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I just finished Julian May's Conquerors Moon which is a fairly standard fantasy novel which begins the 'Boreal Moon tale' of at least 3 books. Julian May is best known for her science fiction books, of which I read a couple of back in the 80's, so I was intrigued enough to pick them up. The gist of the plot involves a Prince on the England-analogue isle of Blenholme and his machinations to unite the four kingdoms of the isle under his rule. He devises a gambit to sack the capital of a neighboring kingdom which requires the enlisting of a sorceress to provide the cover for the approach. There's magic, sword fights, prophecies, political intrigue, and hints of a larger story. There's some humor - during the coronation of the sorceress's unfortunate brother (her major rival), she disrupts the proceedings with plagues of animals. Overall, about what you'd expect in a fantasy novel and nothing more. Fairly literate and compact (445p) as opposed to a lot of the fantasy juggernauts out there. Chronic Reagan fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Nov 16, 2006 |
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Nov 16, 2006 16:58
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I finished 'Horror: Best of the Year 2006' a new Best Of anthology of short horror fiction. Overall I thought it was pretty average. The one standout story for me was 'The Cape', by Joe Hill. It's a story about a down and out drifter who finds his childhood superhero cape which has more power than just nostalgia. Joe Hill is Stephen King's son and I had heard some buzz about him. I will definitely be looking out for more stuff by him. There were a couple of other decent stories - M. Rickert's 'A Very Little Madness Goes a Long Way' which is a surreal story about the loss of a child, a plague of crows and angels, 'Haeckel's Tale', by Clive Barker, which is the story of a bunch of bunnies as they get forced out of their home and look for a new place to live - (wait that was 'Watership Down', this was another Barker gross out story about sex and death) and 'Real People Slash' by Nick Mamatas which was a somewhat pretentious but funny Lovecraftian tribute.
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Dec 11, 2006 16:48
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I finished the last two books in Julian May's Boreal Moon trilogy, Ironcrown Moon and Sorcerer's Moon. My post on the first book: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?postid=318247520&highlight=#post318247520 Overall, I'm somewhat disappointed in the series. The first book was a decent introduction and I enjoyed it. The second book I thought was very underwhelming. The main reason is that the first 2/3 are a setup of two major events. Both basically happen according happen as expected leading to a complete lack of dramatic tension. The third book was more unpredictable and there were some good set pieces. Also, while I thought the author might leave room for a sequel as I got to the end, she wisely ended the series. One of the good parts of the series is the focus on intrigue and spying. The magic that exists largely consists of abilities that allow intrigue - i.e. scrying, sending messages over long distances, stealth. Much of the plot consists of finding out who knows what, or gambits based upon intelligence. This helps make this somewhat different from the typical 'young hero is chosen one / destined to defeat dark lord' plots that so many fantasy novels follow. The one major thing that I found disappointing as I read each additional book was the adding of standard fantasy tropes. The first book I felt was a fairly unique book with few standard fantasy plot lines or tropes. The second book, however, added elves and the third book added dragons and a variation on the 'take the One Ring to Mount Doom' theme.
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Dec 22, 2006 15:16
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I've been reading the Pratchett 'Discworld' Novels. Just finished Soul Music, and before that Lords and Ladies and Men at Arms. I didn't care for L&L that much (although there were a few good jokes), M@A was great, and SM was pretty good. Taking a break from these for a bit before going on to the next ones. I finished George R R Martin's children's book The Ice Dragon while on the train this morning. From an adult's perspective, it was a decent little fable, and there are some nice illustrations. Overall it seemed somewhat violent for a childrens book (the age listed is for 9-12 years). There's a scene in the book where the main character is watching the wounded from a war go by her home, and GRRM describes the horrific injuries they have, from burns to missing limbs. There's also a battle scene toward the end, which seemed more like 'fantasy' violence. It's a little hard for me to remember what it was like to be 9 years old, but to me the scene with the wounded soldiers would be very disturbing to someone that old. Started on Neil Gaiman's Coraline after finishing The Ice Dragon. This is again a YA adult book. So far it seems to be hitting all of the Gaiman themes: Plucky girl character, a strange world hidden just under the surface of things, weird character names like Ms. Forcible, and disturbing imagery. Oh yeah, and there's drawings by Dave McKean. Overall, I'm enjoying it so far, and I'd imagine someone in the 9-12 year range would too, if they enjoyed a creepier sort of story. Also in the past few weeks I read the latest couple of issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine. The standout story for me was 'Fool' by John Morressy. It's a fantasy where the main character is an ugly child who is gotten rid of as a child and the story of how he comes to a position of power as a fool in a rich lord's household, using his wits and secret power. What's great about the story is Morressy's exploring of the darkness of humanity, and what lengths people go through to survive in a world that would throw them away. I recently (in the past couple of years) became a fan of Mr. Morressy and it was a shame to hear that he passed away this past year. He's written some lightweight humorous fantasy stories (the Kedrigern stories), but the ones that really struck a chord with me were the ones where he explored the darker areas of the human heart. One of the stories I had as an audiobook 'The Resurrection of Fortunato', which is the story of what happens AFTER the end of Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado'. It was given a great reading by Harlan Ellison, which helped leave a good impression with me. John Morressy R.I.P. 
