This third installment is a great anchor to the 4th novel in the series. What has been lighthearted and minimalist now thickens up with a deeper connection to the Titus Crow series. This gives the dreamland stories a really nice push going into the series. Lumley has once again shown that he can tone it down or take it up a notch. His ability with a pen is not to be trifled with or taken lightly. Eldin and Hero are from mature characters. They seem to take nothing seriously. They Drink, kill, and copulate their way out of and into trouble on a regular basis. I guess you can say they are living the dream. No pun intended. It is a travesty that none of this author's works have been adapted into film. But that may be a blessing in disguise because typical Hollywood screenwriters would only politicize and water down the wonderful material that Lumley puts out. Still it would be nice to see his work recognized on a larger scale. ( )

Lumley's Dreamlands series (like almost all of his books) are great escapist fun. Character development is minimal (almost non-existent, really), and there's certainly nothing literary about this book. However, for sheer fun, I found this book (and all his Dreamlands books) hard to beat. Lumley's imagination never ceases to impress. His protagonists are roguishly lovable; his monsters, fiendishly drawn, at least on a physical level. This book (and the series) might be described as a sort of pulp fantasy picaresque. The action is almost non-stop; the settings wonderfully fleshed out and varied, from miasmic swamps to the Mad Moon of the Dreamlands.
In short, nothing serious here, but for a lighthearted romp to escape from dull reality for a few hours, it doesn't get much better than this. ( )

The third of Lumley's dreamlands novels has something of the flavor of superhero team-up to it. In particular, it seems that all of the villains of the dreamlands have formed a Legion of Doom in order to be avenged on its heroes. These books are not big on "character development" anyway (as neither are actual dreams), but this one does even less than its predecessors. As superhero comics eventually became notorious for doing, this novel "kills" its protagonists in a non-final sort of way. I was relieved that a threatened cross-over with Lumley's Titus Crow stories did not manifest!

The division of the book into three 10-chapter parts was pretty artificial, and the plot does not reach any sort of plateau in between them. Moreover, the "epilogue" is really the thirty-first chapter, without which it would have been a very different book.

Oh, and David Hero gets naked again.