I’m often the sort of person who feels incessantly indebted to folks partly from my deep well of gratitude and partly from promises I’ve made. I tend to keep them, but I often take years. That includes a promise I made to FC Shultz to read his debut The Rose Weapon, his first, when it came out. Eventually, I’ll die and whatever promises I’ve made will die with me. But until that day, I’m quite content in being neither late nor early, but arriving precisely when I mean to. And the time’s come for me to finish this one and review it.

I read FC Shultz’s The Rose Weapon in a few hours. I don’t do that, not these days, but a few things converged. For starters, I’ve been sick as a dog the last three days. Had to cancel like six meetings yesterday, slept most of the day, but I hit the point where my back hurt from sleeping and so I had to switch to the couch. Tara was out running errands and I’ve been off TV / Movies / video games again as I often do for the first four months of the year at a minimum. I wanted something that wasn’t Ovid’s Metamorphosis because my wrists hurt from holding that tome. That cut out most of the big mysteries and thrillers (looking at you, Galbraith and King), Le Carre novels, and the like I’ve wanted to read. Also kicked out epic fantasy. I also didn’t want something dense as I’ve been slowly translating Marius Victorinus, working my way through other stuff. My mind and body needed something that would help me rest. And so I was looking for a little book.

After talking to FC about mailing lists earlier that day, there sat his little book.

Next to it, somewhere in the ether, gossamer glittering in the pale becurtained yellow glow from my little sterling halogen touch lamp, hung a little promise, however sick I was.

So I started, expecting as I tend to expect with colleagues and friends, to be disappointed and have to couch my language in faint praise. It’s this bracing feeling like you might do for a slow, low-impact crash you can’t quite stop. I’m sure others have done the same to me, though I still beg for bluntness as I’ll receive it anyways when it’s out there.

For example:

I’m going to immediately say Lance’s book was bad. Very bad. The writing, the plot, the characters, the world building, all of it bad. … the whole thing was difficult to read, let alone understand. The writing was sloppy, to be fair, everything was very sloppy.

— Goodreads ★★ review

You get bluntness eventually down the road (however much it reads like snowballing), so pulling punches doesn’t help your friends.

Truth is, FC Shultz’s first was an easy read.

And that’s not the norm for a first short work — it’s a little more normal for first novels, but even still. His really came quite easy. I found the prose readable and the major turns in this little book to have quite the emotional starkness, particularly as a one who recently lost his father. I’m just a little more tender there than I am normally on that subject (Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov review to follow). Being a tender man — being someone who cries often at weird times while watching obscure films — it’s saying something. But FC Shultz did, indeed, move me.

Had I a critique, the book’s a bit melodramatic at times: the characters themselves cry often in the book. I do wonder what could have happened if, rather than tell us the emotion, FC made it a little more specific, a little more on the thought, dialog, feeling about a specific descriptive observation spectrum so that certain associations with the character — with the rose weapon itself, for instance — start to take on a resonance. But that’s a minor thing, truly — particularly with a book that made me feel something while everything else on my body went numb.

It’s a simple story and for a simple story, has a delightful little middle turn that punched me in the chest. FC Shultz does well setting up curious little shocks at the chapter turns that reminds me, in a way, of my first experience reading Harry Potter. Not the magic, the mystery, world building. The pacing. That’s something I struggle with, so it felt all the more delightful to me to read a work by a friend and an author younger than me who does such a thing better than I. I took some notes, so that’s something in his favor for sure.

Could there be improvements? Probably, but I’m too sick to nitpick. To care, honestly: if the whole cloth works, it works, the rest is just shop talk. And it need not work for every reader. Besides, the man’s written plenty of other things since then. Hell, I’ve published his poetry on this site and his stories in Of Gods and Globes.

But short of some stuff he’s sent me in private, I haven’t read something longer of his in its final form. I was bracing myself and found, quite quickly, I didn’t need to. No crash was coming, just a nice old viking crossing my path with a thorny staff in search of leathern wingspan. I stopped and admired him for his quest and we both went on our way.

Final note: I don’t normally do trigger warnings cause life doesn’t come with that, but at the phrase “blood boiling” inside the sealed skin of a man’s arm, I nearly threw the book across the room. That was some heavy metal stuff.

It’s a wonderful gift to not only enjoy a book, but to get halfway through and forget that your friend FC Shultz wrote it. I liked Hosperan, liked some of his struggles, liked the idea of the rose weapon. It’s right on the edge of a believable solution for that particular society. And it was a nice little turn that I never quite expected from the title. To be frank, I was expecting some sort of anti-pacifistic or pro-pacifistic sentiment. Went a different route entirely and sort of skirted my presumed themes altogether.

So read it. If a sick man, and a slow reader at that, can do it in a couple of hours, it won’t take you long. Here you go.