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Jan 18, 2007 15:54
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I just finished Charles Stross' The Atrocity Archives and its sequel The Jennifer Morgue. I liked TAA quite a bit. In the acknowledgements, Stross spells out what you are in for - HP Lovecraftian horror mixed with Neal Stephenson geekiness in a Len Deighton spy thriller. Overall the tone was light, and once the story started moving (it took a while), there was some good action and enjoyable sequences. My main problem with the books is Stross bogs you down with reams of incomprehensible technobabble. If you can get past that, there is an interesting story there. TJM was a bit more of the same, and the one thing that was glaring about it was the freaky demon sex, which there was none of in the first book - it was distracting and frankly, weird. TJM is also written more in a pure parody style, of James Bond novels in particular. The first book, while humorous, seemed to take its world more seriously. Chronic Reagan fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Feb 9, 2007 |
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Feb 2, 2007 14:45
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F. Paul Wilson's The Keep - A somewhat pulpy horror novel set in the middle of WWII in Romania. That probably gives you enough to go on to figure out what the book is about - Nazis and Vampires. Pleasantly enough, there's a bit of a twist and the book keeps you guessing somewhat until the end. Overall, a fun bit of fluff.
Chronic Reagan fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Feb 9, 2007 |
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Feb 9, 2007 18:14
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Stephen Donaldson's 'The Gap Cycle' has been pimped many times by people on the forums, so I figured I would give it a try. I'm almost done with the first book in the series The Gap into Conflict: The Real Story. It sucks. And I won't be reading the rest of the series. Thankfully, I got it from the library and did not spend any money on this. This is a 200 page adolescent rape fantasy from Mr. Stephen 'I love rape' Donaldson masquerading as 'space opera'. There are three characters, all of them cardboard. Evil space pirate, Woman space cop/rape object, and 'Good' space pirate. There's a germ of an interesting idea here - mankind has developed a mode of space travel (the gap drive), which in one case out of a hundred, can drive someone insane. Unfortunately, the author uses this idea as a device to put the female protagonist under the control of an evil space pirate who loves rape. There's some overwrought language, a gimmicky story telling method - retelling the same story several times to get 'The Real Story', and when it comes down to it, very little action. Except the rapes. Apparently, in the afterword (which I haven't read just yet), the author compares himself to Wagner and was attempting to recreate the Ring cycle in space. Color me unimpressed. I remember reading the Thomas Covenant books as a teenager, and liking them. With the endless rape in this book, and the singular act in the Covenant books, Mr. Donaldson would appear to have a pathological obsession. It makes me wonder what I would think if I re-read the Covenant books as an adult.
