castledoom.com

[JuntaJoe]

So I'm musing the scifi section of the bookstore and becoming discouraged. I need a new book about every 3 or 4 days. I have about 50 authors I watch for and they struggle to keep up with my appetite. Mostly I just grimace through all the fantasy crap hoping to find the rare scifi gem I haven't seen yet.

Finding nothing, I start a second search. There are some authors like Koontz and Crichton that are really just mainstream adventure ficton that get hidden on the scifi/fantasy shelves from time to time. So a second search with loose parameters might grab something.

An then I come across Neverwhere. I read the back cover....

Quote: Richard Mayhew is a plain man with a good heart--and an ordinary life that is changed forever on a day he stops to help a girl he finds bleeding on a London sidewalk. From that moment forward he is propelled into a world he never dreamed existed--a dark subculture flourishing in abandoned subway stations and sewer tunnels below the city--a world far stranger and more dangerous than the only one he's ever known....

Hmmm, fish out of water classic plotline. Thugs and grimy people scaring the hapless hero. Not exactly original.

But I'm getting desperate and my only other options are dragon and sword books.


So I pony up the 8 smackers and hope for the best.


As you've guessed by now, I wouldn't bother with a review for a crappy or even average book.

It was terrific! It needs a movie, some sequels, and a video game!

The verbal imagery is astounding. The action for our hapless character reaches plausibility in a supremely implausable world. And oh, what a world it is! A world where time is irrelevant to your lifespan, but rests solely on your skill and power. The strong rules the weak with absolute power while the cunning and supernatural slides between the two groups. Were the feral animals of urbanity, rats, crows, and pidgeons are participating members and hold their own domains and powers. A place where light isn't your friend and the dark more deadly. Where your allies are almost as dangerous as your enemies. Where your life isn't worth a plug nickel if you can't defend it or have something they want.

And a story that wraps up perfectly with the very last word. The kind of story that makes you grin with no one around when you hit the last word at 3am.

This book is worth far more than what I paid.


Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, ISBN 0-380-78901-9

[Batchman]

And he fails to mention that it, and most of what Gamien writes, is fantasy.

Not D&D-style fantasy, but still fantasy.

And film-wise, the BBC has already produced a series or mini-series, depending on how you want to look at it, of Neverwhere.

('s a fun book ... I've read it.)

[JuntaJoe]

So it's fantasy. It's not standard fantasy. 99% of the fantasy out there is D&D crap. I'd be more forgiving of the genre if it weren't so cookie cutter. I was a D&D dungeon master back before computers went into the homes. I've had my full measure of imagining swordsmen, dragons, and wizards. My brain can already imagine every permutation. I'll watch the stuff in a pc game or video as I'm not required to build the setting in my head.

As for letting the BBC produce something like this, forget it. Cardboard and exotic uses for common industrial garbage gets lame fast. This work needs serious Lucas/Dreamworks mojo to treat that book imagery properly.