A friend of mine recently loaned me his copy of The Doomfarers of Coramonde by Brian Daley.  This was relatively new ground for me as it was a book and author I had not heard anything about before, nor was it really on my to-read list.  However, I was glad I gave it a shot, as it was a pretty enjoyable read and I wanted to share a few thoughts here on my blog.

First, just to get this out of the way, the back cover blurb is almost hilariously bad.  It almost seems that whoever wrote the blurb only read the first hundred pages, because the plot outline makes a plot point about a third of the way in seem like the climax (which it really isn’t).  Now, if Brian Daley were to post in the comments to say that he wrote the blurb before the book was finished, I would find that awesome, but still hilarious.

With that being said, the book isn’t really what I expected as it was a fair bit grander.  Specifically, I came in thinking that this would be about the APC, Lobo, making the trek back to their world after being yanked into the war of Coramonde and I kept thinking, “why didn’t they spend more time on this scene/detail?  Isn’t that what this book is about?”  In fact, the author didn’t spend a lot of time on it because it was not relevant to the bigger picture (which makes a lot more sense in hindsight – go figure, the author knew what he was doing).

While I could have easily read a book about an APC’s journey to a fantasy world and back again, I think the grander story was equally good.  Here, Daley provides a neat fantasy world and populates it with very interesting characters and places.  One thing I thought was really quite interesting is that Daley dispenses with political intrigue and states openly that the antagonist is working for a demon whose plans must be stopped for the sake of the entire world.  In this way, the conflict is very black and white, and Daley explicitly calls out the difference between this and the Vietnam War.

My main gripe with the book was that some characters seemed like props instead of actors.  In particular, there were a couple of characters that seemed to exist not so that they could be part of the story, but so that could be introduced, someone could fall in love with them, and then they could be killed – all with less than three pages to their name.  While this certainly dispenses with any cruft, the tragedy had little impact when done this way, as the character’s death had about as much impact as a broken vase…

Overall though, the book was fun.  It was a high-fantasy adventure, which I honestly enjoy, but is not what I’ve been primarily reading of late.