There’s a Party Somewhere, and Everyone is There

Total Party Kill

By Craig Francis Power
Breakwater Books
Available for pre-order here | out October 11 2024 |  $22.95

Reviewed by Drew Brown

“Who am I to judge a grown man for pretending to be someone other than himself, when the self in question is a monster and a loser?” (Craig Francis Power, “Princes of the Apocalypse”)

It’s hard work being playful. Play can only occur in conditions of safety: I have to be confident that you won’t hurt me, and that I won’t hurt you, and that we’re free to do something utterly, wondrously pointless just for the pleasure and joy of it. Play takes curiosity and imagination, openness and vulnerability, a little bit of healthy aggression and enough courage to stretch beyond yourself. It comes naturally to us as children but the world has a tendency to grind it out of us—or train us to beat it out of ourselves and each other. Retaining or recovering a childlike capacity for play as we grow up is a deadly serious business.

Craig Francis Power is well-versed in the work of playing around, and he’s putting it to good use. Total Party Kill—his first collection of poetry—takes us on a hero’s journey from addiction to recovery through the medium of Dungeons & Dragons. 

It’s a heavy concept that could easily get unwieldy, but Power deploys it as deftly as a halfling rogue rolling 20 on a dexterity check. He has a genuine gift for wordplay, weaved like a spell from the jump: “I drop down first, seeing through the dark. It’s my role in this party—drinking myself to death. Grasping vines, the undergrowth, the broken earth: difficult terrain. The trauma of generations distilled into my character, a sheet of paper” (“Tomb of Annihilation”).

In Power’s hands the metaphorical register of “the world’s greatest role-playing game” is loaded down with double, triple, quadruple entendres; it rewards re-reading many times. Its fantasy setting cuts to deep truths that mere realism cannot capture. A party of adventurers follows an “arcane map of purple ink” chasing Tiamat, dread queen of dragons, whose tantalizing hoard of treasures is forever just out of reach. Power takes us through dark steaming jungles and frozen castle spires, jagged sea cliffs and glittering mountain peaks, dreary dives and ruined relationships worn down by a century of familial pain.

A deathless vampire looms brooding in a castle, blasting The Cure, as our narrator wonders “how lonely it must be to live forever, abstinent of sun or running water, of gods or mirrors, without a shadow, waiting for an invite that will never come?” (“Curse of Strahd”). A hydra sleeps within a “1980s nostalgia nightmare” dreaming of “nothing other than drugs and drinking, risky sex, freedom from the tyranny of work, and death to its enemies, who are multitude and ready, and practised and precise in the service of their lords” (“Hunt for the Thessalhydra”). Hordes of orcs—once-noble elves whose devotion to a rage-filled One-Eyed God twisted them beyond recognition—pack the bars of a “blasted rock beset by vicious tides… For here this dive is swarmed by creatures freshly crawled out of the muck—all of whom I’d like to fuck, or at the very least, to tolerate” (“The Isle of Dread,” a poem lovingly dedicated to “the residents of the island of Newfoundland”).

Power’s slender tome of eldritch lore is funny, moving, and brutally sharp. It is tender and unflinching as it accounts for the damage our adventurer has taken and all the damage he has dished out. This is the core of what makes the collection so compelling: its sustained and productive effort to balance responsibility and grace—acceptance and change—without sliding into self-pity, self-attack, self-importance, or self-righteousness. It is beautiful in its willingness to honestly bare deep ugliness.

Anyone who has reckoned their own moral inventory to take responsibility for the role they play in their own suffering as well as the suffering of others will ache in recognition. The shame and pain confronted in this journey is strong enough to drive even powerful wizards into hiding “beneath the ground, within this tomb, designed with so many deadly traps and tricks to remain alone forever” (“Tomb of Horrors”). What makes our adventurer heroic is that he keeps going.

Unlike a good Dungeons & Dragons campaign, there is no dramatic climax or neat resolution: no dragons are vanquished, no miraculous powers come with levelling up, no rescued princesses profess their undying love. Despite the escapist fantasy promised by sword and sorcery—fame and fortune, potions and powders—in the end “the miracle that happens” is a disenchantment: the breaking of a spell, the renunciation of magical thinking. It’s a quiet Saturday night at home, fully present with yourself and the people you love.

This is the terminus of every hero’s journey: you end where you began, totally transformed but also still the same. No matter how much baggage we bring to the table or how many roles we play or how the dice come up, we can only ever be ourselves. Owning that is the adventure of a lifetime; it’s not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, with Total Party Kill, Craig Francis Power has delivered us a veritable Player’s Handbook.