I'm going to do something terrible. I'm going to "review" a book by a brilliant writer without finishing it, because I don't think I'll ever finish it.  But my purpose isn't to review the book; it's to make a point about writing.

Darrell Schweitzer may be the smartest, most-creative person who's ever written fantasy. I see him as a tragic figure. I've watched him for many years, as he shows up at every science fiction convention on the east coast, aggressively selling books in the dealer's room and in the hallways.  I'm his stalker.  I'll spend an hour listening to him on one panel (where he will speak more than his "fair" share, which is fair, as he has more interesting things to say than everyone else).  Then I'll follow him to another panel and listen to him for another hour, then follow him to the con suite and sit a little distance away in a chair and just listen as he goes on for another hour, pouring out facts and ideas about the Byzantine Empire, Aboriginal petroglyphs, or another funny but tragic story about Philip K. Dick, connecting them all together with reasoning as crazy and yet obvious in retrospect as a Tim Powers novel.

I may be the only person in the world who finds him so fascinating.  The other people he talks with more often seem irritated at not being able to inject their ideas into the conversation in the face of Darrell running at full steam.  I'm usually the guy crowding other people out of the conversation, but Darrell is one of the few people who is so interesting that I'd rather hear what he's going to say next than to speak my own thoughts.

He works so hard, and he loves fantasy and science fiction.  He did many of the best interviews of all the grant masters of the past fifty years, and has collected them in a series of little books called "SF Voices" or "Speaking of the Fantastic", which you can buy from him in the dealer's room of any major science fiction convention between Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and Boston.  I've been rooting for him for years, waiting for his breakthrough novel, for him to get the recognition he deserves, but just watching him get older and greyer.

Funny thing, though, is that I never read any of his novels.  His short stories, his interviews, his essays, yes.  Not his novels.  I have a huge reading list, and I never read books unless they're strongly recommended by many people.  No one ever recommended his books to me.  He hasn't written many; if you search for his novels on Amazon you won't find them, because he's edited so many books--mostly collections of Lovecraft, horror, mystery, and pulp adventure that are not nearly as good as Darrell's own writing.

But when I realized, after posting some unsuccessful ponyfics, that I was an unpopular author because I tried to put too much abstract reasoning into my stories, I wondered if there might be a clue as to what I was doing wrong in Darryl's work.  So I bought Mask of the Sorcerer, which he recommended as his best.

It's a little unfair to treat this as a novel, because the first 4 chapters were originally a short story.  The novel's main failing is that those first 4 chapters are a complete story, meaning you have little motivation to continue on to chapter 5.  But there's more to it than that.

The hero is the son of a magician.  They live out over the water on the end of a great pier of an exotic city, which worships and fears the river gods, who are very real.  The magician becomes a sorcerer, summoning the dead to mysterious rites in their house at night.  He sends his son out into the river among the crocodiles and spirits at night to receive a great vision.  The son receives the vision; he returns to find his mother has disappeared and his father will not say how.  The sorcerer calls up a great storm which wrecks the city; he dies; the townsfolk burn the house; the boy seeks out the Sybil; the Sybil pronounces his fate; the boy returns home to see his sister stolen away by his father's spirit and to receive a threat from a zombie.  The boy journeys down the river of the dead in search of his sister.

That's, like, the first two chapters.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.  This book contains too much wonder.  Almost every page introduces something new and wondrous and amazing, which recasts the underlying reality of the story world and your understanding of what is possible and what is good.  Never at any point in the first four chapters did I have the slightest clue as to what might happen next.  Darrell let loose and blasted me with a firehose of fantastic beings and events, and it was too much.  Everyone the main character cared about was soon dead or worse, but it wasn't clear how much that even mattered in this world, or whether getting them back was possible or would be a good thing.  I had no ground to stand on, no context to use to decide what I hoped would happen.

Ergo, I didn't care what happened next.

The book has wonderful things in it.  The theme is something about destiny.  The main character doesn't want to become a sorcerer, but can't escape his destiny, which seems to be to become horrible, inhuman, and god-like.  But the only piece of firm ground to stand on was the main character's desire to throw off his destiny as as sorcerer and return to his teacher, to learn to copy and illuminate manuscripts.  That dream is ripped to shreds in chapter 5.  So you're left with a protagonist whose main goal is not do everything that he has to do, and with befuddlement over what you should be hoping for.  And, perhaps most importantly, the suspicion that none of this is relevant to you, because the world and the main character's destiny are nothing like your own.

Fantasy can't exist without the mundane.  All wonder and no normality is like all Pinkie Pie and no Applejack.  Er.  Or something.