Just when I thought 2009 had said all it was going to say I see the announcement over at Black Gate that the fourth book in the Imaro saga — that’s right, the never-before-read-or-seen-by-human-eyes fourth book — has just been released from Sword & Soul. With less than twelve hours left in the year, this might actually be the biggest news of 2009 . . .

If you don’t understand why this is such a big deal, then you haven’t read my reviews of the previous Imaro books: Imaro and Imaro II: The Quest for Cush, and Imaro III: The Trail of Bohu (and let’s not forget one of the most finely realized female warriors in fantasy fiction, Dossouye). Simply put, this series is every bit as good as the very best the genre of Heroic Fantasy and Sword & Sorcery has to offer, and it’s been badly handled by publishers at every turn.

Now Imaro: The Naama War is out — a book that has never before seen print. Reading through the first three, I got the sense that Charles Saunders was just getting started — after all he was leading up to a continent-wide war for his land of Nyumbani:

Warfare on a cataclysmic scale is convulsing the continent of Nyumbani from north to south. Soldiers fall. Cities burn. Blood reddens the sea. Sorcery sears the land. Deities gather in opposite dimensions, poised to unleash unimaginable cosmic power on a land already battered by the conflict between the Cushites of the north and the Naamans of the south.

In the midst of this massive struggle, Imaro, warrior of the Ilyassai, wages a personal war against his nemesis, the sorcerer Bohu of Naama. This individual vendetta mirrors the larger clash between the forces of good and evil – a confrontation that threatens to tear Nyumbani apart.

The destiny for which Imaro has been honed like a living weapon now lies directly before him. Imaro vs. Bohu. Cush vs. Naama. War. Magic. Blood. Fire. The losers in this wide-ranging battle for the fate of a continent face oblivion. But the winners will not emerge unscathed.

If you’re a fan of fantasy and you haven’t read Saunders . . . what on earth are you waiting for?

Get Imaro: The Naama War right here (as well as The Trail of Bohu and Dossouye). You can bet I’ll be reviewing it very soon.

As announced here, Night Shade books is having a 50% off sale on all existing inventory and some not-yet-released titles (minimum order 4 books, enter coupon code 50NSB2009 at checkout) until June 17th. There’s a lot of good stuff in the catalog, and I’m seriously thinking about getting their multi-volume collected stories of Clark Ashton Smith even though I have the Lin Carter Ballantines, but what I really want to point out is that this is a great chance to buy the first two Imaro books for a song. At these prices, any fan of Moorcock, Gemmell, Tolkien, Leiber, Martin, Howard and heroic fantasy and sword & sorcery fiction in general who has not yet read Saunders’ brilliant series has an excellent opportunity to discover it for themselves.

Other stuff includes harder to find books from Glen Cook, Walter Jon Williams, Harry Turtledove, Neal Asher, Liz Williams, and Steven Erikson. Night Shade produces some really great anthologies as well, such as the themed collections from John Joseph Adams (the forthcoming Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes looks very interesting), Ellen Datlow’s new horror anthology series, and Jonathan Strahan’s ongoing science fiction and fantasy ‘best of’ collections.

Some really great books available cheap.

This week at Black Gate I was thrilled to step back into the lands of Nyumbani in my review of the third book in Charles R. Saunders’ superb Imaro saga. Imaro: The Trail of Bohu ramps up the action and increases the stakes over the previous two volumes (both of which I reviewed here), and includes quite a few unexpected surprises — which I was at pains not to spoil in my review.

Imaro: The Trail of Bohu continues the saga of the outcast warrior Imaro in the land of Nyumbani; a rich fantasy setting based on African history and myth. But, while the first two books in the series, Imaro and Imaro: The Quest for Cush, were essentially episodic in structure (constructed as they were of Saunders’ short stories), The Trail of Bohu, the first Imaro book written as a novel from start to finish, presents us with a bigger overall story — it is, in fact, the beginning of the arc that will carry the reader through books four and five and, let’s just say, things really start to get going in this installment of the Imaro saga.

And as I and many others have said many times — this series is the work of an overlooked master of the genre and to miss it would be to miss a modern day Howard or Leiber. Thankfully, Sword & Soul Media are making Imaro, and Charles R. Saunders’ other work like the equally fantastic Dossouye, available again, and you can find The Trail of Bohu by clicking this link.

