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A review by cathode_ray_jepsen
Summon the Keeper by Tanya Huff
1.0
For October's WOGF review, I decided to get my random read out of the way. Nerd that I am, I actually went to the trouble of writing a shell script to select an author randomly, and wound up with Tanya Huff. I was thinking of picking up one of her military science fiction works, but Summon the Keeper seemed like a good pick for Halloween. It, uh, wasn't.
The protagonist is hoodwinked into taking care of a B&B with a portal to hell in the basement which, as a vaguely magical Keeper, it is her job to close, or monitor or something. She does, to her credit, take some steps towards doing this, but they are mostly off screen, and take up a very small fraction of the book.
For the rest of the book, stuff happens. The protagonist has an incredibly painful Betty and Veronica thing going on. Veronica is played by a ghost who is mean to be Quebecois, but acts like a broad caricature of a Frenchman and who evidently died before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment was invented. Betty is a really stupid Newfoundlander who resents stereotypes about stupid Newfoundlanders and has basically dedicated his life too cooking, cleaning, and (apparently, although this is not stated in the text) working eight hours per day. Also, in this universe, Newfoundland is indistinguishable from a Dickens novel.
Since there is really no way to fill 300 pages with that, other stuff happens. A vampire shows up, feints at seducing the Newfie, and then leaves without having any effect on the plot. The elevator turns into an inter-dimensional portal for no adequately explained reason. In a wicked-dumb segment the Greek pantheon shows up and does things that aren't funny. There are some werewolves or something.
Yes, friends, a great deal of stuff happens in this novel, but stuff happening is not the same thing as a plot. If the stuff that happened was particularly interesting or funny then I might be willing to overlook the absurdly thin plot, but it really, really wasn't. The jokes were flat. The protagonist communicates entirely by snarking, which I suppose is meant to make her funny but actually just makes her a jerk. The love triangle was horribly unconvincing. The talking cat (yes, she has a talking cat) was indistinguishable from Garfield.
I was excited to read this book. I wanted to like it. It seemed like it took some cues from Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, which was funny and clever and original. This book is none of those things. This is a bad book. Don't read this book.
To be cross-posted on Worlds Without End.
The protagonist is hoodwinked into taking care of a B&B with a portal to hell in the basement which, as a vaguely magical Keeper, it is her job to close, or monitor or something. She does, to her credit, take some steps towards doing this, but they are mostly off screen, and take up a very small fraction of the book.
For the rest of the book, stuff happens. The protagonist has an incredibly painful Betty and Veronica thing going on. Veronica is played by a ghost who is mean to be Quebecois, but acts like a broad caricature of a Frenchman and who evidently died before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment was invented. Betty is a really stupid Newfoundlander who resents stereotypes about stupid Newfoundlanders and has basically dedicated his life too cooking, cleaning, and (apparently, although this is not stated in the text) working eight hours per day. Also, in this universe, Newfoundland is indistinguishable from a Dickens novel.
Since there is really no way to fill 300 pages with that, other stuff happens. A vampire shows up, feints at seducing the Newfie, and then leaves without having any effect on the plot. The elevator turns into an inter-dimensional portal for no adequately explained reason. In a wicked-dumb segment the Greek pantheon shows up and does things that aren't funny. There are some werewolves or something.
Yes, friends, a great deal of stuff happens in this novel, but stuff happening is not the same thing as a plot. If the stuff that happened was particularly interesting or funny then I might be willing to overlook the absurdly thin plot, but it really, really wasn't. The jokes were flat. The protagonist communicates entirely by snarking, which I suppose is meant to make her funny but actually just makes her a jerk. The love triangle was horribly unconvincing. The talking cat (yes, she has a talking cat) was indistinguishable from Garfield.
I was excited to read this book. I wanted to like it. It seemed like it took some cues from Zelazny's A Night in the Lonesome October, which was funny and clever and original. This book is none of those things. This is a bad book. Don't read this book.
To be cross-posted on Worlds Without End.