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May 30, 2007 16:44
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bobservo posted:The Regulators (1996) By Stephen King Speaking of mediocre horror novels, I just finished reading The Grave (1979) by Charles L. Grant. Every once in a while I read something from a while ago, and it's really amazing how much has changed in the world even from 25 years ago. The last book like this I read was 'Heat' by Ed McBain, a police procedural from the early eighties, which was interesting in the sense that cell phones were not in common use yet and how that shaped the actions of the characters. In the case of 'The Grave', the main character, Josh Miller, runs a business finding things, for example old manuscripts or, the thing which sets events in motion in the book, an old plow. In today's world there's no way someone in a small town could run a self-sustaining business doing this. People looking for weird items would turn to ebay or websites specializing in the types of things they were looking for. In the book, there's also a lot of calling people and them not answering, being before answering machines and cell phones became common. I read Charles Grant's wikipedia entry this morning, which said he self described what he wrote as 'quiet horror' which I guess would be another way of saying not much happens for the majority of the book. Basically for the first 3/4 of the book Miller runs around and has a couple of vaguely disquieting things happen to him, and it's not until the last quarter that it becomes clear that there is some supernatural evil at work. I couldn't really buy into the main character at all. For someone supposedly with a knack for finding things, his tactic for finding the aforementioned plow is wandering around fields in town, which just seems ridiculous. A more likely way to find it would have been to contact museums or county fairs or antique shops or whatever, but the author needed the character wandering around in fields to find 'The Grave' of the title (although 'The Graveyard' would have been a better title). Additionally, the main character has a visceral fear of wasps after suffering a wasp attack as a child. As someone who actually suffered a wasp attack as a child, and who doesn't curl up into a fetal position everytime I see one, I had a hard time buying into this character flaw. The only thing that this book had going for it was it's length. At only 217 pages, it's over quickly. It used to be that that was the length of a novel, which is another sign of the times it was written in. Also, I either picked this up from a pile of books that someone was giving away, or I maybe spent 50 cents on it at the library sale (can't remember exactly), so I probably got my money's worth. The book is a part of longer sequence of books set in the same fictional town, so maybe there is some additional depth going on (but I doubt it). The wiki entry also mentioned that Grant won the World Fantasy Award, which is the most prestigious of the genre awards, as well as a couple of other awards, so either he wrote some better books or the WFA's have lower standards than I thought. EDIT: I just was thinking I had read something else by him, and sure enough I had listened to a story of his on audiobook, a story called "Coin of the Realm" which wasn't too bad, if nothing special. It's the story of a tollway operator whose toll booth happens to also collect tolls for those on their final journey... Chronic Reagan fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Aug 29, 2007 |
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Aug 28, 2007 16:13
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imnotinsane posted:Just finished Metal Swarm by Kevin J Anderson - This book is number 6 and the story still hasn't finished I finished Pratchett's The Fifth Elephant, more City Watch fun. The Watch stories seemed to be the most tightly plotted of the Discworld books and read more like a novel rather than a series of jokes. I'm also about 2/3 of the way through Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn, which is an interesting take on Yet Another Mammoth Fantasy Trilogy, of which this is the first book. The premise spins the traditional story arc of the epic fantasy, (i.e. boy is the Chosen One, goes off to save the world, defeats Dark Lord, everyone lives happily after) by posing the question what if the Chosen One fucks up and becomes corrupted by the Dark Lord? The story is based 1000 years after those events and the world is dreary, ash falling from the sky, plant life barely surviving and the horribly named 'skaa' are enslaved. The Lord Ruler rules the world with an iron fist, whose minions include Inquisitors who are blinded by spikes in their eyes but can still see somehow. There's a nobility who live a separate life, having ballroom dances and think nothing of treating the skaa as chattel. The main character is Vin, a half-breed street urchin and thief who has been using a variety of magic to help the gang she's a part of, and gets pulled into larger events as her powers are discovered. She gets tasked with infiltrating the nobility, which is the part I have the most problem with in the book. I just can't buy this aspect of the story - they pull a My Fair Lady in a few months and get the urchin who's spent her life on the streets and turn her into someone who can pass as a noblewoman. Overall, I think the book is good, if not great. There's an interesting magic system, and the premise of the book makes me want to know what happened to make the world the way it is. There's some good action sequences, and a couple of parts that gave me a chuckle. On the flip side there's the shades of Pygmalion which fell flat, the characters aren't all that deep, and sometimes it all feels a little too pat. Even with the caveats, I'll probably wind up getting the rest of the series once it makes it way to paperback.
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Sep 6, 2007 18:32
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thequiethero posted:I enjoyed the book so much that I purchased a few others from Lem, including 'Solaris' 'His Master's Voice' and 'Fiasco'. I can't wait for them to arrive. I recently read 'Eden' by Lem, and it fell flat for me. A bunch of astronauts crashland on the planet Eden, and explore the environment. The astronauts are only identified by their job, i.e. the Cyberneticist and the Captain. It's a short novel, but it took me a while to get through. A lot of the book is descriptive, and maybe it was a function of the translation, but I found it hard to visualize any of what the author was trying to get across. The first half of the book is mainly exploration of the immediate environments and the second has the crew finding the civilization that lives on Eden. The society they find is strange and dystopic, with factories creating and then destroying strange items in infinite loops, a vault of skeletal remains, and denizens that are intelligent, but debased somehow. I have a feeling that Lem was using this book as a mirror to view the society of Poland or maybe Europe, but whatever point it was he was trying to make was lost on me.
