Dragonchasers

I’m still working my way through the pile of World Fantasy Con books. Glenn Meganck’s George & The Angels was next up. It’s from Beachfront Publishing which I’m guessing is some kind of vanity press, because this work wasn’t ready for publishing. In fact, it read like a first draft, minus most of the typos. There’re tons of punctuation errors, horrible and nonsensical POV shifts and an overall rough and unpolished feel to it.

As for the story itself…it’s a mess. Imagine sitting down with a young child and asking them to tell you a story, and that’s what you get in George & The Angels. More or less random events strung out in a line that points generally to an ending. We have George going on a quest and a basic theme of him having to defeat an ultimate bad-guy, and that’s where things stop making sense. Characters and creatures appear and disappear with absolutely no logic or consistency. About two thirds of the way through another world is introduced for no apparent reason. Some characters just kind of fall by the wayside, such as George’s wife, who is called “Elaine” in some chapters, but “Mrs. Richards” whenever the children are on-stage. We see her struggle with George’s disappearance for a while, then she just gets discarded, never to be seen again.

To make matters worse, George is one of those ‘constantly carried along by events’ characters that never really does anything to make you like him. In fact, the only remotely likeable characters in the story are his kids. The world is too much of a mish-mosh for you ever to get enough of a handle on it to enjoy being there. If you really enjoy trippy weird stories that are all topsy-turvy, go read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Mr. Meganck obviously has a vivid imagination and a lot of potential, but it seems to me like he’s not willing to do the hard work of writing, and so has tried to cut corners by self-publishing. (I don’t know for a fact that this is self-published but it looks as if this small press might even be owned by Meganck and one or two other authors.) You, dear reader, deserve to be treated better. Avoid this one like the plague.

I picked up Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness on a whim a while back. I didn’t even look at it carefully. I think I must’ve been depressed that day and saw this as some kind of self-help book. Which it isn’t. Instead, it’s a kind of “How Things Work” manual for your mind, focusing on what and why things make us happy.

Gilbert’s argument (and he backs it up with lots of research; there are many pages of footnotes at the back of the book) is that people make choices according to what they think will make them happy, but that these choices are often at least partially wrong. In other words, they make a prediction as to their future happiness basing the prediction on the assumption that they’ve made a particular choice. The problem is that people are lousy at making these predictions, and Gilbert explains why that is. Picking a random example, he cites a study where college students were asked to predict in advance how happy they’d be if their team won a big upcoming football game. Then after the game, they were asked how happy they were. It turns out that they weren’t nearly as happy as they’d predicted they would be. Why? Because when they made their predictions, they imagined the end of the game, the final play and all the hoopla. But they neglected to imagine that they still had a test to study for, piles of laundry waiting to be done, or financial woes. Their imaginations didn’t paint the whole picture when making the prediction of happiness.

That’s just one of many, many examples. Throughout the book we learn all kinds of things about our minds that we might already know if we ever stopped to think about it. For example, how bad we are at noticing things that aren’t there. A classic example is this card trick that made the rounds of the web a while back. If you haven’t seen it, go on and try it. I’ll wait.
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Back? OK, so what’s the trick? I already gave you a clue. The trick is that none of the cards on the first page are also on the second page. But under normal circumstances we don’t notice that. We’re focused on ‘our’ card and ignore the others, so when we get to the reveal page, it (normally) never occurs to us to check the other cards. We see that our card isn’t there and we’re amazed! OK, well, we’re puzzled at least.

Anyway, back to Stumbling…. In spite of all the footnotes and citations, Gilbert has a breezy, conversational style that makes the book easy going for us laymen. He’s pretty funny at times, too. I will admit that after a while the book starts to feel a bit repetitive as he describes study after study that support what he’s telling us. It’s the kind of book that’s best read a chapter or two at a time, interspersed with other reading materials. And the focus here is on why we make the (often wrong) predictions that we make; there’s very little in the way of self-improvement tips.

And yet, I came away feeling as if at least a few scales had fallen from my eyes. Once you’ve been made aware of the way your imagination can paint an inaccurate picture of the future you can (in theory) allow for that. Perhaps more importantly, it’s encouraging to know that we’re not alone. That almost everyone who tilts at the gold ring isn’t nearly as happy to capture it as they thought they’d be. Knowing ourselves better is never a bad thing. Stumbling on Happiness teaches us about ourselves in a fairly entertaining way, and so gets a big thumbs up.

Charles Coleman Finlay’s The Prodigal Troll is another title out of that box ‘o books that I got from World Fantasy Con. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover but damn, did Pyr ever do a terrible job on this one. I never would’ve picked this up off a bookstore shelf.

Not that it would’ve been a huge loss. This is Finlay’s first novel and though he writes very nicely, the story took an awfully long time to grab me. Ever since Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, tales of humans being raised by beasts have been a part of folklore and this is the trope that Finlay has set out to explore once again. OK, technically the human in this story is raised by trolls and not beasts, but the trolls act like apes who have language and can’t be exposed to sunlight. Our hero Mowgli…I mean, Maggot, grows strong and clever because he has to fight for acceptance among the clan that he is a member of. Had the trolls been apes, the story wouldn’t have had to change much at all.

Once he leaves the world of trolls he falls in with a tribe that takes its culture from a mixture of Native Americans and one of the more primitive tribes of the British Islands. Picts, perhaps? I’m no historian. The names are very olde English but some of the dancing and pipe smoking behaviors feel Native American. In either event, the culture of these people feels recycled. These tribes are pitted against a matriarchal version of a typical pseudo-medieval culture lifted out of fantasy. Actually, this culture has some interesting facets. For instance, eunuchs are treated as women legally, which means they can own property. This leads fairly powerful or well-familied men to become eunuchs.

The sad part is we just get glimpses of this, the most interesting culture in the book. Presumably Finlay is planning Troll to be the first of a series in this world and is laying the bedrock for later tales. In fact, we get glimpses of a lot of interesting ideas. The Knights are driving out the Peasants who are driving out the Trolls. There are ‘demons’ in the river that play a much too minor role in the story, and we meet a wizard or two who are very interesting but don’t get much ‘air time.’

But the greatest insult, and I really felt betrayed by this, is that the first 100 pages or so tell a totally different story with different characters. Characters that I came to like, with their own fears and desires and struggles. In many ways this was my favorite part of the book. Then *poof* they’re gone from the pages, never to be seen or heard from again!! They end up just being the device that Finlay uses to get the human child into the hands of the trolls, but he took much too much time with this and asked us to invest ourselves in these characters…only to toss them aside.

It really soured me on the whole story, and I think changed the way I read it. Almost as if I was looking for things to gripe about after that.

Now all that said, should Mr. Finlay write another novel set in this world, I wouldn’t be opposed to reading it, because by the end of this one he had hooked me. Mostly this was due to his word-craft. I really did enjoy the way he wrote. This is a first novel and I’m sure his next will be even better. Thumbs up or down on this one? I think my suggestion would be to wait and see what else comes out in this world. If Finlay doesn’t revisit it, then The Prodigal Troll will end up feeling like a tease.