A mysterious stranger rides into a corrupt, violence-ridden town and proceeds to clean things up in his own no-holds-barred fashion. Set that in the Wild Wild West and you’ve got the plot of every spaghetti Western movie. Put it in a medieval fantasy world and you have Brutal, a novel very much in the tradition of pulp-era S&S classics like Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and Clark Ashton Smith’s Hyperborean cycle. Read More…