The Gods Awaken (actually, they are dead, and rolling in their graves . . .)
13) The Gods Awaken, by Allan Cole, 404 pages
There are not words enough to express my loathing. Out of sheer spite, I as of this moment declare that the first two books, no matter what I said previously, are utter shite. Big, fat zeros. And this one . . . oh, this is the stuff that sticks to the side of a ferret’s litter pan and requires industrial grade floor cleaner to remove it. This is a terrible book.
It is as though Mr. Cole consciously set a goal for himself wherein he would try to make each chapter stupider than the one that came before. A goal at which he succeeded most prodigiously.
Read on if you dare. I will warn you that I am still feeling very hurt right now, and am a little incoherent. This is also by far the cruelest I have ever, ever been to a book.
First of all, the cover. I must mention that the prominently-placed Wise Old Man’s face digitally manipulated into the scene bears no relevance whatsoever to the story. I can only assume that this is because the cover artist, one Kamil Vojnar, was wise enough not to read the book. Or perhaps it was not in a language he could read. Either of these circumstances would be equally merciful. At any rate, the cover, while genuinely cool, bears no relevance to the words within. One wonders why they could not get Hickman, who did the covers for the first two. Perhaps Hickman learned. His apathy was already showing on cover #2, which showed a scene that did not actually occur in the book. While I would normally criticize and artist for such an oversight, in this case I cannot, because I can only assume that after reading the damn thing, Hickman didn’t care what he painted. He just wanted to be done with it and move on with his life and try to forget that anything happened.
Second, the title. The Gods Awaken. One of the main threads supporting the plot (what there is of it) is the fact that, in this dungscape of a world Cole has constructed, the gods are asleep and thus deaf to the pleas of the mortal world. The gods of our own world are asleep as well, patently, or this man would have been stricken down with snake-tongued bolts of lightning in front of his entire family - do you hear me, Thor?! Anyway, it is imperative that the gods be awakened, something which the characters are trying to do to advance the plot. So titling the book "The Gods Awaken" is sort of like titling the last book of Lord of the Rings "The Ring Destroyed." Thanks for ruining the surprise!
However! There is more. No doubt Mr. Cole thinks himself clever, but he’s firmly standing on his own balls here, because at the end, while the gods are presumably awakened, we see no evidence of it. It is barely addressed. No, there are far more important things to be concerned with. Like that fucking lisping dragon-woman, who reduces the whole matter of the gods awakening to a supposedly zany exchange that ends the whole book like this (and I am quoting):
(Our Hero Kisses the Heroine)
Dragon Woman: "I’m glad to thee that Thafar finally knowth thomebody loveth him! I only with he knew it wath me."
Zany Dwarf: "Never mind that, lass. I’ve set a course for the next landfall. And in one day’s time we’ll find kids and rubes aplenty and you’ll forget all that."
Dragon Woman: "But Thafar thaid the godth might not be happy. What if they curth our performanth and ruin everything?"
Zany Dwarf: "Be damned to the gods, Arlain! Be damned to them all. And be damned to everything but the circus!"
Dragon Woman: Laughs. Quote: And she laughed so long and so hard that she set the airship on fire.
Audience laughs. Cue zany exit music.
What the Hell? Is this a kid’s TV show with puppets? Oh, yeah, speech impediments are just hilarious! Whenever you lack the talent to say something genuinely funny or clever, count on your stupidest characters to supply the half of your ass you are missing, literary rodent. Bring in a laugh track while you're up, will you?
I have never, ever, ever before wished death on every single character in a book. Not once before. And I have read some real boiling shitpots of books. But the last line of this one (the line about setting the ship on fire) made me wish fiercely that the whole ship really would burn to a cinder, killing every character in the book. I caught myself wishing that it were all real so that we could have it on tape, like the Hindenburg, and I could watch it over and over and revel in their demise.