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Sep 12, 2007 22:42
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I also just finished The Road by McCarthy. He doesn't do anything new with the post-apocalyptic genre, from a plot perspective (I got echoes of Lucifer's Hammer and The Stand) but the spare prose, haunting story and utter hopelessness make this book the best example of it.
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Sep 17, 2007 15:22
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I finished The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch and it was a fun read. The book really lives up to the hype. When I look at a 700 page book these days, it's hard for me to work up the enthusiasm to crack the cover, let alone finish it. It doesn't start off like lightning, but by the time the book ended, I was turning pages like crazy, muttering 'Holy poo poo' on occasion, and ordering the sequel... The book is a bit like the Godfather crossed with Pirates of the Carribean. Its focus is the criminal underworld, the fraternity of crime and the power struggles within an analog of Venice, with fantastical elements and larger than life characters. Locke Lamora is the quintessential lovable rogue, a con artist with a heart of gold. Making me like a character who is an amoral thief is a good trick, and his outrageous antics amuse greatly, particularly his final 'gently caress you' to the ruling powers of his city. I enjoyed the book immensely, and would reccomend it for anyone who enjoys fantasy, or enjoyed the Pirates franchise, and even those who enjoy crime fiction and wouldn't normally pick up a fantasy novel. The only caveats I would have would be the somewhat slow start (which is mostly setting the stage and introducing characters), it's overall length (long, but worth it), and the turn for the gory toward the end.
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Sep 25, 2007 17:07
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Rukaya posted:I thought it started off pretty quickly actually, I really like the way Scott Lynch handled the flashbacks to the past to give us a good idea of the background, it was really effective. Rukaya posted:The only thing I have creeping doubts about is what looks to be the main romance
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Sep 26, 2007 14:25
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re: Red Seas Under Red SkiesRukaya posted:I didn't think it was as good as the first one. I'm not sure what it was, but it lacked that something which was there in the scenes in the first one where you saw them all together doing what they do best. I just finished this as well, and I thought it was good, but agree that it was not as good as the first one (The Lies of Locke Lamora), which I think transcended the fantasy genre. It's probably not a spoiler, due to the title and the burning ship on the cover, that a major plotline involves pirates. The first half of the book, however (which I think is stronger) involves Locke and Jean planning a robbery of a casino, and their plans going disasterously wrong, getting them into progressively hotter and hotter water. Once they finally hit the open seas, I thought the plot actually slowed down. There's a fairly strong finish to the book, and some hints of larger events going on in the world, which kept my attention. Overall, it's a pretty solid book which makes it easier to forgive the hackneyed romance plot. I checked out the author's website and he plans this as a series of seven books. I hope he can maintain the quality over a long series like this. I also finished Terry Pratchett's The Truth, which was his take on the newspaper business. It was a strong book, and funny, and the only complaint I have is that he seems to be parodying an idealized version of the news business, rather than what purports to be journalism today. The book was published in 2001, before some of the more egregious recent examples of yellow journalism, so I guess that can be a minor criticism. Considering that he's taken his skewer in previous volumes to religion, racism, government, and war, he seems to hold journalism with more reverence than some of his other topics of parody. Lastly, I finally finished Science Fiction: Best of the Year 2006 which has been sitting half read on my shelf for a while. Overall, it was pretty average, but there were four strong stories in there. Susan Palwick's The Fate of Mice is great, a riff on all the major tropes of mice in fantastic fiction, particularly Flowers for Algernon. It's the closest that a story from this collection comes to potentially being a classic. Wil McCarthy's The Policeman's Daughter is an insane story about a lawyer and client in a legal battle against a younger version of themselves. Mary Rosenblum's Search Engine is a noir take on an idea I'd seen done already (in M. T. Anderson's Feed), in which everyone is tracked constantly by the things they buy in various databases, and how to avoid detection when everything you do is logged. Alastair Reynolds, who is becoming one of my favorite sci fi authors (after only reading two of his stories), closes the book out with Understanding Time and Space which is a story about the end of the human race, enlightenment, and Elton John.
