Destroyer of Worlds

Some books take effort to get into: you want to give up, but you keep at it and your perseverance is rewarded. This is not that kind of book. It's more the opposite: starts off promising, then gets increasingly tiresome as it goes on. The writing is not memorable, the dialog clumsy, the stories flat and formulaic: introduce our heroes; oh no, a magical threat; heroes scramble to battle the threat, all the while facing racist harassment from muggles; a magical solution is found, yay. Repeat.

And yes, stories. The book boldly proclaims itself "A Novel" on the cover: it's not. It's just one short story after another, each usually with a small subset of characters drawn from a standard cast, taking place in chronological order but with little real connection to each other. I'm told by a friend that there's a TV show with this same name, but I don't know which came first: is this a "novelization" of the TV show? If the book came first, it was pretty blatantly written with TV in mind: each story would make a short, standalone, forgettable episode.

There's no tension, no real consistency. The "magic" is pure handwaving every time, different in each story but without any pretense to any set of rules: more like, hey, let me come up with random ideas, and presto, we have FTL travel, transmogrification, murdering dolls, secret chambers, each of them with their own unique convenient brand-new out-of-the-blue magical solution just in time for the happy end of the episode. I mean story. Oh, and racism is bad (frowny face).

So, meh. Please remember that two Goodreads stars doesn't mean bad, it means "ok"—and that's what it feels like. If I'd stopped reading after the first two stories, I might've considered four... but I didn't stop reading.

If there were a [wrinkles nose] emoji I would use it here. Granted, it was going to be hard for any novel to follow Invisible Man but it took me a considerable effort to readjust my expectations as I was reading this one. It's basically fluff. Nevermind the high pedigree implied by the upcoming HBO show. I'm most looking forward to seeing how they change this novel to raise it up to meet that premium cable channel's standards. This is, in fact, a very good premise done dirty with poor prose and shallow characters.

There were other aspects of the novel that made me a little uncomfortable. I guess it's fine but the racism was borderline cartoonish, which, coming off of Ellison, felt wrong. That this was a linked series of short stories made the project feel more like a pitch for a TV series (which it initially was) than an artistic choice (which is probably unfair). The Lovecraftian horrors were mild so if anyone were looking for a scare they wouldn't find one here.

Taken on its own terms this novel is fine: a cool premise that breezes by. I guess I really wanted to stick it to Lovecraft. Really turn him on his head so that the repugnant, racist father of mystical horror would be completely appropriated by the victims of his own hateful ideas (such an ironic horror for the man himself). Well this ain't it. This book isn't interested in that kind of sophistication.