As soon as my eyes had skimmed the final words, I recall shrieking something like "Yes! Yes! Burn! DIE! ALL OF YOU FUCKING DIE!", but I don’t remember exactly what. You will have to ask my cat, if she ever comes out of the basement.
Sorry. Mustn’t hate.
Let us come to two humorous points of technicality that I feel I must mention. Call me a nitpicker, but really . . .
He refers, somewhere in the first 200 or so pages, by which I mean on page 23, to ". . . belts festooned with shrunken skulls. . . ." For a man as supposedly well-traveled as this fellow, he seems remarkably unaware that there is no way to shrink a human skull other than by a shrink ray (preferably VonDraco model SR-2213).
You see, when you look a shrunken head, and I hope that someday you get a chance to, you are actually looking at the skin of the head only. It has been shrunk by regular filling with hot sand. It’s a fascinating and beautiful process, really.
But anyway, before I get the FBI called to my house. . . . Either Mr. Cole was assuming that we would assume that these skulls were shrunk By Magic! or he was just being sloppy and saying shrunken skulls where he meant shrunken heads, or he really did make an ignorant mistake, for which we are all justified in mocking him. Please, make up your mind quickly. The tour of horrors must move on.
Later in the book (apathy by this point prevented me from noting the precise page) the author describes a battery of ship-mounted catapults that fire burning balls of pitch. All at the same time. Never mind that the combined force of the mechanisms all releasing at once would overturn the ship or at least crack her beams. Doesn’t take a physicist to know this. But such are the technical inaccuracies of which the book is made.
However, that's still a technicality, and I should not pick at it, even though it bothered me. We still have ground to cover.
Moving on, why limit ourselves to the technical? This book fails on so many levels that the moment one musters up a last bilious burp of forgiveness, another transgression sours our stomachs once again. Some are crimes against reason, some against character, some against simple good taste. I never throught, outside of an utter farce, to see a chariot drawn by ostriches. (Ostriches on a tropical isle, by the way, but it’s best not to start the technical criticisms again. That way lies madness.) A better writer could have managed it. Hell, it would have worked in a humor book.
Tanith Lee once used a flamingo as a murder weapon (well, not Tanith Lee personally), and in a different story she managed to terrify me with a giant penguin. It’s not like I don’t accept birds in unconventional roles. But this man could not convincingly evoke a fart in a high wind. Which is all the more tragic considering that his line-by-line prose is sometimes truly beautiful. It’s an utter, tragic mess, like watching a beautifully made up porn star go down on a guy and then throw up in his lap.
Once again Cole relies on the crappiest flashbacks, flashbacks so clumsy I see cheesy swirly 60’s-style wipes playing on the screen of my mind, instead of simple fades to black. He also includes whole italicised passages from the first books, apparently to keep from having to summarize his own crappy writing. I suppose that must be because even he did not wish to think about it too much.
And once again, the villains are reduced to an even more ridiculous form. I thought he had hit the murky, sedimental bottom of the septic tank in the last book, where his villains were transformed into (drumroll please) Real Live Werewolves (for no apparent reason). This book trumped it, leaving me with a sense of helpless outrage that I could only otherwise feel if I found out that the doctor who had operated on me and amputated the wrong arm had stolen my watch and possibly also drawn a penis on my face.
In this book, the bad guys (after having been killed in the last book, again) emerge from hell as spectral presences. Not ghosts, oh no. That would have been stupid but explicable. No. They emerge as . . . well, I’m just going to say it. Parasites. Worms. One hitches a ride in Our Brave Hero Safar, and in a leap of logic worthy of the most entertaining shitty movie, causes Safar's body hair to change color. I hope to the baby Jesus that Mr. Cole was not as titillated by it as his repeated mentions of it would seem to indicate.
The other three duke it out in the psi-worm state, two get swallowed, and the stronger third, his own victims riding like worms within the worm, is summoned into the body of an enemy king who fumblingly opposes Our Brave Hero and his Merry Crew.
