Review: A rough diamond of a funny fantasy novel. It's worth polishing.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 1, 2013
Every movie-maker wants to find an ingenue working as a waitress and shout, "Sweetheart, I'm gonna make you a star!" And every editor (or avid reader) wants to find a hitherto-unknown author and proclaim that she has found the next Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, Steven Brust, or your-favorite-author-du-jour.But despite my earnest desire for talent-discovery, I've learned that you really do have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince, and you collect plenty of warts along the way. I want to help newbie self-published authors, honest I do, but based on the hundreds of "Please review my book!" e-mail messages I get, usually it is immediately evident why a Traditional Publisher turned down the author's manuscript and they turned to self-publishing instead. (Technical explanation: Because they suck. Sorry.)Graeme Smith's A Comedy of Terrors is, I am happy to say, among the reasons that it's worth kissing all those frogs.The basic setup: Our hero Segorian is the court idiot. That means it's his job to do whatever the queen asks him to do. ("No, he's not the court jester. He doesn't wear motley (whatever motley may be). That's a different union. He's the Idiot. In a Queen's castle, wine split down the wrong dress can lead to war. So someone unimportant has to be blamed for it. That's the Idiot's job.") In this story, Segorian is sent on an errand to talk to a dragon, and things get... complicated.What Smith does well, VERY well, is write with a wonderful character voice that is extremely funny. Such as, regarding demon visitations, "...there are Rules about that sort of thing. Rules like not just turning up, knocking on the castle door, and asking people to cover themselves with salt and pepper. The demon has to be invited. So he starts whispering from the demon world to find people who'll listen. The demon offers all the usual promises, like power and wealth and really, really good tax avoidance planning." I laughed out loud several times while reading this story, and I think you might, too.Which is not to say that A Comedy of Terrors is a perfect novel. Far from it. This prince does need to be cleaned up a bit before I'd bring him home to meet the family; a few "ribbit!"s do sneak into the conversation. The layout of the e-book needs work. There are several points at which the silliness of the style gets in the way of storytelling. I put down this book several times in the several months I've had it... but I did always pick it up again. Some books' weaknesses make me set the book aside (and occasionally throw it with great force), but in this case, the novel's imperfections made me think things like, "This guy needs a good editor to polish his work and market it effectively, and then he could be REALLY great." I dearly hope he finds one. He deserves it.If you're willing to look past the Beginner Novel imperfections, grab a copy of A Comedy of Terrors. Then you, too, can say, "I read him before he was discovered!"