When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
I finished A Dark Traveling this afternoon, as expected. It’s about a boy (who happens to be a werewolf), his sister (a witch) and his brother (a martial arts expert) who must band together and rescue his mother (also a witch) and his father (just some guy) from bad guys. See, the boy’s family runs an inter-dimensional transit station, and agents from the “darkbands” (dimensions where evil forces have taken over) have infiltrated their own lightband. They go adventuring through the dimensions and save the day. Despite my prosaic plot summary, it really was quite a good book. I think one of Zelazny’s biggest strengths is that he’s able to bring real light and life to characters and situations that would be incredibly hackneyed if written by lesser authors.
One of the funnier things about this book is its size. The story as written is really no longer than a short story – maybe a short novella. Somebody really wanted to publish it as a novel, though, and they pulled out all the tricks. It’s in a large typeface, with large margins, multi-page chapter breaks with nonsensical graphics, and a handful of illustrations take up the extra space. As it is, the book is only 150 pages long, which I think is very close to the lower limit on the length of a mass-market paperback. On the whole, it has the sense of a college freshman trying to pad a paper up to the minimum length limit. In any case, a nice change after the behemoth I read before this.
Now I’m reading Thomas Easton’s Greenhouse, the second book in his “Organic Future” series. I read the first book of this series a long time ago, not knowing it was the beginning of a series. He’s a good writer though and I’m looking forward to this.