Are you with me? Worms, people. It’s how they are described, again and again. Our big scary villains are worms. Like their host has suddenly developed a bad case of psychic tapeworms. Unfortunately, I do not also have a psychic tapeworm, which might have allowed the contents of this book to pass in and out of my conscience without doing any lasting harm.
The best I can say for this approach to the parasitic villains is that it does bring to mind the humorous image of the infested characters trying to relieve the itching of their spiritual butt-worms by scuttling across the carpet on their bare asses, like cats with poop stuck in their fur.
Just between you and me, that is no reason to read a book.
At every turn, this man demonstrates the need for a complete overhaul of the publishing industry. Any system that would allow such unfiltered camel waste to reach the printing stage has suffered a critical failure on a par with a sucking chest wound in a marathon runner. The book consistently, page after page, outdoes itself in self-conscious, trite, and downright irritating writing.
Irritation, I am told, produces pearls. But I will also point out that irritation also produces yeast infections. And standing on the far side of the sloppy stink of this festering pile, I am able to say with utter authority that there is no pearl hidden within this plot’s flabby folds. Which leaves me to scream in utter horror at what I have been rooting through all this time. I may never get the smell out.
Let us end with the author’s photo, in which he looks so well-traveled and smug.
Do not be fooled. This is the grin of a man who has just served you an elaborately frosted dog turd and claimed that it is a chocolate cake. But it is not. It is still a frosted dog turd. So do not be a fool and read any of these books.
I can only conclude by saying that I hope that Mr. Cole suffers from a week’s worth of vivid nightmares in which Lovecraftian squid-beasts with thorn-covered and rubbery green mouth-tentacles violently ass-rape him while vomiting boiling oil into his colon. That might begin to make up for the time I spent reading this book.
I am not amused. This book: 0/10. This series: 0/10.
It does, however, bring me up to 13 out of 50 books, which is 26% complete. Yup. I’m really hunting for that silver lining. I know it's in here somewhere.
link
There are not words enough to express my loathing. Out of sheer spite, I as of this moment declare that the first two books, no matter what I said previously, are utter shite. Big, fat zeros. And this one . . . oh, this is the stuff that sticks to the side of a ferret’s litter pan and requires industrial grade floor cleaner to remove it. This is a terrible book.
It is as though Mr. Cole consciously set a goal for himself wherein he would try to make each chapter stupider than the one that came before. A goal at which he succeeded most prodigiously.
Read on if you dare. I will warn you that I am still feeling very hurt right now, and am a little incoherent. This is also by far the cruelest I have ever, ever been to a book.
First of all, the cover. I must mention that the prominently-placed Wise Old Man’s face digitally manipulated into the scene bears no relevance whatsoever to the story. I can only assume that this is because the cover artist, one Kamil Vojnar, was wise enough not to read the book. Or perhaps it was not in a language he could read. Either of these circumstances would be equally merciful. At any rate, the cover, while genuinely cool, bears no relevance to the words within. One wonders why they could not get Hickman, who did the covers for the first two. Perhaps Hickman learned. His apathy was already showing on cover #2, which showed a scene that did not actually occur in the book. While I would normally criticize and artist for such an oversight, in this case I cannot, because I can only assume that after reading the damn thing, Hickman didn’t care what he painted. He just wanted to be done with it and move on with his life and try to forget that anything happened.
Second, the title. The Gods Awaken. One of the main threads supporting the plot (what there is of it) is the fact that, in this dungscape of a world Cole has constructed, the gods are asleep and thus deaf to the pleas of the mortal world. The gods of our own world are asleep as well, patently, or this man would have been stricken down with snake-tongued bolts of lightning in front of his entire family - do you hear me, Thor?! Anyway, it is imperative that the gods be awakened, something which the characters are trying to do to advance the plot. So titling the book "The Gods Awaken" is sort of like titling the last book of Lord of the Rings "The Ring Destroyed." Thanks for ruining the surprise!
