{"id":1666,"date":"2004-11-01T01:33:00","date_gmt":"2004-11-01T01:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=1666"},"modified":"2018-07-30T16:00:31","modified_gmt":"2018-07-30T21:00:31","slug":"1666","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/11\/01\/1666\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: <i>Highlander: The Element of Fire<\/i> by Jason Henderson (1995)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I bought <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0446602833\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=0446602833&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=stlbrianj-20&#038;linkId=33bffbd0ab00156dfcabc8a990362e43\" target=\"_new\">this <i>paperback<\/i><\/a> (oh, the horror, the horror!) from the local library for a quarter.  Heather and I, although we&#8217;re upper middle class, we&#8217;re the <i>evil<\/i> upper middle class who buy books second hand so the poor starving artists don&#8217;t receive their pittances and from the library for less than the books are worth as sort of another tax break for us.  Muhahaha!<\/p>\n<p>So what you&#8217;ve got here, basically, is a book about immortals that was published ten years ago based on a movie that came out twenty years ago.  Wrap your heads around that.  Man, where was I ten years ago?  Working as an assistant editor at a magazine and moonlighting as a produce clerk, which is where I was when I got the call that my father died.  Man, that&#8217;s a heavy thing to come up from a cheap little multimedia tie-in book like this, but wow, has it been ten years since that syndicated television show aired?  Yessir.<\/p>\n<p>This book, which might have been the first in the series, features the characters from the movie and the series and they run about, lopping off other immortals&#8217; heads, which really means that the immortals are only <i>mostly<\/i> immortal, but if you don&#8217;t know the mythology of the bit before you pick up the book, you probably wouldn&#8217;t pick it up in the first place, even for a quarter.  But I digress&#8230;.don&#8217;t I?<\/p>\n<p>Unlike the first movie and most of the episodes of the television series I saw, this book takes place entirely in the past, with an old immortal who thinks he&#8217;s a god and who doesn&#8217;t understand the rules of the Game, which to be honest I&#8217;m not entirely sure of, either.  But he vows revenge on Duncan and Connor Macleod.  220 pages later, it doesn&#8217;t work so well.<\/p>\n<p>Sorry to ruin it, but the Highlander lives on to fight in other books in the line.  It&#8217;s not a bad junk read, a bit slow in spots, and I sometimes get the sense that the author has done just enough historical research to mention but not really give much sense of place.  But the flaws with the book&#8211;that it&#8217;s written with a definite sense of being adapted from television and lacking in proper setting and mood&#8211;come with the genre.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I bought this paperback (oh, the horror, the horror!) from the local library for a quarter. Heather and I, although we&#8217;re upper middle class, we&#8217;re the evil upper middle class who buy books second hand so the poor starving artists don&#8217;t receive their pittances and from the library for less than the books are worth [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1666"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20862,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1666\/revisions\/20862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}