I could not be more excited to see that the third installment of Charles Saunders’ masterful Imaro saga is now available form Sword and Soul Media. Anyone that has read my reviews of Charles Saunders work, such as my review of the first two books of Imaro, and of Dossouye, Saunders’ first book released from Sword and Soul, should have some inkling of how pleased I am to finally see The Trail of Bohu available for those of us that didn’t catch it the first time around.

Anyone that likes Sword & Sorcery, or Epic and Heroic Fantasy, will love these books. The first two are still available from Night Shade Books, and the third can be found simply by clicking the link over on the announcment posted at Charles Saunders’ website.

I’ve ordered my copy, of course, and you can be sure I’ll be reviewing it. For now, I’m just thrilled that Mr. Saunders has been able to persevere, and that Sword and Soul has embraced this project as they have, so that all of us can get the full story of a saga every bit has compelling as anything penned by Howard, Moorcock, or Leiber — and as for those never-before-published Imaro books that conclude his story, the word is to expect more later this year.

I was thrilled to hear the news that Charles R. Saunders would not only be continuing publication of the Imaro series through Sword & Soul Media, but that he had another hero whom I had yet to discover — the female warrior Dossouye — and that a collection of her tales was already available. Well, having bought and read it as fast as I could, I’m pleased to say it’s a book I would recommend to all fans of Sword & Sorcery and Fantasy fiction in general. Check out my full review at Black Gate by clicking the link below.

Dossouye reviewed at Black Gate

Dossouye is of the quality that you’d expect from the author of Imaro — Saunders’ masterful world-building and smooth prose are as good as ever — but it also creates a world and a protagonist with a subtle difference. It’s not only a great tale of action, but a story with depth, and it leaves a haunting resonance that lingers after you have turned the last page.

Dossouye at Lulu

The sight of Ngatun in a cage angered him; the Ilyassai believed that the souls of their dead occupied the bodies of lions before returning to animate a human of a succeeding generation. Thus was Ngatun the most honored of foes; only by slaying a lion and freeing an Ilyassai soul to become human again could an Ilyassai youth gain full status as a man and a warrior.

• Title: Imaro, Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush
• Author: Charles Saunders
• Genre: Sword & Sorcery/Heroic Fantasy
• Year:2006, 2007 (1981, 1984)

As someone who reads a great deal, I can’t help but be a bit jaded. It’s inevitable really, and books that may have held my rapt attention as a teenager just get a passing nod as light entertainment now. When I picked up Imaro I expected little more than a decent, entertaining read. Instead I was blown away. Saunders’ name belongs without qualification alongside those of Leiber, Moorcock, Burroughs, Vance, and Howard — and that he isn’t better known, and that this groundbreaking epic has twice now been curtailed by publishers, is a great loss to fans of heroic fantasy fiction.

The premise of Imaro, in a nutshell, is a Sword & Sorcery tale in the Howardian tradition drawing upon African sources rather than the typical ancient and medieval Near Eastern and European ones. As Saunders states in his introductory piece to the first volume ‘Revisiting Imaro:’ “Imaro’s Africa, which I named Nyumbani, would serve as an antidote to the negative stereotypes about the so-called ‘Dark Continent’ that crept — advertently and inadvertently — into the fantasy world of far too many other writers.”

But I get the impression that the unfortunate tendency to try to package Imaro as the ‘Black Conan’ has undermined its perception as anything other than a gimmick, as if Saunders was merely telling the same old stories with a different color palette. For the book’s initial release in 1981, DAW’s planned slogan was ‘The Epic Novel of a Black Tarzan.’ So moronic a slogan is, I think, somewhat indicative of the mindset that may have contributed to the series’ failure to find its audience.

Anyone who reads these books, however, soon discovers that such flippant, sound-bite style labeling does an extreme disservice to what is a major piece of storytelling. Having learned the best lessons of Howard, Saunders takes them to the next level. His prose rolls with a smooth efficacy that embodies the punchy pacing of pulp without any of its awkwardness or excess — a style equally at home in the midst of a clash of arms as it is in the careful evocation of a landscape. Like his protagonist, Saunders is at once lithe and powerful; he is a writer sure of his own voice and passionate about his story.

