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My dirty-little-secret when I start to read a 372 Pages book is that I think, on some level, this is going to be the one I like. Every book. It's only been true of The Eye of Argon because I felt like 16-year-old Jim Theiss, without recourse to an editor (or a dictionary, it sometimes seemed) poured his heart-and-soul into his work and that managed to come through despite the many, many flaws.

I figured this book would be one I could read standing on my head, with one hand behind my back. And, I was wrong.

Dead wrong.

This book reminds me of Twain's famous advice to kill your "darlings". Claremont is so taken with his own ability to create imagery that he doesn't care whether or not he's actually communicating with the reader. I've heard this attributed to him being a comic book writer, and there were certainly places where pictures would've helped, and I could imagine (were it a comic book) the artist saying to him, "Hey, what do you have in mind here."

But let me recount a few of the sins of this 450 page book.

1. This is supposed to be a sequel to Willow. We get an opening sex scene, everyone pretty much dies 40 pages in, Willow murders a child, and later on we get a scene that is a direct lift of the final scene from the gore classic Hellraiser. Not exactly keeping in the spirit of the PG movie.

2. Anachronisms. Claremont seems to have no problem with dropping in "current year" references and Earth references. Nothing pulls me out of a fantasy world faster. Describe apartments as "mostly walk-ups" for example. The term "walk-up" originated around 1900 when elevators were in common use. At one point, he references Descartes "I think therefore I am". Rookie mistakes, IMO.

3. Editorial sloppiness. Passages of the text are copied and pasted verbatim. A conceit using Camel Case for some things (like the...spells?...InSight, OughtSight, MageSight) is inconsistently applied. Passages appear where figuring out who's doing what is nigh impossible. There's a paragraph with two different princesses and yet Claremont boldly just says "princess" and dares you to figure out which.

4. Names. OK, names are hard. So Claremont's approach is to give everyone three or four names and switch between them, sometimes in a very jarring way. First name, sure. Last name, okay, sometimes. Species name? A little crude. Epithet for species? Jeez, dude.

5. Magic inconsistently defined. Fantasy is a fragile thing: If you establish a character can do X or is immune to Y, while you can say "Well, they're not immune to Y+1" but you'd best be rigorous and as consistent as possible or the readers will begin to suspect you're lazy. In this book, we learn that Elora can see through "minor glamours" like the one protecting Willow, but despite looking right at him, she doesn't recognize him. The very next encounter they have, she absolutely does recognize someone pretending to be Willow well enough to pick out the non-Willow-like aspects of this character, even though she hasn't seen Willow for 12 years...when she was twelve months old. The book is rife with these kinds of inconsistencies.

6. Further, nothing matters. From the get-go Willow is described as exhausted, pushing himself beyond all fatigue, and therefore he can't cast a spell. Which he then casts and follows up with, well, gee he's even more tired. By the end, it's genuinely comical.

7. Claremont will use a metaphor/simile to describe something but it will often be a "X is like Y" construct where you get something along the lines of "The alabaster sound waves were like coruscating odors..." (not an actual quote) where instead of getting an insight into X you get even more confused about Y.

8. Everything is superlatives. The storm's not just as powerful as a dragon, it's as powerful as all the dragons combined! It's not just bright, it's brighter than the sun! It's not just a chilling scream, it puts banshees to shame. Everything being at 11 makes it impossible to respect anything.

9. Worse, if you care what words mean and are looking for a literal understanding, you end up reading things over and over again trying to figure out passages. Who's standing where? How did they get over there? Given the description of the place just described, how did this army of armored men sneak up on us?

10. The pseudo-omniscient narrator. Claremont uses 3rd person to describe things, but he switches from POV to POV "seamlessly" which is jarring and alienating. And then in places where a straight up POV change would be welcome, he uses a conceit where Willow, casting a very delicate spell (an overused trope in this book, that is immediately disrespected every time it's introduced) becomes the floor and therefore can see snippets of things happening all around the castle. (This feels very comic-book-y and probably would work in a comic book, to be fair.)

11. Claremont has "set pieces" for his writing. His darlings, I presume. So we get page after page of a ship being tossed at sea, the upshot of which is the characters end up in the same place as they started, but with some dead. At another point, he interrupts a delicate spell with a flashback of a miscarriage.

This last, much like the gratuitous child-murdering and the gratuitous Hellraiser knockoff, made it feel like Claremont was trying to be real, man. Life is hard. But besides that being cheesy, it was so ridiculously inconsistent as to be tedious. So, there was an apocalypse...but here's a perfectly thriving and prosperous town. We're constantly—whenever we need Willow to get the 1,000-yard-I've-seen-some-stuff stare—hearing references to Willow's adventures in the subsequent 10-12 years since the apocalypse and...well, life seems to be going on pretty much as normal.

I fared better than a lot of the 372 pages readers as I am quite familiar with a lot of the tropes—how this was ever intended to be a mainstream follow-up to the very mainstream movie eludes me—but even I despaired of understanding large sections of text in the middle of the book. Of course it isn't as toxic as the execrable Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff, but it grinds you down with pages and pages of misery and death which fails to capture the (admittedly minimal) charm of the film.

Still don't know after 450 pages whether or not Willow's family is dead or alive. Still don't know who the villain is, although I've been told it's the worst sort of time-traveler/alternate-universe-style stuff, and I believe that.

I sure as hell ain't gonna read the next two even longer books to find out.