Leslie Greenwood

“The Magic of a Great Premise and the Delusion of Insufficient Rewrites”

A great fantasy premise set in a world not unlike Dungeons and Dragons let down by poor execution which ultimately takes you nowhere for no particular reason.

Karnest Connel is a down on his luck farmer in a backwater village on the edge of an empire full of danger. You can tell it is full of danger because there are adventurers everywhere. So many that they may, in fact, constitute a plague of Adventurers. When one such group, composed of adventurers of the ham-fisted type, blow through town, it is inevitable that Karnest will lose everything of what little he has left. See, his kid died and his wife left him for an adventuring bard because Karnest just wasn’t fun anymore.

With the loss of his farm, all Karnest is interested in is revenge. Except, he also takes a great interest in the bottom of a beer mug at the local tavern and getting to it as often as he can. So much so that he never really gets started on the whole revenge thing until one evening when the tavern door bangs open and an Arch Mage falls in, literally dead on his face.

Well, it’s all a bit much for the drunken Karnest to take in given his present state, but he decides that it wouldn’t hurt to pick the newly made corpse’s pockets and make off with any money he might have about his person because, after all, arch mages count as adventurers and maybe he can buy his farm back into existence.

Of course, things quickly get out of hand and Karnest equally quickly finds himself in possession of not only the mage’s money, but his bigger-on-the-inside coin purse, all its many potions, the mage’s wardrobe, and his staff. Named Stave. Because it is intelligent, you see. Or so it is claimed.

As set ups go, this is pretty interesting. Karnest knows nothing at all about magic and Stave is very little help, frequently and conveniently falling asleep just when he would be most useful. And, since Karnest sees an opportunity to get repaid for his losses when he discovers a note outlining the Arch Mage’s current mission to train some unruly adventurers for a princely sum of money, ‘most useful’ is practically all the time.

You can sort of see the shape of the story. The premise is intriguing. You want to know how this loser sort of guy is going to pull off being an Arch Mage when all he’s got is a magic stick that is as thick as two short planks. And some potions. And some magic robes with magic enchantments that make it so he can’t be hurt. And doesn’t get tired. And is comfortable at all times. Here is where the problems with the storytelling start in.

He encounters no trouble getting to the city. Has no trouble finding the adventurers guild and is whisked straight in to a meeting where he is given more gold than originally promised for taking on the Arch Mage’s mission with no problems at all.

No one really questions Karnest or reacts to his inability to answer basic questions or his odd behavior. In fact, most of the trouble Karnest faces—that is, actually has to deal with—is entirely minor and inconsequential stemming from his own internal monologue or his occasionally dickey stomach in moments of stress.

No one questions why they have to explain basic magic knowledge to an Arch Mage, why he never actually seems to know what he is doing, or even why it is that he doesn’t seem to do much actual magic. The world is just sort of smoothed over for Karnest and his pack of miscreant adventurers as they cruise along mostly not having any adventures at all. Even meeting one of the adventurers that burned his farm to the ground doesn’t cause more than the merest of social faux pas.

And that is, essentially, one of the biggest problems with this book. Nothing really matters. We’re not playing for any stakes. Anything that could, or even should, be major obstacles to the successful carrying out of the ruse, just isn’t. They’re written away as if someone knew there should be problems to overcome, but didn’t know the characters in the book should be the ones overcoming them. Even the stakes you want to be stakes aren’t really stakes because, well, they just aren’t. It would be too inconvenient to have any. They’re introduced in one sentence and written off two sentences later and nobody ever really deals with anything that matters.

Even the best scene in the book has this problem. Two characters who have taken a great dislike to each other suddenly discover that they share a similar situation in their lives that might serve to bond them together if they could just take the time to come together on it. This common thread is introduced in one paragraph while on the road and in that moment you’ll say to yourself, “Ah-ha! Here is the heart of the book. This is what it has all been about and for. At last there are things that matter here.” And then a couple paragraphs later it’s done and over and fine. Never, ever explored further. No depth is given to it, no exploration of what it might mean. It’s just a thing that momentarily happened and, while it does serve to lighten the mood between the two, even the characters never want to talk about it again. So it goes with everything of consequence in this book. By the time you get to the end, every difficulty has been dealt with by a wave of the proverbial hand.

But, you could argue that there is a reason for this. See, the book is holding its cards very close to its chest. So close that it forgets to do things like foreshadowing, or dropping hints, or even subtly suggesting that anything other than what is happening in front of your eyes is anything more than what is happening in front of your eyes.

And then, suddenly, the last ten chapters just explode in improbably deep and complex plots and machinations that come from literally nowhere. It’s hard to even call them twists because they’re just so poorly executed that it is almost like the ending of an entirely different and far more interesting book than the one you’ve been reading for the last 30 chapters. They don’t fit with the story or the characters as they have been established up to that point. It’s a bolt from the blue and it makes no sense. They just get plopped in and you’re expected to believe that this quivering mass of plot has been there all along seething away. Unless you think that something so glibly executed by such poorly developed characters explains why the whole rest of the novel has had all the difficult bits sanded off, that is. I don’t, but you might.

The other major problems with the book is it’s lack of style, flow, and editing. This novel is not an uncorrected proof. It’s not marked as such and is currently actively available and for sale at all the usual places. But I was almost convinced this was an AI generated book because it read so poorly from beginning to end. Sentences are awkwardly written, pronouns underused, and the language stilted and clunky. Take, for example, this selection that occurs about two thirds of the way through the novel:

“I am just going to go into the water,” holly said. They were close to shore, after all. Her feet were facing the shore, and she pushed down with her powerful arms, making a leap for the shore.

Set aside, just for a moment, that a character’s name hasn’t been capitalized (that’s how it appears in this section of text) focus instead on the overuse of the word shore. That’s three shores in a row. Surely the passage could be restructured and rewritten to more effectively describe the action without causing the word ‘shore’ to take over the paragraph. I can think of at least three. Problems like this occur all over the book and basic proofreading errors, like missing the capitalization of the character name, happen more often than not. At more than one point houses are described as having wooden coverings over the windows. You and I know them as shutters, but somehow the word ‘shudder’ has been allowed to creep in at least twice and go unchallenged, making the windows almost as uncomfortable as the reader. There should have been more editing to correct errors and more rewriting to improve style, tone, flow, and story done before this book went to press.

Which highlights my overall impressions of The Magic of Delusion. I love the premise. I’m very interested in the premise. I’m even interested in the story that potentially could come from such a premise. I want to explore it and get to know the characters better. But the book just doesn’t allow me to do that. There are more obstacles to the reader’s enjoyment of the book than there are to the character’s adventure. I wanted to be pulled along by this story of a farmer pretending to be more than he is, but ultimately I had a harder time getting to the end than the characters did.… (mehr)