Vellum

Hal Duncan

Wow. The first twenty-five pages of this book are amazing. Thoroughly captivating stuff, especially for book geeks. A university student, guided by research in amazingly out-of-the-way places, stumbles upon the Book of All Hours hidden in the rare books room at his university. The Book of All Hours is an amazing thing that opens up doors to other worlds. You read this stuff and you know this is going to be one fantastic adventure tale, the kind of thing you will devour in one sitting, forgoing food and sleep, and then will press on your kids, and their kids, and your friends, and their kids, and so on as long as you live.

And then you hit page twenty-six, and everything gets bollixed up.

Reynard Carter is the protagonist of those first twenty-five pages, and when he's getting screen time, this is a good book. It never quite reaches the heights of those first twenty-five pages again, but it's still good. He, unfortunately, is a character in very little of the ensuing manuscript (what of it I was able to read, anyway; I gave up in disgust a little less than halfway through). His polar opposite is a character with the painful name of Phreedom Messenger, and for coming up with that name alone Duncan should have all of his writing utensils taken away from him forevermore; it doesn't help that her portion of the book (as large as Reynard's is small) is as dry as the dust her motorcycle's always kicking up.

The "original" tag being constantly bandied about perplexes me; all of the qualities that people find so original about this book were done, and far better, in Gaiman's American Gods. Okay, so Gaiman's missing an infinitely large parallel world in which to run around. (Here's hoping he rectifies that eventually.) But, really, if you're looking for myth reworking and amusing, compelling characters who personify those myths, how is Gaiman's name not the first one that comes to mind? (The mythpunks are burrowing through this particular burial mound as well, though in far more subtle fashion, and doing it with the kind of style and panache most writers only dream about.)

There is a great deal of potential in this book; I couldn't find any of it realized. It's possible, judging by a number of reviews I've read, that I didn't stick with it long enough. This may be so, but there's a limit to how much I'll suffer for someone else's art. Vellum is way, way over that line.