Burning Books for Pleasure and Profit

by KJ Parker

Genres: Fantasy, Short Stories
Pages: 26
Rating:

Synopsis:

A talented bookbinder is tasked with creating a copy of a text so inflammatory it threatens to alter the very existence of Truth itself.

K.J. Parker’s Burning Books for Profit and Pleasure is very clearly one of Parker’s stories — something about the style would have tipped me off if I hadn’t known already. Parker’s narrators are definitely distinctive, in part because of their strong (but similar) voices.

There’s not so much of Parker’s dark humour as in some of the other stories and longer works I’ve read, but there is a little, against the background of the story about manuscripts with some nice grounding details. The way the story works out is also very distinctively “K.J. Parker” to me: it’s well-structured and has a sting in the tail, and I’d recognise it as his work from a mile off.

So I guess the upshot of all this is that you will likely enjoy it if you like Parker’s work, and won’t if you don’t generally enjoy the “Parkerish” hallmarks!

Rating: 4/5