Ah, gentle reader, I just bought this book from the author at Rublecon, where “just” in this sentence means July 2024. So I have owned it longer than the Ben Wolf books, and I finished the Ben Wolf accumulated over two different trips to Davenport, Iowa, first. But that might be because of my experiences with other Walker books: Down the Road and Back Again (poems based on the television show The Golden Girls), Loot the Bodies (other poetry), and Hang Me If I Stay, Shoot Me If I Run, a short novel.
So: The plot, such as it is, is that a sick young man is taken from his bed to a place called Everland, run by a Boy-God, who is a dark analogue of Peter Pan. The Boy-God, not named, likes to watch the people in Everland, mostly pirates, fight and die with one another. He especially takes issue with a particular pirate whom he allows to succeed and then wrecks his ship. Inland, we have natives. And, periodically, the denizens of the sea rise and slaughter the people in the seaside town, but as Everland is always summer and the people, aside from the battles, don’t age or die, and they tend to forget the previous Reaping when the sea monsters rise. So the boy, who lands with the Everland equivalent of the Lost Boys but doesn’t completely buy in, the one-eyed pirate, and a native girl who kills a seamonster that killed her father team up to kill the Boy-God.
The actual text of the book runs 134 pages, and then the book is padded with 50 pages of behind-the-scenes things. The author did a Kickstarter before producing this book, and I guess it was originally going to be a comic book series–the book contains panel outlines for several issues, incidents which appear in the book–and which might have worked as one-off stories in a series of comics, but integrated into a “novel,” they are threads that go nowhere. One such story is a pirate who goes overboard and is about to drown, but he’s saved by a seamonster whom he thinks is a beautiful mermaid–and it tells about him meeting the monster’s father, and then…. Well, he is killed. Why bring him into the story? I mean, it’s Stephen Kingesque, but this 130-page book shouldn’t have room for such asides–it just pads out a short novella to a longer novella length. The book has some world building, but its depth is pretty shallow for all that. I mean, we get almost a Space Trilogy sort of cosmology, but it’s never really addressed, and some of the characters are built up and do…. not much.
I mean, the setup and material would have made for a longer book, but it’s really just repurposing some material from a proposed comic book to get it out the door. The author is a better writer than Ben Wolf whose books I’ve just read–but the plot is underdeveloped. The book that comes to mind, though, is A Blade So Black by L. L. McKinney just because hers was a modern fantasy twist on Alice in Wonderland and other works by Lewis Carroll. But, again, that book was fully developed as a novel where this was a little underdone.
Actually, I have the sequels or next book in the series from both these authors–The Lion, the Witch, and the Eye by Walker and A Dream So Dark by McKinney. I actually picked up A Dream So Dark from the bookshelves but decided against it for one of my next reads. Who knows where I’ll go with my twee reading themes–to finish the Walker books I own in case he’s back at Rublecon, or maybe to finish the books my son got me for my birthday. Given that I’ve only got a couple of each, perhaps I’ll complete them all before long. Certainly before the Shakespeare I’m working my way through.
