Customer Reviews

Pages of Pain

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I think that if one simply removed the planescape logo and offered this as the Modern Theseus, it would have been more widely read.

This is an amazing book. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a classic, but rather a modern myth for modern times. The story's narration was excellent, and the ending wasn't necessarily shocking and instead more akin to a tragedy in which you know what will happen but are enthralled anyway.

Denning's work on this book is marvelous. It rights it as if you are almost the Hero himself. When he's thirsty and exhausted, you feel thirsty and exhausted. And then the Lady of Pain talks to you. Which only makes the feel of the book more personal. I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone that likes mythology, or fantasy, etc. Great job Mr. Denning!

This book is the best TSR novel ever produced. It is not for the little teens that are reading Forgotten Realms... It's probably the most mature role playing ever written. If you are a fan of Planescape or you like good fantasy then go and buy it.

Once again Troy Denning shows us that he can take a great campaign setting and utterly destroy it. ... the first half was great, a very good adventrue type novel. Then he gets trapped in the mazes which turns into some symbolic crap about pain and suffering. When I want symbolism i'll read a great classic, but I didn't want symbolism I just wanted a good fantasy book, which in this case did not deliver.

Also, Denning still does not know how to write something in the first person point of view. At times it seems like the book is simply narriated, but then it turns into the Lady of Pains specific observances as to what is going on around the hero. The same thing was attempted with Crucible: Trail of Cyric the Mad and failed just like this book.

Precisely that. The first half is good. The second half, whilst in the maze, is bad. I got so sick of the pointless wandering about that I skipped ahead to the ending. The prose is pretty good, but there is little sentence variety. The sentences didn't all have to be so long! Reminds me of those run-on sentences from the eighteenth century...

And the hero? The first time I saw the summary, I thought it was the PS:T novelization with a different plot. As for his companions....after the first few sentences in which you meet them, they promptly lose all personality. They could have all been killed and I doubt the plot would have been affected much.

Final verdict: Don't buy this book. Borrow it, just for that first good half.

Is there a rule that all Planescape stories must star an amnesiac invincible hero? It's hard to write a third-person narrative about a nameless hero. The author's solution is to alternate strictly between "the Amnesian Hero" and "the Thrassan". I found two places in the book where this pattern is broken -- the scars, presumably, from an editor's knife.

Pages of Pain has some good moments on the philosophy of mazes, and of being a hero. But it's not a good book. Here's a taste: "Then my body nettles with a blistering itch no ointment can heal, and the greater my woe, the more scalding the anguish that seethes from the the greater my woe, the more scalding the anguish that seethes from the empty well inside. I boil in my own sick regret and I cannot staunch the flow. I burn with the shame of a thousand evils I cannot recall, and still the well pours forth..."

Mixed metaphors abound (like the hot breathy kiss with long fingers!) and the prose is turgid -- swollen and distended -- making it hard to read. The editor should have cut more. The bad prose is confounded by a terrible choice of typeface.

The book reads like an account of a roleplaying afternoon. Most of the story takes place inside a dull hazy maze, fighting a dull hazy monster, while the characters make maps and get steadily weaker. None of them have any character. The author has rolled up their stats, and looked up a page of quirks/specials for each, and spends the story revelling in these quirks. There's little character development, and little substance to the characters behind their quirks.

If like me you enjoyed playing the computer game "Planescape: Torment", and you're looking for a way to extend that experience, you probably won't find it in this book.

This is an amazing book by an amazing author. It is the story of a lost man who has forgotten his past, his love, his name--everything but a mission to seek the the most powerful Lady of Pain, ruler of Sigil, in hopes of regaining his loss. This book delves deep--the imagery created, metaphoric usage, and eloquent, poetic manipulation of wordage is nothing short of amzaing. This is by far the single best book I have ever read--Troy Denning is a god. I recommend it to anyone and everyone, but especially to those TSR lovers out there.

Have you ever read a poem, or seen a movie without completely understanding them - yet still found you really loved them? This is one of these stories. This is the story of a memory-less hero, who embarks on a quest to find his memory. The tale of his exploits is not an ordinary adventure tale: his adventures are poetic - philosophical. This a story which really makes the reader think. I know I did not fully comprehend all of it. Yet it is worth the read. This book will be great to anyone who loves philosophical fantasy novels - or loves the planescape setting.

Planescape is a wonderful videogame. The novels are superb and I recommend you buy them. The novel tells a wonderful plot and gives you infrormataion about the town of Sigil. Great Book!

I was so *excited* to read this book, having just recently discovered, and delved quite deeply into, the Planescape campaign setting. I love Planescape, it's wonderful as a backbone for a campaign, and perhaps it's partly the fault of the campaign setting itself that novels about it aren't all that "interesting" character-wise, because to be TRUE to the setting, BELIEFS ARE EVERYTHING. But the characters in this novel acted more like NPCs than PCs, if you know what I mean -- so very VERY one-dimensional that with each page I became less and less interested in where their one-dimensional journey (try to picture THAT one!) would take them. Their goals were flat and uninteresting, and their personalities never developed. One thing I noticed -- no one seems to SLEEP in the book (OK, a few times, but not enough); no time passes, really, or at least not enough to give any meaning to the rudimentary development the characters undergo. [Sigh...] I was so excited to read this book, but frankly I couldn't finish it, because I stopped caring about whether the characters would succeed or fail, or anything in between. But: nice descriptions of settings here, although a bit dark (even for Sigil)...