Nyumbani, Imaro’s alternate-African setting, is a triumph of secondary world creation. Like Howard’s Hyborian Age, Nyumbani blends the real with the invented to create a world that is at once teasingly familiar and wholly exotic. But Saunders exceeds Howard as a world-builder, for Nyumbani breathes with life — it is no mere backdrop to the action. Instead, the world of Imaro feels authentic from the very first page, and this setting is fundamentally a part of every character’s persona and the action of the story; shaping events, attitudes, and even Saunders’ use of metaphor. But unlike a modern ‘fat fantasy’ epic, Imaro pulls off this feat of world-building without resorting to vast slabs of description, managing to condense the epic feel of larger fantasy in a faster-paced Sword & Sorcery package that never once loses its momentum.

Imaro himself is a character that will naturally be compared with his Cimmerian cousin, for they do have much in common. Powerful, wild, and unlike other men, Imaro is a warrior in the truest sense of the word, fearing neither man, beast, or demon. But while Conan is an outcast and adventurer by choice, Imaro is a man without tribe or kin, literally a ’son-of-no-father’ as his mother’s people, the Ilyassai (based on the Masai), contemptuously refer to him. Though raised by the fierce Ilyassai to become a peerless hunter and warrior, Imaro parts ways with his tribe at an early age and is thrust into events of epic proportions.

Alone, Imaro is a man of the wilds, distrustful of others and bitter over his own treatment at the hands of his people — for, though Imaro clearly does not resemble the Ilyassai, having inherited the features of his unknown father, he had desired above all to be a part of them. But he is a man with powerful enemies — sorcerers, the users of mchawi; evil magic. With each episode the reader learns a bit more of the scale of the threat to Nyumbani such beings pose, and the otherworldly descriptions of Imaro’s numerous sorcerous opponents is some of Saunders’ best writing.

But Imaro is not a static character, and his growth toward a greater maturity and self-acceptance sets him apart from the typical Sword & Sorcery hero who exists more as an archetype around which the story revolves. Imaro’s encounters with love, community, responsibility, and friendship forge his character into something more noble — it is this process of his ‘taming,’ as he himself perceives it, that gives him a kind of humanity often denied the heroes of this kind of story.

It is with the second book in the series, Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush, that Imaro truly begins to come into the role he is destined to play. The world of Nyumbani opens up as well, and the numerous peoples and cultures and their links — sometimes apparent, sometimes not — to real world or mythological civilizations, infuse the setting with a richness and exoticism every bit as compelling as the plot. By the book’s end Imaro is on the verge of further changes and responsibilities, further humanizing ties, and himself makes a choice that reflects his new maturity.

Though much in the Imaro books is told episodically, having first appeared in short fiction magazines, the stories are not collections of aimless or unrelated tales. Not only are the books cohesive as novels, but the whole story feels epic from the start — and I can think of no other Sword & Sorcery saga that feels as much like a High Fantasy epic as Imaro.

But the epic is unfinished, and looks to remain so. Twice now it has come into print and been canceled mid-stride, before it was allowed to find its audience. Despite Saunders having completed four books and parts of a fifth , and despite the inarguable quality of the work, Night Shade Books has canceled the series after only two releases. While book store shelves are positively groaning beneath the weight of substandard and derivative fantasy, it is a real tragedy that something as fresh, entertaining, and rewarding as Imaro was not given the fair shake it deserved.

I don’t intend my reviews as advertisements, but I will advise anyone who is a fan of Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy to buy these books before they go out of print again. I hope that somehow this is not the last chapter in the Imaro story, and that it will one day get the recognition and success it warrants, and Charles Saunders’ name is spoken in the same breath as Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber.

It is still possible to track down the older Imaro printings, and Imaro 3: The Trail of Bohu is sometimes available from second-hand sources.

UPDATE: For those that have not yet heard the good news, please see Charles Saunder’s comments below and be sure to check his website for up-to-date information on the release of the full Imaro series, from Sword & Soul Media.

• Imaro on Amazon
• Imaro 2: The Quest for Cush on Amazon
• Charles Saunder’s website
• Charles Saunders interviewed and Sword & Sorcerey.org