(Before I unshuttered this blog in April 2025, I posted some book reviews on Facebook. I’m going to repost a few of them here. Starting with this one.)

Grunts! (1992, UK) was a reread, although to be honest I remembered little of my original read back in the early 1990s. It’s not typical of her oeuvre as it’s a comic fantasy, although some of her short stories, particularly those written for the Midnight Rose anthologies, are similar. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, there was no comic fantasy market for writers in the UK, there was only a Terry Pratchett market. Having said that, Grunts! is not a novel Pratchett would have written.

A group of orcs discover a dragon’s hoard of weapons beneath a mountain. The dragon is dead, and the weapons appear to come from many different worlds, including our own. The hoard is cursed, however: whoever uses the weapons becomes like those from whom the weapons were stolen. In this case, the orcs arm themselves with guns and equipment used by the US Marines, and so slowly become US Marines.

The forces of Dark lose the final battle – despite the orcs with assault rifles – but the orcs are keen to show their continuing usefulness. So they go into the arms business. With the help of a halfling duchess of questionable morals, they manufacture and sell advanced weaponry to all the other nations. Then the Dark Lord returns from his defeat, but decides this time he can’t be bothered with a long war and a final battle. Instead, he wants an election. Meanwhile, a horde of space Bugs, a cross between giant biomechanical scorpions and the xenomorphs from the Alien franchise, have invaded…

Gentle pastiches pretty much every fantasy trope going, and every movie that features US Marines (and lots more besides). A lot of the fun in reading Grunts! is spotting the references. I’d definitely forgotten how bad some of the jokes were. For example:

“And now,” the small orc cried, “a song I’ve dedicated to Quartermaster Zaruk. He tells me he’s been getting lots of requests from you orcs for those camouflage cloth squares you can roll up and tie around your head. Unfortunately there aren’t any left in the stores”… “Yes, we have no bandannas…”

A lot of the orc characters are pastiches of stock characters from war films. There’s a covert operations undead orc squad, a mad genius inventor orc, and a squad of butch female orc Marines. The fantasy characters, on the other hand… they’re jokes, but they don’t come across as send-ups of stock fantasy characters.

Grunts! is a fun read – except for some of those jokes – more visceral than is usual for high fantasy (but that’s a Gentle thing), and despite being a comic fantasy filled with really bad jokes makes a number of serious points. Not Gentle’s best book by a long shot, and readers looking for something like Pratchett might be a little disappointed. But still a fun read.