Have you ever read a book so bad you feel the urgent need to bad mouth the author and defame the book entirely? Right, you’ve read my segway, so you probably know what’s going to ensue.
The book in question is ‘Eyes of God’ by John Marco. Fans of the fantasy genre might think, "Hmm, nice title, cool cover" but seriously this book serves an expensive lesson that books should not be judge by their covers, no matter how cool looking they are.
If one would turn to the first page of the book, you’ll see random quotations by apparent "book critics" who actually commend the book. Of course the actual critics are of obscure fame. Let me just show you one of the quotes:
"This is no lightweight book. Marco’s characters are complex and multidimensional, and his seemingly simple story is a rich, complex exposition of high fantasy with an underlying brutal reality. This brutality is punctuated with Marco’s skill as a military writer-battle scenes in The Eyes of God are massive in scale while remaining rich in exquisite, personal detail."
-Editors of Amazon.com
Alright, notice how they glorify the characters as "complex and multidimensional"? Well I don’t know what crack the editors of Amazon.com’s been smoking but the characters are anything BUT multidimensional. They are so 2-D I’d go so far as to say, they’re like the cut-out paper dolls that used to come out in old magazines where girls can play dress up with. And about "complex"? It’s about as complex as the plot of The Fast and The Furious (yes, ladies and gentlemen it really is that simplistic). Good guys are the stereotypical "Knight in shining armor" archtype, while bad guys usually turn out to be either the blundering buffoon or predictable final boss of every RPG. Come on, what about some mastermind playing the buffoon or the knight in shining armor that turns out to be a serial rapist and murderer? While I don’t particularly like Sephiroth of FFVII fame, he’s a better example of a complex character.
On the subject of plots, the intricasies of the plot is well, unintricate. It’s so predictable even a dime store gypsy can see how the princess dies in the end. Oops, major spoiler there. Not that it makes much difference anyway. I saw that coming.
Moving on, the setting of book is well fantasy, but seriously, Johnny boy must have gotten lazy after writing the second chapter of the book because in fantasy, I usually expect something more… fantasy-ish. Here’s a little peek into what "amazing" things await the reader in the book. There’s a dessert. In the dessert are people, people who apparently dress and behave like Arabians of old (or at least what we read in Arabian Nights). Even the women in the dessert cover themselves from head to toe in well, familiar garbs. Uncreative, very very uncreative.
But I digress. i remember back in secondary school, there were English lessons (duhh), and during those lessons the teacher would sometimes ask us to write essays. Well, I remember those essays, or at least what they looked like, and I what I think is that Eyes of God is just one very very long essay written by a secondary school student, albeit one with a range of volcabulary and perfect grammar. So this is what I think, John Marco is nothing more than a child with delusions of grandeur, thinking his works can match up to masterpieces by the masters of fantasy such as R.A. Salvatore, Robin Hobb, George R. R. Martin & Raymond E. Feist. In the realm of fantasy, John Marco would be the village idiot. His works are simply lacklustre and insipid. It was a pain getting to chapter 10 and even that I only read parts and pieces of the book. I would go on and on about my apprehensions with the book, but I am simply too inarticulate to properly describe them. So I guess I’ll end here.
Good hunting.
