The Knights of the Cornerstone

by James P. Blaylock

[empressbrooke]

To sum it up: What a mess.

I grabbed this off the New Arrivals shelf at the library - it's the sort of book I'd have avoided (I'm wary of post-DaVinci Code books about the Knights Templar and Biblical artifacts, since most of them seem to be hastily slapped together to take advantage of the trend), except it's by a veteran fantasy author I've been intending to check out.

It would have been better off staying on the shelf. It's just shy of 300 pages, and yet it took me days and days to read. As I was trying to finish up the last 80 pages today, I feel asleep twice. The main character is pathetic and odd; he doesn't seem to have any friends, his fiance left him, and his life revolves around collecting obscure pamphlets and sketching very, very unfunny cartoons. He has a bad habit of not telling people things that really should be told, and he's so insanely passive that the book could have only been improved by replacing him with a turtle.

And that's saying nothing of the plot, which only half exists. There's some sort of malarkey about antagonists trying to steal a veil, or is it silver? Can we make up our minds? Nothing is explained very well, and all the characters do things that left me saying, "Okay, but WHY? Seriously?" The timing of everything is far too coincidental (of course plans that have been brewing for decades go down in the days that the main character just happens to be in town!) and by the time camels and a fake film crew and catapults came in for no good reason, I was just ready to burn this book. Except I think the librarians wouldn't appreciate that.

Any Blaylock fans out there who can tell me if this is representative of his other work, or if he just dropped the ball on this one?