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Oct 10, 2007 15:59
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I finished two Pratchetts, The Last Hero which was novella length with some great illustrations, and was great, and Night Watch which seemed to go back to his style of rambly and plotless with occasional insights or funny bits. The last few Watch books were great, and this one felt like a step down. It also was longer than most of his books, which didn't help. I've been reading all of the Discworld books over the last year or so, and with these last two have now finished 28 of 36. I feel like the end is finally in sight. As a break from all of that Pratchett, I decided to try a light and fluffy thriller, and read Four Blind Mice by James Patterson. In all honesty, this is one of the worst books I've read cover to cover. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but considering that he's had two of his books turned into movies, and another series turned into a TV show, I was hoping for a decent pulpy read. What I got was a pile of crap. The book was written as if for a grade school reading level (especially with the large print, big margins and 4-page chapters), and the characters were wooden, situations unbelievable, and the plot resolution ludicrous. Lastly, I read the Gene Wolfe issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine from earlier in the year, which featured a long novella from Wolfe, Memorare, a couple of essays about Wolfe, and a few other mostly forgettable stories from other authors. Memorare had an interesting premise - someone filming a documentary on tombs built on asteroids and filled with deathtraps - and delivered some of what you'd expect with Wolfe - elipitical storytelling, playing with perception and identity, and a touch of humour. Overall the story didn't grab me, though.
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Oct 24, 2007 15:09
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I just finished The Android's Dream by John Scalzi, who is admittedly riffing on the title of the famous Phil Dick book. Scalzi touches on a theme of Dick's book, what it means to be human, but past that bears no relation. This book is a flat out comedy. Scalzi has an impishly adolescent sense of humor, particularly evident in the first chapter, but it doesn't really get in the way of the story. And it's a fun story. He seems to be taking the classic stories of SF and updating them with some modern ideas, like a mechanic restoring a classic car and then putting an MP3 player in it. The story involves weird aliens, diplomatic snafus, AIs, a pair of Nike Airs to die for, a religion self-admittedly based on a charlatan and sheep. There's some great plot twists and several laugh out loud moments. It's a popcorn book, but like a good bag of popcorn, leaves you with a buttery warmness when you are done. Also read a couple of sf mags recently - the 25th anniversary issue of Interzone, and the May issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Interzone is a beautifully designed magazine with good paper, interesting art, good editorials and reviews, and, at least in this issues' case, mediocre fiction. One story actively made me angry, and the others were not notable, including a story by Alistair Reynolds, who I have previously liked. The story that irritated me was by Hal Duncan, and is a companion piece to a duology of books he has called The Book of All Hours composed of Vellum and Ink. It's clear from reading the story that Duncan really wishes he was born James Joyce. Unfortunately, writing plotless gibberish doesn't automatically infer literary value. At one point prior to reading this mag, I had a copy of Vellum in my hand while in a book store, but put it back, and I thank this issue for giving me the knowledge to avoid Duncan in the future. There was a free download as a bonus for this issue, Journey to the Center of the Earth, which was a fun, lunatic alt-history piece that was better than anything published in the issue. The F&SF issue was very good, with a three very good stories, one good story, and one ambitious story which fell flat for me. The very good stories were The Master Miller's Tale by Ian R MacLeod, which was a melancholy story about technological change leaving whole ways of life outdated, Kaleidosocope by K. D. Wentworth, a light tale about someone's life changing constantly around her, and The Tamarisk Hunter by Paolo Bacigalupi a not unbelievable near-future tale about water-rights in the western US.
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Nov 2, 2007 15:52
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I guess my main problem with it was that he was unabashedly mimicing Joycean stylings, even to the point of using Joyce's mashup word 'riverrun' in a passage of the story that was breaking the fourth wall and describing the story being written. If I wanted to read Joyce, I'd finally crack open that copy of 'A Portrait of the Artist...' that I have sitting on my shelf.
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Nov 2, 2007 19:10
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If immortal pirates, robot zombies and killer snails tickle your interest, 'The Skinner' by Neal Asher might be up your alley. It was good, fun, gory, solid action-sci-fi. It was good enough that I ordered the sequel from the UK, since it hasn't been published here yet.
