Bedlam's Bard (Mass Market Paperback)

This book is great. The situations are realistic. One detractor complained about 'endless near-death escpaes'(something like that), but that is the one thing that I identified with. Eric is battling himself as much as any 'villian' in the book. His refusal to acknowledge his role leads, as it would in real life, to many pitfalls and situations. If you deny yourself, life seems to constantly put you in bad situations and frustrate you to no end until you get in line and follow your destiny.

This book is very good and there are lessons to be learned in it. And if you don't like it, go back to reading "Star Trek" or something by Stephen King. :P

I'm not sure if co-authoring with Ellen Guon had anything to do with the crud-factor of "Bedlam's Bard," but the shortcomings here are pretty much the same as those with Lackey's other novels. This book was like fanfiction gone pro: amateurish and untried, the literary equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon (and trust me, all the He-Mans and She-Ra's in Hanna-Barbera's 2-D world have more edge than this book). The characters are off-brand stock. The setting is bland. The heroes and villains are too obviously so, and the line between good and evil is too sharply drawn. The plot staggers along of its own accord like an epileptic chicken, leaving the host of pitiful characters to react like a bunch of brain-fried androids; they should be pushing the plot along themselves like well-rounded characters are supposed to do. Lackey's handling of names drives me batty: every character has some cutesy nickname. For about a fourth of the book we're seeing the name "Korendil", then out of nowhere, with no explanation, drops "Kory". Who?! It took me several pages to realize I hadn't simply skipped over the introduction to some new character or something. (And just how she managed to pull "Ria" out of the name "Arienrhod" simply blows my mind . . .)

For those looking for it, there is action in this book. Too much -- the sign of an author trying too hard to keep the reader hanging on. All it results in here is melodrama. Every single interaction and knee-jerk response is played out for the maximum emotional effect and beyond, to the point where the scene loses all credibility. Eric just *happens* to see an image in his head of Korendil in bed with Beth (who's an obvious foil the story could've done without); Eric rushes to Beth's and just *happens* to see the two of them embracing after an obvious bout of lovemaking. Eric runs off in a jealous crybaby rage and just *happens* to fall into the arms of his enemy and soon-to-be lover Ria, who weaves some kind of enchantment over him to keep our poor unwitting hero in her bed. Ria later spots him talking to his former comrades and she suddenly goes nutty as an escaped lab monkey, destroying her place while trying to kill Eric for apparently betraying her. I guess she forgot about her own enchantment. The authors were probably hoping the READERS forgot about it too. Oh well. As contrived and over-the-top as it is, at least that unfortunate little incident (and several others) gets Eric back to where the plot needs him. When your characters are that shallow, the bottom line is all that really matters.

At least there's one fault to "Bedlam's Bard" that can't be blamed totally on the authors: the typos. Page after page of typos. What's up with these editors nowadays? If you're going to have a book this poorly plotted, you could at LEAST give the reader one less thing to complain about. But then again, if you're going to publish a rotten book, you may as well make it rot to the fullest.