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Seven years have passed since the climatic battle on the sands of the stadium in Heroes Die. Hari Michaelson, known to the world as the Actor Caine, has replaced his old nemesis, Arturo Kollberg, as Administrator of the Studio. He and Shanna have married and now have a daughter, Faith. But the years that have passed have not been happy ones for Hari, as he is bound to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down by the wound he took at the stadium, his career as Caine over, his days spent in brooding and bitter memories as his bodily functions are controlled by the shunt of a neural bypass. In the real world, his wife has become his nurse, and now he can only watch from a monitor while, as Pallas Ril, she continues her adventures on Overworld, a welcome escape from the invalid that has become her husband. Like Hari, Ma'elkoth is also trapped, mortal now and self-named Tan'elkoth in recognition of his fall from deity and the physical loss of Overworld, a permanent exhibit in the Studio Museum where each day he performs for the patrons. But a mysterious illness is spreading across Overland, killing all the inhabitants in its wake, and setting in motion events that may threaten both worlds, and from which no one will escape unscarred.

For fans of heroic fantasy, until now this sub-genre has been established and its traditions fairly well set by authors such as Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber (ignoring for the moment the more literary-adopted antecedents found in Homer, the Norse eddas and sagas, Beowulf or chansons de geste such as "The Song of Roland"), those traditions adhered to and followed most recently by writers including David Gemmell, Glen Cook, Dave Duncan and Robert Jordan in his contract writing for Tor. These last authors, while playing stylistically perhaps with the conventions established early on by Howard and Leiber, for the most part have chosen to cleave to characterizations and storylines that offer little departure from the originals, regardless of any rewards their tales and retellings may offer. Howard's formula was so successful that it has spawned an intentional serialization of imitation. Robert Jordan's work for Tor prior to Wheel of Time is just one instance among many, while White Wolf has recently tried to resurrect Leiber's Lankhmar in the writings of Robin Wayne Bailey. Both publishers and, occasionally readers, recognize a good thing.

At surface, Matthew Stover's two books -- Heroes Die and the subsequent Blade of Tyshalle -- appear continuations of the above heroic tradition, centred on the adventures of an anti-hero, appropriately enough named Caine. But only in the most basic outline of his tale does Stover maintain the traditions of heroic fantasy, its conventions only a guise in which the author enwraps intentions more normally reserved for literature. And I suspect, for the average reader of heroic fantasy, this literary sleight-of-hand might create some uncertainty in the minds of those seeking purely action-driven fantasy, contemplation not usually a factor when reading heroic tales of adventure -- at least not since our high school classes in Homer. Likely most of us who turn to fantasy, especially heroic, have forgotten how to think while at the same time reading, our objectives more imaginatively and superficially pleasurable than intellectual.

For this reason, I am not surprised to find that some readers appear rather tentative or baffled in accepting this novel. As with the previous Heroes Die, the author is once again pushing and blurring the boundaries of traditional heroic fiction, incorporating elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror into a single as well as singular reading experience, using the conventions of heroic fantasy to explore existential and contemporary social -- what some might call more literary -- issues not normally expected within the fantasy genre: works of fantasy incorporating metaphor and symbolism are a rarity indeed. And, he does so with a gritty style and grim, incisive tone and insight into the human condition that bares outward appearances to the bone, with a vividness of language that sets him far apart from the majority of his contemporaries.

Blade of Tyshalle is a leap forward as well as arguably thematically a departure from the earlier Heroes Die. This is not to say that themes and concerns addressed in the earlier novel are not continued here, but that the level and scope of the author's interests have achieved a depth and complexity only hinted at by comparison with the previous novel. Marvellously and subtly interweaving multi-layered motifs and metaphor (for example, follow the many ways Stover uses sculpture -- in particular David the King -- to reveal not only Caine's crisis of identity and relationship to his own existence, but the larger issues of deity and humanity's significance in the universe), within the context of fantasy, Stover examines and explores concepts and issues as diverse and multifaceted as art, religion, alienation and existentialism, chaos theory and quantum probabilities, moral relativism, justice, pedagogy, sexism, and the destructive nature of our own held notions of self-importance in relationship to life and the planet. Many of the scenarios played out in the novel could easily be viewed as possible harbingers of humanity's future, revealed through an unsparing, if compassionate, relentless and stark examination of human nature, as well as an excoriating delve into the individual psyche, stripping away the comforting illusions of depravity and nobility, the mythologies of identity we create not only for ourselves but our species, leaving in its stead the absence of life's meaning as we prefer to construct it, tailored around ourselves, significance or purpose instead found only in how we tell our own stories:

"...that doesn't mean our lives have no meaning... Life might not have a meaning of its own, but the stories we tell about it do... What it means depends on how I tell the story." Further, what anything means "is a function of who I am when I look at it."

William Thompson is a writer of speculative fiction, as yet unpublished, although he remains hopeful. In addition to pursuing his writing, he is in the degree program in information science at Indiana University.