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Feb 20, 2008 16:21
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I read crap fantasy so you don't have to! A Cavern of Black Ice by J. V. Jones, another over-inflated fantasy novel. I managed to make it only halfway through this one, which, at full length of 770 pages of dense type, is an accomplishment in any case. I think I wanted to enjoy this book, but the text itself kept frustrating me. The elements are there for a decent story - forces at work trying to foment war among barbarian clans and a boy caught between what is right and loyalty to his clan. The text kept getting bogged down in endless awkward metaphors, descriptions of every rock, tree and stream the characters encounter, and constant lists of characters, events and places that had no bearing on what was happening. There weren't any surprises, the villains were cartoony in their evilness, and it was gross having the author describe the main bad guy pissing himself every time he uses magic. The Summoner by Gail Z. Martin, isn't so much bad as derivative and inconsequential. What pushes it over the edge to crap is the terrible editing job. Besides the numerous spelling and punctuation mistakes, the map that's included is printed so poorly that it is illegible, which might make the variable geography of the text understandable. In relative close proximity in the text, a country is described as both north and south of the characters, while being to the east on the map in the front of the book. Part of this might be explained by the fact that this is one of the first books put out by Solaris, the new SF and Fantasy imprint of Black Library (the Warhammer folks), and maybe this a fluke. It does make me wary of getting anything else in the Solaris line. If you are looking for your USDA requirement of Big Fat Fantasy and looking for new authors, I'd recommend Scott Lynch's Gentleman Bastard Sequence for some grade A stuff, and Brandon Sanderson for some solid grade B stuff.
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Feb 21, 2008 16:54
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One other one that I finished recently that I meant to add: Hunter's Run by George R. R. Martin, Daniel Abraham and Gardner Dozois. Martin gets top billing (for marketing reasons, I'm sure), but all three contribute to the book. The way I've explained it to a couple of friends was like the movie 'Midnight Run', and in place of DeNiro and Grodin, you've got a guy and an alien. It's not played for laughs, though, but there are a couple of moments of levity. There's a twist that's set up in the first half that's fairly obvious, possibly intentionally so. After the twist is revealed, the plot goes in unexpected directions, and kept me interested. This is a kind of classic sci-fi tale, with weird aliens and starships, but what gives this an edge over being just more-of-the-same is the characterization. Ramon is ostensibly a prospector, who lives for being alone out in the wilderness. When he comes to town, he gets edgy, drinking too much, getting into barfights, and continual fights with his lady. He's definitely an unsympathetic character, and one of the things the book does is make you give a crap about this guy who doesn't have a whole lot of redeeming qualities. There's some good questions raised by the book, but it's hard to discuss them without giving away the major twist.
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Feb 22, 2008 20:31
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I finished Sean Williams' The Resurrected Man, a sci-fi mystery concerning the possible nefarious purposes teleportation could be put to. The central conceit of the book is the question of whether the same person steps out of a teleportation unit, or if the technology is a 'murdering twinmaker'. The book succeeds as an exploration of this theme and speculation on identity and societal ramifications of teleportation, and partly succeeds as a mystery. The mystery falls apart in the last act, as certain plot aspects are introduced seemingly because that's when the author needed them to occur, and the whodunit is not surprising (although the howdunit and whydunit are interesting enough), almost as if the main characters were deliberately blind to who the villain was. The first couple of chapters are particularly visceral and disorienting, but things get bogged down with a lot of tail chasing. On the tech side, Williams offers some disturbing ideas, like "smoothing functions" which basically are like the difference between lossy vs lossless compression, except you're talking about people vs a Justin Timberlake MP3. It's a relatively early book by this author, and worth checking out, even with the caveats mentioned.
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Jun 1, 2009 16:24
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Mediocre_Dane posted:Last night I finished my dad's copy of The Strain, which was co-written by Chuck Hogan and Mr. Pan's Labyrinth himself, Guillermo Del Toro. I gave up on Tom Lloyd's The Stormcaller part way through. I'm a pretty indiscriminate reader, but this really didn't do it for me. Take psychotic, murderous elves, a suit of liquid metal armor, and a berserker main character who might be the cause of the apocalypse. Sounds interesting? Unfortunately, Lloyd doesn't follow through with his germ of interesting ideas and the result is a big sloppy mess. He makes a lot of goofy mistakes, for example, the main character and his entourage are travelling and stop at a village, where they were "... treated like royalty" - which wouldn't be a big deal except for the fact that they are, in fact, royalty. In another part, one character (a villain?) changes his last name, which is supposed to be a big deal. Several chapters later why this is a big deal is explained. This is also one of those Big Fat Fantasy novels where the world building consists of endless lists of characters and places but the author never gives us any clue as to who they are and why we should care. I'd had good luck with books from this publisher (Pyr) but this was a dud.
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Jun 23, 2009 13:32
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