effort fantasy that was flooding the market in 90s and early 00s.

“You can’t beat no orc marines

When we fire our M16s!”

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Mary Gentle’s Grunts in a nutshell. Grunts is a satire of the schlocky high fantasy Tolkien ripoffs of the 70s and 80s. It pokes fun at the aesthetic of the American military as portrayed in film and literature. It combines Grand Guignol (think slapstick but extra gory and violent) dark comedy with satire on bad fantasy.

Ash - A Secret History is by far the longest novel I’ve read. When I saw the thickness of the book, the number of lines on each page and the miniscule size of the font, I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to read through the whole thing.

All it took for me to get over that fear was reading the first few pages. Mary Gentle hooked me with her commitment to telling Ash’s story in a way that only she could and she refused to let go of me until the very end.