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Worst book I've encountered lately, certainly, was Shadow Moon, written by George Lucas and Chris Claremont. Admittedly, I was reading it only in the expectation of it being stunningly bad, but even still it was exceptional.
1) It is a sequel to the (unsuccessful) film Willow, in which, as you may remember, every midget in Hollywood got to eat, and Val Kilmer helped to save the world from the evil Queen Bavmorda and rescue the baby Princess Elora Danan. Seeing the unbelievably generic fantasy bollocks? Well, the plucky Nelwyn-that-is-to-say-hobbit-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off is still around, thirteen years on, wandering the land with a new sub-Tolky name (Thorn Drumheller) and a coterie of two brownies and eagles he talks to telepathically.
No, really. It gets worse from there. There is a travel-scarred ranger, a beautiful warrior-princess, a bad guy called the Deceiver (oooh, scary scary), salty tars, did I mention the fucking brownies.
Claremont clearly did the lion's share of the actual writing, with Lucas providing the intellectual property and the publishing deal. How can I tell that Claremont did most of the writing?
Well.
1) Funny accents all over the place, showcased to the full in endless passages of dialogue that at least provide a break from the endless pasages of monologue (see 3).
2) Every problem resolved by a "but wait....wings! Bursting from my back!" deus ex machina - Taiwanese Hobbit Clone or other member of Mismatched Band Journeying through a Hostile Landscape Pursued by Malevolent Enemy of Impossible Power suddenly discovers a new power, ally or acorn (no, acorn) that allows them to get out of jail free, in at least one case literally.
3) He keeps panicking and, in the absence of an artist, spooling out vast tracts of description, to go with the vast tracts of random geography, history and tribal anthropology that characters seem to indulge in in the vast tracts of tell-not-show internal monologue. Surely after the first few times you met somebody you wouldn't have to spool out the entire history of them, their people, and their crew whenever you saw them.
4) Claremont, as anyone who has read his X-Men may note, has a BDSM thing. People are whipped a surprising amount in this book. When they are not whipped, they are described in similes *involving* whips. A lot of things are oddly like a whip of flame/thorns/steel descending across one's shoulders. I mean, more than you'd expect. This reaches its comedy apogee when the gang are kidnapped by ruffians who, despite being a set of central-casting rough types, happen to have a leather mask with gag handy to wrap over the face of the tied-up 13-year-old princess. Fiiiiine. I am vaguely curious about whether he knows he's doing this.
There's an extract here. See the utterly asinine simile, followed by an utterly asinine simile.
The gleaming smooth surface of the Scar acted like a mirror, reflecting the heat at the same time as its dark color absorbed it, giving him a painful insight into what it must feel like to be on a blazing-hot griddle. |
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