The Vanished Villains by Necessity

So once upon a time, I scheduled this blog to be posted, and blogspot said nope. Or maybe lulz, you think I'm in your timezone?


Wednesday-Wednesday Weekly Wordcount: 5,500 added to Gloaming, of 26,000 total.
This Week's Reads: Marathon Man, some Embassytown.

Happy Banned Book week! I have an embarrassing banned book story that I'll tell you Friday. But today I'm going to cry about a book that was not banned. 

But it is gone. 

And its untimely absence leaves me sobbing into my pillow on dark lonely nights. 

I wish I had gotten a copy of Villains by Necessity by Eve Forward, when I had the chance.

Out of print on Amazon, vanished from my library, new copies running at over a hundred bucks a pop--it's out of reach. And it isn't on Kindle or Nook, which is pretty criminal if you ask me.

Back in middle school, this was my favorite book ever. It was new, it was different, it was a revelation that not all sf&f was confined to the transposed plots of The Black Cauldron and Lord of the Rings remixed a little and thrown on the page. It was a revelation that there could be fantasy outside of the hundred farmboys prophesied to save the world, the weak females, and the sickeningly lawful knights.

No, this was a tale of the villains, and they were much more fun. It combined humor and darkness. It quite possibly began my obsession with assassin-characters. It subverted cliches, without giving way to the chasm of postmodernism. It was filled with action and adventure. It did not regurgitate the narrow range of morals and divine right of kings everything else pushed.

It was, along with Vlad Taltos, the strongest influence on Shadowing.

It was the best book.

Of all time.


...or at least that's how I remember it, and that's how it'll stay in my mind, because it is quite firmly out of print. And it doesn't seem any amount of clicking Amazon's "I'd like to read this book on Kindle" has changed that.