Book Review

Viking by Fabio - A Guest Review by RedHeadedGirl

F

Title: Viking
Author: Fabio
Publication Info: Avon November 1994
ISBN: 978-0380770489
Genre: Time Travel

Fabio - Viking. Fabio holding a sword with huge pecs aloft.The things I do for your entertainment.

So, to get back to the discussions of Old Skool WTFery, I went as WTF as I could.  I went Fabio.

You remember, right, that Fabio “wrote” a couple of romances back in The Day? I remember reading an article in Parade (I think) when his first one came out, and that he had put his foot down that his books would not portray smoking and would encourage safe sex. I remember a scene in Pirate where the Fabio character (because seriously?  It’s self-insert fic.  Let’s be honest, here) was about to commence fucking a whore, and she got all pouty when he pulled out a (accurate) sheepskin condom.

It’s sweet.

Anyway, here we have Viking.

So the main male character here is Marco.  He is a movie star who is madly in love with his girlfriend of some years, and he is ready to settle down and have babies, but she is 23, and just getting the good roles (which will only last for another 5 years, tops!) and is not ready to settle down and start a family just yet.  They are starring in a Viking movie, and during he scene where his character, Viktor the Valiant, is buried at sea in a Viking funeral (burned in a boat) something goes pear-shaped and he ends up in a burning Viking boat in Iceland, where the REAL Viktor the Valiant is being buried at sea after being killed by an attack on his village by Wolfgard, who lives across the fjord.

So he jumps out of the boat and into an attack of the people who “killed” him in the first place (and also in the movie, because Art IMITATES lI) where everyone is like “HOLY CRAP YOU’RE NOT DEAD” and he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing and the Bad Guy’s stepdaughter, Rayna, who looks exactly like Marco’s girlfriend in the present, freaks out and the attack is repelled. 

So Marco-now-Viktor tries to slip back into being Viktor, but he has an academic idea of what Vikings are (except not, because while they talk about his “Love of historical accuracy” while filming, he seems to forget all about it when he’s actually there) and he Does Not Approve of paganism, slavery, or drunkenness.  Also he is concerned about his warriors’ cholesterol. 

No, really. 

“…He had to wonder what was more harmful- the alcoholic beverages his warriors swilled so freely, or the diet so rich in fat and cholesterol that the Vikings consumed daily.  He frowned.  In addition to his other duties here, he would need to develop programs both for reforming drunkards and for unclogging their arteries through establishing more healthful diets.”


EXCUSE ME MR. MORALIZING-PANTS.  First, shut up.  Second, it’s rich food in NATURAL fats and not this transfat, hydrogenized bullshit fake food SHIT you’ve been eating in LA, dickbag.  Also, in an environment where they are CONSTANTLY working hard, so the calories get worked off, and where the growing season is super short, veggies are not always in plentiful supply.  Let’s see how you can handle a celery craving in the middle of February.  Sanctimonious ASS.

Also, Scandahoovians can fucking hold their booze.  Ask my great and great-great uncles about that.  They trashed the West Bank in Minneapolis many times throughout their lives.  Like good Vikings. 

ANYWAY

Viktor decides that the Vikings are too bellicose (the drinking game for this book is take a shot for every “bellicose” and “sadistic” and you too can drink like a Viking) and decides to try to end the feud with the Bad Guy across the fjord by going and talking to him.  They somehow make a deal that if Viktor can kidnap Rayna and make her his wife and tame her hoydenish ways or something then the book will end. (spoiler alert: it takes too fucking long)

Viktor snags her (and her servant/chaperone, who is a seer of some sort and has told Rayna that her destiny is with Viktor) and drags them back across the fjord to his village.  We find out through flashback that Rayna is actually a French princess who was kidnapped by the Bad Guy when she was 3, along with her mother.  Her mother was forced to marry the Bad Guy and bore him a son who would rather make flower chains and not be a warrior and they’re all secretly Christian and anyway, that’s why Rayna hates all men and especially her stepfather. 

It’s ridiculous.  There’s a Christian hermit monk in the tundra because of course there is.  Viktor/Marco is also Christian so there’s that.  Viktor locks Rayna up in a smokehouse to sweeten her temper and she insults everyone and it’s like the baddest badass in Viktor’s cohort or village or clan or whatever the fuck the proper collective noun is (don’t worry, Fabio doesn’t know, either) has never been called a shriveled dick before, the way he acts.  Like, seriously. 

But it’s all a lot of Slap Slap Kiss, because Viktor’s like “I have loved you in another life!” and Rayna’s all “I would like to have the sexytimes, but I Have Principles, Dammit and those Principals are that I hate all Montagues Vikings as I hate hell and thee!” and it’s pretty boring, because we have seen all of this before but better executed.  She only agrees to marry him when her idiot brother Ragar shows up with one other dude to “rescue” her and they get caught. 