However! There is more. No doubt Mr. Cole thinks himself clever, but he’s firmly standing on his own balls here, because at the end, while the gods are presumably awakened, we see no evidence of it. It is barely addressed. No, there are far more important things to be concerned with. Like that fucking lisping dragon-woman, who reduces the whole matter of the gods awakening to a supposedly zany exchange that ends the whole book like this (and I am quoting):
(Our Hero Kisses the Heroine)
Dragon Woman: "I’m glad to thee that Thafar finally knowth thomebody loveth him! I only with he knew it wath me."
Zany Dwarf: "Never mind that, lass. I’ve set a course for the next landfall. And in one day’s time we’ll find kids and rubes aplenty and you’ll forget all that."
Dragon Woman: "But Thafar thaid the godth might not be happy. What if they curth our performanth and ruin everything?"
Zany Dwarf: "Be damned to the gods, Arlain! Be damned to them all. And be damned to everything but the circus!"
Dragon Woman: Laughs. Quote: And she laughed so long and so hard that she set the airship on fire.
Audience laughs. Cue zany exit music.
What the Hell? Is this a kid’s TV show with puppets? Oh, yeah, speech impediments are just hilarious! Whenever you lack the talent to say something genuinely funny or clever, count on your stupidest characters to supply the half of your ass you are missing, literary rodent. Bring in a laugh track while you're up, will you?
I have never, ever, ever before wished death on every single character in a book. Not once before. And I have read some real boiling shitpots of books. But the last line of this one (the line about setting the ship on fire) made me wish fiercely that the whole ship really would burn to a cinder, killing every character in the book. I caught myself wishing that it were all real so that we could have it on tape, like the Hindenburg, and I could watch it over and over and revel in their demise.
As soon as my eyes had skimmed the final words, I recall shrieking something like "Yes! Yes! Burn! DIE! ALL OF YOU FUCKING DIE!", but I don’t remember exactly what. You will have to ask my cat, if she ever comes out of the basement.
Sorry. Mustn’t hate.
Let us come to two humorous points of technicality that I feel I must mention. Call me a nitpicker, but really . . .
He refers, somewhere in the first 200 or so pages, by which I mean on page 23, to ". . . belts festooned with shrunken skulls. . . ." For a man as supposedly well-traveled as this fellow, he seems remarkably unaware that there is no way to shrink a human skull other than by a shrink ray (preferably VonDraco model SR-2213).
You see, when you look a shrunken head, and I hope that someday you get a chance to, you are actually looking at the skin of the head only. It has been shrunk by regular filling with hot sand. It’s a fascinating and beautiful process, really.
But anyway, before I get the FBI called to my house. . . . Either Mr. Cole was assuming that we would assume that these skulls were shrunk By Magic! or he was just being sloppy and saying shrunken skulls where he meant shrunken heads, or he really did make an ignorant mistake, for which we are all justified in mocking him. Please, make up your mind quickly. The tour of horrors must move on.
Later in the book (apathy by this point prevented me from noting the precise page) the author describes a battery of ship-mounted catapults that fire burning balls of pitch. All at the same time. Never mind that the combined force of the mechanisms all releasing at once would overturn the ship or at least crack her beams. Doesn’t take a physicist to know this. But such are the technical inaccuracies of which the book is made.
However, that's still a technicality, and I should not pick at it, even though it bothered me. We still have ground to cover.
Moving on, why limit ourselves to the technical? This book fails on so many levels that the moment one musters up a last bilious burp of forgiveness, another transgression sours our stomachs once again. Some are crimes against reason, some against character, some against simple good taste. I never throught, outside of an utter farce, to see a chariot drawn by ostriches. (Ostriches on a tropical isle, by the way, but it’s best not to start the technical criticisms again. That way lies madness.) A better writer could have managed it. Hell, it would have worked in a humor book.
