• “The smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting 'Scrooge McDuck' comics.”—Salon.com
  • A time-hopping, continent-spanning salmagundi of genres.”
    —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
  • “These books have to be word-of-mouth books because they're too weird to describe to anybody.”
    —Jackie Cantor, Diana's first editor

Tag Archive for ‘Diana Gabaldon THE METHADONE LIST: Sam Sykes TOME OF THE UNDERGATES’ rss

THE METHADONE LIST: The Tome of the Undergates

I don’t know that one could really say that any author or book is the “opposite” of any other author or book—but by contrast to A.S. Byatt’s THE CHILDREN’S BOOK, a literary novel by an old master at the height of her craft…here’s an epic fantasy by a young debut author—though equally crafty, it couldn’t be much more different in either style or structure. Sam Sykes’s TOME OF THE UNDERGATES _is_ what’s called “epic fantasy.” It’s not, however, anything like the classic “You know…boy/scroll/prophecy/dragon/sword…” description I once heard from a fan at a con. [g] In fact, one way in which Sykes’s work resembles Byatt’s is that nobody would _ever_ mistake either one of them for someone else. Now, TOME is definitely not for the faint of heart or stomach. One review of it I saw described it (approximately) as “a slaughter-fest that makes “300” look weak.” It does feature head-eating fish-demons, and it had one scene (involving thumbs, and that’s all I’m going to say about it) that even […]