Eventually, Viktor sends them off to Loire because…. Ragar wanted to see where his mother came from or something stupid.  Wolfgard the Bad Guy takes a dim view of this and ramps up the feud and is stupid and Rayna has plotted defenses around Viktor’s village like putting wild boars and snakes into lava floe pits and Wolgan’s stupid as fuck henchmen stupidly fall in. 

Oh, Rayna gets pregnant superfast, too, of course.  Viktor takes a page from Catherine Coulter and figures it out before she does, but he at least isn’t the one to tell Rayna.  She figures it out on her own and then he’s just smugly all “I know!” when she tells him.

UGH.

Anyway, Rayna wants to go home to Loire, and Viktor stupidly (it’s like he’s never seen any time travel movies ever.  YOU’RE A FUCKING MOVIE STAR FOR GOD’S SAKE) tells all of his men about “Futuregard” and instead of doing the reasonable thing, which is to declare him to be mentally unstable and not a whole man and by Norse Law, unfit to rule and then kill him, they FUCKING EAT IT UP.

UGH.

So then, in middle of all this crap, the Plot shows up in the form of Rayna’s previously thought dead baby brother.  He was supposed to have been exposed in Loire because he had six toes (thus making it easy to prove that he was who he said he was- he just needs to take off his stinky goddamn boot) (which he does a lot) but some Convenient Poor Farmers were on hand to raise him and once he was old enough, he took his rightful place as the Prince of Loire.  Ragar found him, and married a Loire-ian girl named Cutie (okay Mingon).  (SERIOUSLY THIS OFF STAGE CHARACTER IS NAMED MINGON.) (Her friends call her Filet.) (not really BUT THEY SHOULD)  And Alain is there to pout, say “oui” a lot, take off his boot and tell Rayna that she deserves better than to be married to a dirty awful Viking.

….

She’s pregnant out to here but she’s supposed to drop everything to hop a boat to Loire.

I can’t even.  I have lost the ability to can.

Oh, also Rayna is feeling frisky (or horny, as Viktor has been teaching her modern slang) but Viktor won’t fuck her because of the germs on his dick. 

Seriously, this is an actual conversation.

Then Alain convinces Rayna that she needs to go back to Loire RIGHT NOW because the bad guy isn’t going to stop his whole war thing, and Rayna hops on Alain’s boat even though she is 9 months and 57 minutes pregnant.  Wolfgard attacks, Viktor fights him off and while Rayna goes into labor, and then the deus ex machina fucking shows up in the form as a volcano erupting out of the sea.

So everyone stops what they are doing because a motherfucking volcano erupting out of the sea is the gods' way of saying “Holy fuck, you assholes.  KNOCK THIS SHIT OFF.”

And Rayna makes to shore in time to birth the kid right on the beach and they all live happily ever after and Viktor builds them a lovely little A-frame chalet with a breezeway and possibly a hot tub.

What the FUCK. 

So there are many problems here.  Many, many, many.  The first being that it is boring. There’s nothing I care about at stake here.  I don’t care about Viktor/Marco, because he’s a sanctimonious ASS who manages to fuck up all the time travel rules.  He’s SO SURE that he is right with his Christianity and his “omg your cholesterol!” bullshit and I kind of hate him.  Rayna is either raging at the world, or horny as hell, or both, and when she’s not those things she’s basically cardboard. 

Wolfgard is also cardboard.  He plots for the sake of plotting, he cackles, and rages at his minions when they fuck up.  He hated Rayna but allowed her to be one of his warriors, but hated her a LOT and then gets all pissy when she seems happy with Viktor?  I don’t even know. 

The dialogue was awful, and trying too hard to be old timey.  It’s ridiculous.  We also are treated to five billion examples of Viktor using modern slang and people being perplexed by it. Jo Bourne can write in dialect, and Fabio and his ghostwriter cannot.

Look, we all know Fabio used a ghostwritier.  Fabio did not write this shit.  But this is something someone wrote thinking Fabio would like it enough to want to put his name on it.  Viktor reads some of like the kind of character a man thinks women would like- he’s sensitive, controlling, just wants to settle down, just a bit of an alphole, domineering in bed, and NONE OF THOSE THINGS GO TOGETHER WITH ANY COHERENCY.  People are complex, I get that. But there’s still a coherent throughline to anyone’s self, right?  Certainly in a book character, you need coherency.  Viktor has none.

Well, his dick is always pretty big.  He’s got a little consistency.

