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A review by brentonk
On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony
2.0
The good: On a Pale Horse has a captivating premise: ordinary guy becomes Death incarnate, and hijinx ensue. The prose and dialogue are pretty good for mass-market science fiction.
The bad: While the world Zane (aka Death) inhabits is interesting, the plot he's sent to execute isn't. A magician has big plans for Zane, as does Satan. Said plans seem to emerge out of nowhere about a third of the way through the story, once the workaday business of harvesting and classifying souls has run out of narrative gas.
And the character development is questionable. Zane, who begins not just as an ordinary guy but really kind of a loser — we meet him as he's nearly scammed into taking on a lifetime of debt for some magical gems of dubious quality — suddenly and inexplicably becomes good at everything, and a desirable romantic partner to boot.
The ugly: Misogynistic tropes abound, all the way down to fridging. By the end it just reads like a juvenile exercise in wish fulfillment.
The bad: While the world Zane (aka Death) inhabits is interesting, the plot he's sent to execute isn't. A magician has big plans for Zane, as does Satan. Said plans seem to emerge out of nowhere about a third of the way through the story, once the workaday business of harvesting and classifying souls has run out of narrative gas.
And the character development is questionable. Zane, who begins not just as an ordinary guy but really kind of a loser — we meet him as he's nearly scammed into taking on a lifetime of debt for some magical gems of dubious quality — suddenly and inexplicably becomes good at everything, and a desirable romantic partner to boot.
The ugly: Misogynistic tropes abound, all the way down to fridging. By the end it just reads like a juvenile exercise in wish fulfillment.