Reviews

A Dark Traveling by Roger Zelazny

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dantastic's review against another edition

3.0

A Dark Traveling was very interesting. I wish Zelazny would have written a sequel or three.

Jim is a fourteen year old werewolf. His sister is a witch and they live with their father Tom and an exchange student named Barry. Tom works for some kind of parallel universe monitoring agency. At the beginning of the book, Tom goes missing, and the equipment he uses to monitor and travel to other dimensions is damaged. Jim, Becky, and Barry spend the rest of the book trying to find him and in the process learn some things about the fate of Jim's missing mother.

Zelazny is always a treat when you're looking for a short read. A Dark Traveling is a good example of this. I think it took about two hours to read. Although there wasn't a whole lot of action, Zelazny kept me interested with the plot development and details about the world. I like that the parallel worlds were divided into lightbands, deadbands, and darkbands, aka good, lifeless, and evil. The cosmology reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Interworld. Gaiman's a Zelazny fan so that's not surprising.

I'd recommend this to Zelazny fans and fans of parallel universe type stuff.

shane_tiernan's review against another edition

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1.0

I love Zelazny and everything but this really sucked. I've got it in this beautiful illustrated hardcover (millennium) edition but really there had to be 25 other Zelazny novellas that deserved this treatment more than this piece of crap. At a very stretched out 143 pages, the action starts at about page 120. There's the werewolf angle that goes nowhere and seems to be included for no reason other than possibly to increase page count. The dues ex machina. The main evil bad dude that shows up for about 3 pages toward the end. And then an interesting paragraph or two at the end that talks about multiple realities.

Not recommended - even for hardcore Zelazny fans.