And finally, this book has no point.  Marco gets transported back in time where he totally fucks with the time stream and builds his modern a-frame house and goes into total fucking-with-the-timestream mode.  And there’s NO discussion about what happened to Marco in the modern day.  Is he dead?  Is this a hallucinatory dream?  WHY ARE THERE HORNED HELMETS IN THE CHAPTER HEADINGS?

Oh my god, this was so awful.  This was a super awkward chapter of our genre’s history.  Super.  Awkward.  It's not even entertaining enough in it's WTFery to warrant an F+.


This book is available used from Amazon | BN | Alibris | Possibly Your Local Library.

Categorized:

Ranty McRant

Comments are Closed

  1. Anony Miss says:

    I would listen to Gilbert Gottfried reading this book… or just this review…

  2. Sasha says:

    I’m having major surgery tomorrow and was just sitting here feeling miserablely sick and sorry for myself.  Your review was just what the dr. ordered, thanks I needed a laugh, like bad.  Extra points for your uncles Mpls. adventures:)  I might be tempted to read this just for the heck of it during my recovery but in a drug induced state it sounds like I might throw my Nook against the wall and that would probably be bad…

  3. Beccah W. says:

    Too funny! I actually want to read it just so I can point and laugh. If I do I’ll certainly be thinking about this review the whole time.

  4. EK Garrigan says:

    I landed in the hospital for a couple days after a car accident (all is well now) and this is the book my friends brought me to read while I was recovering.

    Laughter truly is the best medicine. This review is spot on.

  5. Lori says:

    Thank you. An excellent hump day case of the giggles.

  6. Jane Lovering says:

    Brilliant.  Also, did ‘Fabio’ refer to the region of France as ‘Loire’?  Because it’s actually ‘The Loire’ – being a region and not an actual, you know, place, as such.  If it was ‘Fabio’ (or Fake Fabio as his ghostwriter should be known), then it’s just, plain, wrong.

    If, on the other hand, RedHeadedGirl, it is your naming…name away.  The French will learn to deal with it.  They’d better.

  7. Honestly, I don’t remember if the article was there or not.  Probably not.  It seems unlikely. 

  8. Well, Sasha, on the plus side (for your Nook), there’s no e-book versions of any of Fabio’s books.  So getting a 1 cent used copy would be safer for all involved.

    I’m not convinced that would help your healing, though!

  9. Beccah W. says:

    What’s really scary is that I just went on Amazon to read more about “Fabio’s” books…and found that there are quite a few raving reviews out there! Some people really liked these books!

    The funniest to me are the reviews for “Comanche” which go on and on about the racial issues and feminism, etc addressed in the story. Apparently Fabio doesn’t just stop at helping people address their cholesterol crisis.

    So somewhere out there is a person – a WOMAN – who honestly thinks a book “written” by Fabio is helping advance out society. *shudder*

  10. Karenmc says:

    First, Starbucks gave me my drink for free because the drive-up window line was so slow, then I read this review. My Wednesday is proving to be more worthwhile than I could have imagined.

  11. katherinelynn_04 says:

    “Also, Scandahoovians can fucking hold their booze.  Ask my great and great-great uncles about that.  They trashed the West Bank in Minneapolis many times throughout their lives.  Like good Vikings.”

    LOL!

  12. Oh god.  I do have Commanche, now I guess I really do have to read it.  AUGH.

  13. ridiculousspider says:

    Just out of curiosity, did Marco/Viktor speak the language of the time he was transported back to?  Was the potential language barrier even addressed?

    LOL.  Worrying about cholesterol?  I’d be more worried about not starving to death, staying warm, and not getting killed in battle. 

    Awesome review as usual.  😀

  14. No, it wasn’t addressed! What ever forces sent him back in time gave him a Babel Fish or the Translator Microbs from Farscape or a TARDIS with the universal translator or something, and I don’t recall him ever going “Huh, I wonder how it is I can udnerstand these people!”

    He’s pretty stupid, though. 

  15. Rosa E. says:

    . . . well, I know what I’m giving my brother for Christmas.

  16. Lyra Archer says:

    I’m not sure if this is greater than, less than or equal to the WTFery of a Very Virile Viking, but it sounds like they’re cousins by the same backwoods clan.

    Also seriously? He’s all about historical accuracy and he can’t work out why those people need all those calories? I mean pillaging has got to be worth at least 20 Weight Watcher points.

  17. All I got to say is, if I were going to show up at RWA, I’d TOTALLY want to see dramatic readings of this in the hotel bar. Complete with drinking game rules.


    ….
    …..

    On the other hand, that might wipe out the entire stock of the hotel bar.

