Dead Man's Hand (The Unorthodox Chronicles #1)
3/10
I have read all 17 Harry Dresden Novels, and the Aeronaut’s Windlass. These were written by this author’s father. I’ve been reading the Dresden books for almost 9 years. In my early college years, Harry Dresden was something of a father figure to me. I had a concussion just before I started reading Storm Front (book 1), and when Harry Dresden got hit on the head with a baseball bat in the story, his resilience made me feel a little healed. By rights, I get an opinion of his son’s first novel.
Every author needs a foundation. The “moral” foundation is paramount. Art needs to be directed at the world. Art is meant to investigate and reveal. Mystery is supposed to shed light. It’s difficult to say that a story has shed any light when every new scene is a further step into the bizarre. This author needs to examine the real world more closely. No dream is more magnificent than the real world. An artist takes all the people they know, and even all the people that they don’t know but can imagine well enough, and reflects them to reveal them. When artists do this, it magnifies the beautiful and shows the defeat of the ugly. This book doesn’t have enough of the DNA of real-world people. The characters come across as caricatures, or silhouettes, and this means they are extremely predictable, while real-world characters always have the potential to surprise us. Everyone you meet in real life will surprise you, if you focus on them enough. This author needs to focus on more life / lives. As for how this is achieved, I think it is similar to religious worship, where the record of life becomes, to an artist, more holy than god, or it may become god itself. When an author learns to focus on characters as if each life story is sacred, then the worth, the value, and the potential become clear. Then we know who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s average, and this goes for finding a person’s nature and circumstance.
So my advice for this author is: “Examine the lives of others more closely until the patterns emerge. Find characters that you can’t live without knowing. Find a question the world desperately needs to ask. Then send the characters on that quest.”
We meet the main character as he is wearing a taco-fairy outfit. He doesn’t want to wear it, but he must wear it because this is the only job in town that will give him a chance to use his magic. This doesn’t work for the story. It’s reasonable that a wizard would feel an overwhelming NEED to use magic as much as possible, even putting himself through hell to do it, but we have to ask what other opportunities are out there. Helping police as a vigilante, whether they like it or not, is another option for a witch / wizard. Going online and hunting pedophiles is another option. Stopping shoplifters at the supermarket. Tracking pets. The list goes on and on. Why is he stuck in a taco fairy outfit? It’s funny, yes. It’s surprising, yes. But I would ask him, “Buddy, are you okay? You’re in a taco fairy outfit.” I’d rather use magic to destroy the restaurant than be forced to wear a tutu. Imagine if JK Rowling put Harry Potter in a taco fairy dress. Fans would ask what the bloody hell was wrong with her. Hermione and Ron would drop in and ask, “What the bloody hell are you wearing?” Hermione would quite possibly slap or punch the shit out of the employer for putting a mentally-vulnerable employee through such a demeaning ordeal. At the very least, Hermione would magic-away the tutu and replace it with a knight costume with the words “Sir Tuesday” (taco Tuesday) emblazoned across the chest in Gryffindor colors (which go surprisingly well with Mexican themes), and then she would magic-away all the hair off the business owner’s head, rendering them a bald bean.
There is a female character in this book who seems to be a love interest for the main character, or a friendship interest, and while her role’s potential exists, it is never accessed. It’s like a tasty taco has passed under the author’s notice (sexual euphemism intended). Why wasn’t she given more of a role? Dynamics like that drive book sales. Rain (Rayne? Rainne?) should have been a sharper focus, a more constant inclusion. Instead, we get this grumpy old man who is not as cool as Morgan from the Dresden Files, who never chills the fuck out or communicates more effectively than a grunt. I would have beat his ass after two minutes of his old man bitch shit. Old people are the worst customers you’ll ever meet, and old men are three times as bad as old women. Suffer them not. Humor them not. They are not long for this world. God I hate (some) old people. If they’re not stupid, they’re senile, and if they’re not senile, they’re perpetually angry, like spoiled children who need to be put in their place. All those inhibitions that make middle-aged assholes somewhat tolerable fly out the window when they retire. If I have to listen to this old man grump about one more thing, I’m going to make boots with his leather. I’d have slapped him upside the head with that succubus dildo. “The Huntsman? I’m not going to call you the Huntsman, old man. I’m going to call you Trixie, and you’re going to like the name I’ve given you.” In the first five minutes after meeting Grimshaw, he pointed a gun at him. If a crazy old man on a revenge quest points a gun at my mentally-vulnerable friend in a taco fairy outfit, then he’s going to be eating bullets first thing in the morning. I’m going to confiscate that gun and me and Trixie are going to have a little chat in a back alley of the Elsewhere, where all my psychotic incubus and succubus friends are on speed dial. “If you’re so skilled that they call you ‘The Huntsman,’ but you’re dumb enough to think that taco fairy boy over here is the murderer of a premier sorceress, then all the logic in the world has pulled a Houdini. Or maybe you thought this boy was special for some reason, a reason you’re not telling me. Maybe you know about his past, his handicaps. But if you thought he was so powerful, then why weren’t you keeping closer tabs on him, Mister ‘Huntsman’? And if you didn’t think he was powerful, then why did you suspect him? He was so obviously framed that it boggles the mind. It’s like if someone found a dead politician in their bathroom with this note in blood upon the mirror: ‘the cat did it lol’.”
The world doesn’t want to see a good man wearing a taco dress if he doesn’t want to, and the world doesn’t want a character to wallow so much in his misery. The call to action should be so strong that such a childish acceptance toward one’s own misfortune is batted away by the blossoming need to slay devils and love angels.
A boy covered in burn-scars would not, or should not, let himself be subdued to the point that he wears a taco fairy dress. His hunger to live should be stronger. His hunger to let others live is already so strong that he would show mercy to the people who wronged him the most. Let this trait be a source of contemplation.
Only toward the end does the main character talk enough about his past pains. Those should have been front-loaded sooner in the story, to give us a clearer image of his identity. When he talks / thinks emotionally about his mother, it feels like it comes out of nowhere, almost to the point that it’s funny. It’s like if Harry Potter didn’t talk or think about his parents until the final chapter of the first book. It’s too late by then. JK Rowling did it perfectly when she put Harry in front of that mirror and showed him images of his mother and father, the parents that he’d always wanted but couldn’t have. We got that chapter in Book 1 of Harry Potter. Let that emotion, that scene, be studied.
The prose is well written, but overdone. Think of a lovely ten-pound cake that has been decorated with thirty pounds of frosting. No matter how lovely the frosting is, too much of it is going to make the guest sick. Where we should have two sentences describing the character’s emotions, we get ten. In a chapter that needs one simile, we get five. The protagonist doesn’t get to experience normal emotions, because he’s always too busy, and I paraphrase, “enduring the gigantic chaotic upsurge of a salacious extreme mind-boggling roar above the tumult.” When all the emotional descriptions are huge, none of them feel huge. Prose should be like a dance-fight. Prance, dance, and do the ballet as much as you want, but make sure that you throw enough quick punches too. Dazzle your opponent, then knock them out. Tease the reader’s interest, then hook them.
