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Blood Hostages | Rating | |
| F | |||
| J. Robert King | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Bloodwars Trilogy | N/A | ||
Aereas is a young lad staying at his uncle's cabin for the summer with his cousin. But when his uncle is kidnapped by gargoyles and carried through the tobacco stand in the study to a different world, the two feel they have no choice but to attempt a rescue. They find themselves in Sigil, the crossroads of the planes, and their uncle has a history they couldn't have imagined. But he's still kidnapped, and he still needs rescuing, so off they go!
The book gets right into the action, the kidnapping occurring very soon after the start. Too soon, really. Although Aereas reminisces a little bit about past summers he'd spent in the cabin, we really don't know him very well at all. We don't get the chance to see if he is a coward or a risk-taker, honorable or conniving, slow or sly. We don't even know such basics as whether he's dextrous or clumsy, strong or weak, soft-hearted or practically-minded. There are little vignettes at the end of each chapter that possibly are meant to serve that role, but even the first of those takes place after the kidnapping itself. And frankly the most I got out of them, anyway, was that he'd spent a lot of time with his impulsive cousin Nina.
Immediately after the adventure starts and the pair find themselves in Sigil, Aereas finds himself mistaken for his uncle. It's irritating not just because I hate mistaken-identity plotlines - they require people to act in unnatural ways for the mistake to last any length of time - but because it is completely unnecessary. The gnome who makes the error is an old acquaintance of the uncle's. But if he's willing to help them because he think's he's Artus then why would he refuse if he knows they're his relations? Especially if he were told the quest, as it were, was to recover Artus from the kidnappers? It makes even less sense in light of how, immediately after the gnome tells Aereas "his own" history (he assumes "Artus" doesn't remember him because of some sort of magically-induced amnesia... yeesh!), the boy reveals his true identity and the gnome agrees to help recover the uncle. So what was the point of the whole rigamarole of the last twenty or thirty pages?
For a little bit it seemed that the one problem I'd truly anticipated from the moment I picked up the novel was not to be. I'd worried that the book, being based on the Planescape role-playing game and set in that world, would have a great many references to things I would not understand and that would not be explained, the author assuming readers of his book were all players of the game. But the two main characters are very new to walking the planes, and when the gnome starts giving them a guided tour of Sigil I figured that here were the necessary explanations and definitions. But all it was was a guided tour, and questions were left untouched. And I do not just mean story questions that will be answered later in the book or trilogy as the plot unfolds, but major ones regarding the setting itself. Things such as, "Who is this Lady of Pain you keep talking about and what does she do?" and "What, exactly, are the planes and the portals? How do these things operate?" Nothing is said of how the society of Sigil works, the Bloodwar that seems rather important gets barely a mention, and the characters and readers are left in the dark about a great many things. It made me think of the darkness of very deep water penetrated by a minisub's light. You can see what's going on right in front of you well enough, but there is very little context to put anything into. It's not a very fun feeling.
And that, I feel, is the worst of it. Those are questions that need answering, but although I read half the book there was absolutely no indication they ever would be (except, presumably, the Bloodwar thing, since that's the title of the trilogy). As far as I could tell, King wasn't even aware that these questions were there, or these novice green planewalkers would have been asking at least some of them. That, and how the surface plot of a kidnapped uncle just never did grab my interest, is why I stopped reading. I simply wasn't enjoying it.
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