Tanith Lee once used a flamingo as a murder weapon (well, not Tanith Lee personally), and in a different story she managed to terrify me with a giant penguin. It’s not like I don’t accept birds in unconventional roles. But this man could not convincingly evoke a fart in a high wind. Which is all the more tragic considering that his line-by-line prose is sometimes truly beautiful. It’s an utter, tragic mess, like watching a beautifully made up porn star go down on a guy and then throw up in his lap.
Once again Cole relies on the crappiest flashbacks, flashbacks so clumsy I see cheesy swirly 60’s-style wipes playing on the screen of my mind, instead of simple fades to black. He also includes whole italicised passages from the first books, apparently to keep from having to summarize his own crappy writing. I suppose that must be because even he did not wish to think about it too much.
And once again, the villains are reduced to an even more ridiculous form. I thought he had hit the murky, sedimental bottom of the septic tank in the last book, where his villains were transformed into (drumroll please) Real Live Werewolves (for no apparent reason). This book trumped it, leaving me with a sense of helpless outrage that I could only otherwise feel if I found out that the doctor who had operated on me and amputated the wrong arm had stolen my watch and possibly also drawn a penis on my face.
In this book, the bad guys (after having been killed in the last book, again) emerge from hell as spectral presences. Not ghosts, oh no. That would have been stupid but explicable. No. They emerge as . . . well, I’m just going to say it. Parasites. Worms. One hitches a ride in Our Brave Hero Safar, and in a leap of logic worthy of the most entertaining shitty movie, causes Safar's body hair to change color. I hope to the baby Jesus that Mr. Cole was not as titillated by it as his repeated mentions of it would seem to indicate.
The other three duke it out in the psi-worm state, two get swallowed, and the stronger third, his own victims riding like worms within the worm, is summoned into the body of an enemy king who fumblingly opposes Our Brave Hero and his Merry Crew.
Are you with me? Worms, people. It’s how they are described, again and again. Our big scary villains are worms. Like their host has suddenly developed a bad case of psychic tapeworms. Unfortunately, I do not also have a psychic tapeworm, which might have allowed the contents of this book to pass in and out of my conscience without doing any lasting harm.
The best I can say for this approach to the parasitic villains is that it does bring to mind the humorous image of the infested characters trying to relieve the itching of their spiritual butt-worms by scuttling across the carpet on their bare asses, like cats with poop stuck in their fur.
Just between you and me, that is no reason to read a book.
At every turn, this man demonstrates the need for a complete overhaul of the publishing industry. Any system that would allow such unfiltered camel waste to reach the printing stage has suffered a critical failure on a par with a sucking chest wound in a marathon runner. The book consistently, page after page, outdoes itself in self-conscious, trite, and downright irritating writing.
Irritation, I am told, produces pearls. But I will also point out that irritation also produces yeast infections. And standing on the far side of the sloppy stink of this festering pile, I am able to say with utter authority that there is no pearl hidden within this plot’s flabby folds. Which leaves me to scream in utter horror at what I have been rooting through all this time. I may never get the smell out.
Let us end with the author’s photo, in which he looks so well-traveled and smug.
Do not be fooled. This is the grin of a man who has just served you an elaborately frosted dog turd and claimed that it is a chocolate cake. But it is not. It is still a frosted dog turd. So do not be a fool and read any of these books.
I can only conclude by saying that I hope that Mr. Cole suffers from a week’s worth of vivid nightmares in which Lovecraftian squid-beasts with thorn-covered and rubbery green mouth-tentacles violently ass-rape him while vomiting boiling oil into his colon. That might begin to make up for the time I spent reading this book.
I am not amused. This book: 0/10. This series: 0/10.
It does, however, bring me up to 13 out of 50 books, which is 26% complete. Yup. I’m really hunting for that silver lining. I know it's in here somewhere.
link