Review - Beast Be Gone by A.L. Billington
Preamble
The author of Beast Be Gone, A.L. Billington, approached me on reader magnet / universal book link / all kinds of good author management tools StoryOrigin. He was looking to swap book mentions in our newsletters – he would advertise The Bawdy Bard to his mailing list, I would do the same for Beast Be Gone. I have a bit of a moral issue with recommending stuff I have not read, so I read a couple of chapters, decided it was funny, and decided to finish and write this review before April 1, 2022 so I could tell my readers what I actually thought of the book.
A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.
Take from that what you will.
Review – 5/5
One of my earliest memories of fantasy comes not from reading The Hobbit, or even watching the old Rankin Bass animated version of the story, both encounters that were formative for me. No, what I am talking about here are games like King’s Quest and Quest For Glory, old text-parsed games that came out in the 80s and 90s when video games could be made by a single person or two or a very small team. They were crude, punishing (King’s Quest was particularly difficult) and set in a fantasy world. In the first King’s Quest, you’d write stuff like ‘get egg,’ and you’d get the golden egg out of the robin’s nest you spent a few moments climbing after writing ‘climb tree’ not a moment before.
Things became more complex of course. A game like Elden Ring, the early 2022 game of the year fantasy RPG contender, would have made five-year-old me fall over with cardiac arrest, yet they are now seen as ‘par for the course.’ They involve small villages of people in order to get made, massive piles of cash infused by enormous corporations. And there is an enormous glut of them today, more RPGs and fantasy video games than one can even rationally contemplate playing, particularly with the responsibilities of adulthood nipping at one’s heels. Like evolution from a unicellular organism to a hulking behemoth of sapience and subtlety, video games have grown up from humble origins and into something altogether different. And I grew up along with them.
Beast Be Gone is a nod to people like me, the types who had fantasy video games hooked up to the IV from the moment they could use a keyboard on up to present. There are references to all kinds of tropes and ridiculous stuff that we take for granted as just part of the game. One of my favourites was the notion that guards, with their limited AI, would ‘investigate’ the disappearance of a fellow guard and blame the commotion on the wind, in spite of treading on the dead body of their friend in order to make the pronouncement that the noise of violent murder was ‘probably just the wind.’ That kind of thing has happened in video games – I have lived through it.
But Beast Be Gone is not just about RPG video games. It’s about a guy named Eric, a middle-aged pest control guy who hates the fact that adventurers are ruining the world. Like myself, he knew the times before the complexity of the present. He prefers the good old days, when he would use simple turn undead scrolls to kill liches and various other tricks to clear crypts and dungeons in exchange for enough cash to buy warm beer at the inn. Because dude is most definitely British, as I have come to suspect A.L. Billington to be.
There is all kinds of referential humour in here, from the fact that Americans like the fizzy cold stuff to the insanity of RPG mechanics to ridiculous tropes like that of the Dark Lord and the Chosen One. It’s got the telltale British humour stank of making fun of the stupidity of bureaucracy at length. But it’s not just that. There were several points where I laughed out loud at the cleverness of the writing, and this is a writer who does not allow his characters to utter a single f-bomb.
I was reminded of the discussions of stand up from my younger years, when ‘clean’ comedians (at least one of whom ended up as a cancelled sex offender, no less) would say that if you needed to swear, you weren’t funny, since you were just eliciting some form of Pavlovian response to the naughty. I think that idea is a pile of fucking bullshit, but I do have more than a little respect for what A.L. Billington has done. Sure, sex is referenced, though it’s not done gratuitously. He made a genuinely funny book that I could recommend to someone under the age of majority.
The story itself is a parody, a satire of a genre that is filled with self-seriousness. After all, fantasy quests are all serious business. The hero has to save the world from evil, after all, and none may laugh at the intensity of his or her devotion to the good. Except for dudes like A.L. Billington and Eric the pest control guy, who just wants to live in peace, be a kind dude to goblins, and drink his good warm beer in a bad dingy pub.
Highly recommended.