My reading high that I was riding a few months ago has suddenly died. I can think of a few reasons for this – it's been spring and summer, which means a lot more outdoor activities, and slowly waking up from my winter hibernation, I've been taking the dogs for walks every night, which means I'm not using the treadmill as much (where I do a lot of my reading during the winter), but most importantly, I think my reading slump is a result of the novel I'm currently reading - King's Rising, the FINAL book in C.S. Pacat's mind-blowingly awful Captive Prince Trilogy. It's so bad that I have no desire to read.
I started Lake of Fire around the same time, as I like to have a novel and a graphic novel on the go at the same time. Written and coloured by Nathan Fairbairn and illustrated by Matt Smith, Lake of Fire, is... basically, a re-hash of the film Outlander staring James Caviezel – an alien ship lands on earth in the past, and heroes of the time are pitted against monstrous alien creatures bent on eating and destroying everything in it's path. While the premise is the same, Lake of Fire takes place in 1220 AD in France, during the Albigensian Crusade, a crusade initiated by Pope Innocent III to eradicate Catharism, a Christian dualist movement, that had taken over the former southern province of Languedoc. Today the crusade is considered an act of genocide by the Catholic Church. Mark Gregory Pegg, an renown Australian medieval history professor wrote that "The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross".
Lake of Fire isn't really about the crusade, it takes place during the crusade, and there is a Cathar priestess in the story, but I just really like history. It's one of my favourite subjects, I pretty much love everything before 1900... for some reason, as soon as we got to 1900-present day in history class, I just did not care. Oh, and also anything American. I'm from Canada, and while we didn't learn a lot about U.S. history, the little we did was super boring.
BACK to Lake of Fire! I'm not sure if it was because I was forcing my way through King's Rising, or because the seasons were changing and I wanted to be outside more, but I wasn't too fond of Lake of Fire. I found the story overdone – how many times are we going to re-hash the "dangerous aliens crash-land sometime in earth's past" plot. I would have preferred if this had been a story about the Albigensian Crusade, get rid of the aliens, give me some historical, medieval fiction. Because, to be honest, the characters were pretty interesting! There's the surly Baron Mondragon with his own issues with the crusades; the young knight Theo and his friend Sir Hugh (who I'm 100% sure has a thing for Theo); Bernadette, the Cathar priestess; and the villainous Catholic Priest who, of course, mucks things up. And some of these characters had interesting motives and character development, that I would've liked to see fleshed out more... without alien's getting in the way.
The artwork, however, is beautifully coloured and has a prominent "comic book" feel to it. It's nothing overly artistic (like Pretty Deadly, or From Under Mountains), it's more of a traditional art style, and while I enjoyed it because of it's clear and concise depictions, I almost missed some of the more artistic panels that I'd seen in some of the other comics I've read.
So overall, it was a decent comic. Not my favourite, but also not the worst I've read over the last year. It was enough to peak my curiosity towards Fairbairn and Smith, and I'll be looking for some more work by both the writer and the artist.