  18. Pickwick411 says:

    Hahaha amazing! I love your reviews! I hope you get your hands on many more Fabios in the future (did that come out wrong?) and live to tell the tale.

    Btw, I think your review needs just one more round of proof reading (either that or my laptop is adding words to it at will). Sorry for pointing it out, but I have this (horribly distracting) habit of reading mistakes over and over again till they’re etched in my mind :-/

  19. Susan D says:

    RHG-Your reviews are always better than these books ever could be – thanks for entertaining us! I wonder….could the cholesterol thing be a subtle push for “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” – wasn’t her the spokesman for them about the same time?

  20. Katie Graham says:

    I am confused. Why did his penis have germs on it? And didn’t it have germs on it when he knocked her up?

  21. @Susan D: Maybe?  I hadn’t consdiered that angle.  But that would be REALLY subtle and subtle is not something that happens in this book.  Ever. 

    As for the Penis Germs, she wants to have sex, and he tells ehr no, because they don’t want there to be germs in the birth canal to infect the baby. 

    Seriously, that’s what he says.

  22. ppyajunebug says:

    Pls write all reviews ever kthxbai.

    I have this image of Fabio bent over a desk attempting to write a sex scene. He gets frustrated, flips his hair back and exclaims “ACK! I cannot do it! I know- he will refuse her because of ze germs!”

    Or he emailed that to his ghostwriter. But definitely one of the two.

  23. Amanda says:

    Wow, I’ve seen these Fabio romances at the library where I work, but I never considered what gems they’d be. Thanks for the hilarious and enlightening review! Viktor is such a lame, lazy Viking name it makes my non-Viking blood boil. And Marco/Viktor’s religious issues sound particularly disturbing—I think Fabio needs a dose of the Prime Directive, stat!

    As a side note, what ever happened to Fabio? Did he retire to his own plush A-frame house on some sunny beach somewhere? Start a harem of female fans to feed him grapes and discuss the ills of society, such as unsafe sex, paganism, and fatty foods?

    Also, it’s Mignon, right? Or did Fabio get that wrong too? 🙂

  24. No, no, that was me.  I was so pissed off I couldn’t remember how to spell it, clearly.

  25. Brewing is an efficient way of preserving the caloric value of fruit and grain, as well making easier those long dark knights, er, nights. Laugh out loud funny, ReadHeadedGirl. Thank you for saving my from this.

  26. Susan D says:

    Oops…typing too fast. That should be: “wasn’t he their spokesman….”

  27. Beccah W. says:

    This made me think of genital warts 🙁

  28. Susan D says:

    Amanda – he turned up in the Old Spice viral video campaign last year as a challenger to be the “New Old Spice Guy”. He lost – no surprise, Isaiah Mustafa is smokin’ hot. But now maybe he’s back in his A-frame on the beach…..

  29. Sandypo says:

    Your review was hysterical. I want you to review everything from now on! Honestly, that was probably my very best laugh of the week.  Too funny! Bravo Redheadedgirl, I bow to you.

  30. tikaanidog says:

    “(Her friends call her Filet.) ” BEST. LINE. EVAR! HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Looove your reviews! 🙂

  31. Lu says:

    Lol. Always a pleasure reading your reviews.

  32. Lily says:

    Wow 🙂 fantastic review. I was thinking making a drinking game everytime I saw you curse the character/writer/weird plot devices etc.
    RedHeadedGirl, you rock!

  33. That’s a terrible idea.  Someone would die of alcohol poisoning.

  34. Oh, Redheadedgirl, I’ve missed you so. I’m sitting at work with raging migraine and trying to make sense of Semantic Features of Similarity and Children’s Strategies for Identifying Relevant Information in Mathematical Story Problems. I kept reading the same page again and again, and finally I popped over here to SBTB for a little mental break. Your hilarious review makes it all better. The only problem is that your review was so funny that I now want to read the book!

    If you’re ever in western Oregon, we must have drinks.

  35. Jinniblack says:

    Eugenia Riley and Wendy Corsi Staub are the co(ghost) writers.  I know Wendy has written a zillion books for Avon and assume that this was done to appease her masters.  Riley, I don’t know.

  36. MissB2U says:

    Only if there are Vikings present!

  37. The Other Susan says:

    Yay, RedHeadedGirl is back!  Thanks for taking another one for the team!

  38. Nabpaw says:

    I noticed the typos too and they bugged the crap out of me!  Good review otherwise though.

  39. SB Sarah says:

    Kick ass and take names in your surgery, Sasha!

  40. cleo says:

    Awesome review.  I needed the laugh.  I think I picked up a book “written” by Fabio back in the day – all I remember about it is that breasts were called “globes of flesh.”  And that was enough for me.

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