How to Slay Dragons and Influence Peasants (Heidi Regan)

How to Slay Dragons and Influence Peasants: Life Lessons from an Unlicensed Seer

Heidi Regan
Heidi Regan, publisher
Fiction, Collection/Fantasy/Humor
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION:

The kingdom of Ektopia is much like any other in the world. It has its good monarchs and bad ones, its allies and enemies (who often switch roles on a whim), its dragons and centaurs and magical gnomes who don't always get their spells right, its wizards who name themselves after their own foreseen deaths, and of course its share of prophecies so vague they're only useful in hindsight, if then. But there's a reason for that vagueness; for all that they claim they want the truth, few people like having spoilers for their future blurted out, and some get rather testy about it. When a young witch with the gift of foresight blurts out a prophecy to her wizard lover, he angrily and impulsively curses her to spend the next 400 years atop Mount Woe - and, just like that, she finds herself in a dank cave on a cold mountaintop, unable to climb back down.
Instead of succumbing to doom and gloom and insanity (well, not for more than a few months), the seer instead chooses to make cursed lemonade out of the cursed lemons life handed her, leveraging her gift for prophecy into a lucrative business... but always being careful to couch her visions and advice in stories and anecdotes, because she really would rather not be cursed onto yet another mountaintop, not when she's finally got her cave nice and comfortable. Here, she collects many of her greatest hits, helpfully annotated with lessons for the modern reader.

REVIEW:

I usually shift gears between books, so having recently finished John Scalzi's cotton candy puff piece Starter Villain, I'd hoped to dig into something meatier and darker. Unfortunately, life kept interrupting whenever I tried, and finally a battle with insomnia drove me online to spend some Amazon credits on something, anything, I could enjoy that might cajole an uncooperative brain into rest. I grabbed this title on a whim, having seen and enjoyed several of the actor/comedian author's online videos... and I wound up devouring over a third of it in a single binge, and the rest the next day. (Yes, I did eventually sleep in between.)
Regan's writing has shades of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, but unlike them she's not trying to slide a sly, dark knife of sophisticated social commentary underneath the humor (though there are several digs scattered about for those who want to look for them). That's why the stories collected here succeed; they never try to be more than they are, never pretend to build to some grand or profound insight. Even the timelines of the tales are wibbly-wobbly; the narrator intentionally skirts this by claiming that seers perceive time differently than other people, and trying too hard to find logic or line up events in a strict chronology takes the fun out of it, a written rebuke to nitpickers along the lines of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song's admonition to repeat to yourself that it's just a show and you should really just relax. That said, there is some humor in how tales get changed and twisted through later generations; an Emperor's New Clothes-like incident of royal public nudity is later remembered as a mere misunderstanding, or a bold monarch bucking trends, or a royal victim of peasant cruelty.
Like Regan's online videos, the stories here often start with familiar parts from folklore and fairy tales and general fantasy tropes - the poor woodcutter catching a talking fish, the search for a Chosen One, a village plagued by a monster, and so forth - but veer off in wild, hilariously unpredictable directions almost out of the gate. She gleefully twists expectations, creating characters you care just enough about to keep reading, who often are their own worst enemies as they trip themselves up on the paths to their destinies. None of the tales are direct retellings of ones I've seen online, often elaborating and filling out the story. The seer herself occasionally appears, as do a few other recurring characters, such as a multiheaded half dragon and a possible Chosen One who isn't sure he wants to give up chicken farming. I found myself snickering a fair bit, and laughing more than once. There were also some nicely human moments along the way, and lessons if you think stories need them to justify their existence (including the lesson that there aren't always lessons).
As with any story collection, some tales felt stronger than others, but there were no duds in the batch. I rather enjoyed this little jaunt on the humorous side of fantasy, and wouldn't mind reading more.

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