Book Review: Riddle In Stone by Robert Evert

The fan­tasy genre, par­tic­u­larly quest fan­tasy, can be a very cliched place. Do we need another young hero set­ting out to make some­thing of him­self? Robert Evert attempts to sub­vert that par­tic­u­lar trope by giv­ing us a hero who is while well mean­ing, also mid­dle aged, fat, cow­ardly, self-absorbed and self-deluded. It’s cer­tainly a dif­fer­ent approach.

There’s also a cen­tral theme to the book that leg­ends aren’t real. That real­ity is dirt­ier and nas­tier than sto­ries. So while our dis­tinctly unheroically named Edmund sets out on a glo­ri­ous quest com­plete with a lost trea­sure and an encounter with a troll, things take a very nasty turn. And the author doesn’t shy from that nas­ti­ness. Not at all.

The tran­si­tion is almost too abrupt actu­ally and that’s one of a few tonal issues that affect the book.  Edmund is just too pathetic in the begin­ning and by about a third of the way through the book I was sick of his stut­ter­ing and his whin­ing. For­tu­nately he grows a back­bone some­where around halfway through. Unfor­tu­nately he remains per­pet­u­ally unable to accept that the leg­ends and sto­ries he loves aren’t true and we’re hit over the head with the “mes­sage” that leg­ends aren’t real again, and again until the end of the story. That aspect really needed to be toned down later in the book.

There’s another tonal thing that bugged me all the way through the book. It fea­tures a pair of gob­lins who’s behav­ior just doesn’t quite fit any of the other estab­lished gob­lins and it pro­vides no con­text to explain this. The two talk in a fash­ion that’s rem­i­nis­cent to me of Mr. Croup and Mr. Van­de­mar from Neil Gaiman’s Nev­er­where. And while that does make for an effec­tive vil­lain­ous pair­ing, it’s just at odds with the cru­dity of every other gob­lin we are exposed to in the book. I get the feel­ing it’s been done because the author liked the char­ac­ters, not because it made sense in the story.

The frus­trat­ing thing here is that at it’s core there’s a good amount to like in the story and once Edmund finally start­ing doing things instead of blub­ber­ing I really started to get into it. But these tone prob­lems kept drag­ging me back out of it.

There’s a sec­ond book in the series appar­ently and I’m not sure if I’d read that. It may work bet­ter now that the author has a bit more prac­tice with the char­ac­ters and world, but I’m not sure I want to take the chance that it will be as uneven as this one.

In the end I think I would prob­a­bly give it 5/10 and wish it had gone through one more re-draft.

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