Blue Moon Rising with Stephen Hart

This Book I Read...

00:00 / 54:05

This month CM Lowry is talking to author Stephen Hart, about Blue Moon Rising by Simon R Green in ‘This Book I Read…’

Topics covered include:

Stephen points out that Simon R Green is somewhat unknown, dispite being a New York Times Bestseller, and is most widely known for writing the novelised version of the classic Kevin Costner film ‘Robin Hood: Price of Thieves’. The royalties from this enabled Green to clear his mortgage and so he is now able to live off the income from his creative endeavours
Blue Moon Rising was Green’s first Bestselling novel and is part of a wider series of fantasy novels set in The Forest Kingdom.
Stephen loves this book due to the characters – they are very real, and the heroes are brave and winsome, even in the face of insurmountable odds and opposition from friends and family. Prince Rupert in particular is intriguing as he knows the quest he’s being sent on is a death sentence and yet he does it for the good of the Kingdom.
Another reason that Stephen loves this book is that it is a serious book that has a lot of humour in it. It’s not a comedy, but there is an amazing sense of humour written into it. The interactions between characters are so true to life and that makes for some very fun reading.
Green does really well at creating characters that the reader will have empathy for. Even his monsters have traits that we can identify with and relate to. And the humour helps, as it does in real life, to process things that are less than ideal.
Stephen also really appreciates the fact that the characters in the book suffer, they fail and there are consequences to their actions. They are incredibly human, the suffer trauma, they get dirty and hurt and broken. This book contains Stephen’s favourite death scene in any work of fiction.
We also get into some negative aspects – This is a beautiful stand alone book but the modern print version has Book 1 of 4 written on the cover and that can be very off putting for a first time reader as it feels like your committing to reading four books. Stephen feels that Green’s writing has become rather lazy in recent years – there are examples of repetition of character traits, events and story hooks, sometimes even verbatim paragraphs.
CM Lowry asks Stephen why people should hunt out Blue Moon Rising for a read. Stephen suggests you read it because its full of great characters, it inspires genuine peril and yet it’s damn funny. It’s also a brilliant stand alone book that you can grab online from around £6 – that’s a bargain! Go and read it!
CM & Stephen have a great chat about stand alone books as opposed to book series. They discuss heroes and villains and the joy of character development.
There has been lots of discussion of RPGs in this episode. Check out our other podcast ‘What Is Roleplay’

Links to things we discussed: