Customer Reviews

Bad Magic

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am rarely down right impressed by a first novel. So many times you encounter writers who have great ideas, but still need work on the art of expressing those ideas on the page. Mr. Zielinski does not have this problem. From the first page, this book packs power. It is gritty, scary, funny, sad & one of the most delicious reads I've enjoyed in months.
The characters are wonderfully weird, tacky & in some cases a little mean. Just enough to be utterly human, even in the midst of their most magical behavior.
This is also a very visual story. I could see the action & I loved it. It was like reading a comic book with out the illustrations.
Buy this book. Love this book. And pray there's a sequel.

This is an intensely realistic book. Sure, there's magic (or, if you must, "magickal technology") all over the place, but an awful lot of work has been done making the characters seem like real people (or whatever they happen to be) uneasily at home in their environment...never have I seen a description of a working mage that makes learning what he knows seem at least as difficult as acquiring a doctorate in theoretical physics.

Nothing is perfect: sometimes the studied lightness grates, and there's just a bit too much wackiness-for-its-own-sake near the end...but an author who knows where to lift from Pynchon, Burroughs (probably), Andrews Vachss, and Walter Gibson, and is good enough to acknowledge the fact, scores highly thereby.

But again, Zielinski seems to know very well that when you've dropped the reader in what is in effect a new world, and you're not about to spell everything out, well-made characters serve as a strong anchor when the setting and plot are hard to immediately understand.

I'd like to see more of this world and characters, but wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the author left it and them alone, while they're still pretty much perfect...look at the later Ringworld or Riverworld books to see why.

After that, it's just a book review.

Every fantasy author asks us to believe in a world created solely for the purpose of the story. Magic, of course, is a must. Then some number of magic workers and creatures - alchemists, vampires, elemental witches. And, of course, there are a few heroic human types to leaven the bread. Settings vary, but this time we find ourselves in San Francisco with a team of mages and warriors determined to root out those forms of magical creatures that consider humans as walking lunches. They are an Opposition task force, whose headquarters are in Seattle, and whose enemies lair in San Diego. All that saves us mundanes is a learned response to deny occult occurrences - what we won't see, can't hurt us - most of the time.

Suddenly San Francisco is the target of the vulture cult, a group that survives on human misery and anger and who will bring down the world if they can feed their god. This is an unequal struggle. Our team of eight consists of quirky individuals who argue and criticize as much as they coordinate. And the forces they are taking on are numerous, and armed with hell creatures like thin dogs and zombies. The odds definitely favor the end of life, as we know it.

For all their special abilities, the team works more like the A-Team than it does a magic circle, although their efforts at military precision often are more comic than effective. They are as likely to shoot an enemy as bespell it, but more often than not what saves them is a strong ability to beat a hasty retreat and a knack for having the right spell for the wrong reason. There is something vaudevillian about witches whose totem is a clam or houses that fly away when you press the panic button.

Zielinski keeps things going at the speed of a Chinese fire drill - there is no such thing as a time when someone isn't in dire need of help. Attitude is the rule of the day, as are wisecracks in the face of doom. What suffers in the flurry of action is character development, although all the star players are given enough initial depth to keep the reader in touch with them. Zielinski has laid the groundwork for a series with an interesting premise and sequels may accomplish what one volume cannot.

On the whole an enjoyable book, one I'm glad I took the small risk of reading. Perfect for the thrill seeker who thinks too many long incantations spoil the broth.

Bad Magic I liked a lot. Though ultimately it is nothing more than a description of a San Francisco-based Mage: The Ascension (and it is worth noting that Mage has a lot of astute social commentary) campaign, it is hilarious and very interestingly written in an odd, breathless, present-tense mode that manages to be enthusiastic and laconic at the same time. For example:

Whitlomb chokes, "Try the big red one."
Arbeiter pushes the red button. The building sprouts wings and flies away.

Later, and equally casually, do we learn the extensive consequences of making a building fly away. But it works, and well. Funny too.

After the story ends there is an extended, and only tangentially related, appendix in the form of a scholarly article about a form of the undead called zombi diego, who are essentially well-tanned people from San Diego. The article discusses the debate between those who believe zombi diego to actually just be human beings and those who point out that the zds discorporate when exposed to Tibetan salt, just like any other undead. So there!

One of our favorites: fast, funny, over-the-top weird, and lots of fun. We keep only our favorites among the many novels we read (one of us has read over 10,000 fantasy and science fiction novels so far, the other over 2,000), and we both own Bad Magic. Highly recommended.

So it seems we all have a third eye. When we choose to open this eye, we're able to perceive all the occult horrors lurking amongst us, just waiting to pounce. But, a long, long time ago, we've learned to firmly keep that third eye shut, as a defense mechanism for our sanity and our souls - the ostrich mentality being that if we can't see the monsters, then they can't see us. Fortunately, there are a select few out there who valiantly make use of their mystic eye to safeguard humanity from the ever present forces of darkness. Me, I'd rather keep that eye close, thank you very much.

BAD MAGIC is Stephan Zielinski's first book and it's one of the weirdest, wackiest, and hippest fantasy/horror reads I've ever come across. This book just explodes with fresh ideas as it chronicles the exploits of a cell comprised of eight people striving to foil the inimical, magical beasties of the night. The author's employment of a staccato narrative style and judicious use of fragmented, present-tense sentences lend a sense of immediacy and urgency to the storyline. The tone and creativity are reminiscent of a Roger Zelazny product; dazzling, descriptive passages fly off the pages. Some of my favorite sentences: "The serum is screeching through their systems like a thousand randy Siamese cats; which makes sense, because that's one of the ingredients"; and "They hear a ram smashing into the door. Fortunately, it's reinforced with congealed hard gamma and sealed with the stubborness of a septuagenarian Republican." And, one of the characters, on handing a hundred-dollar tip to an outraged waitress, advises her to "...spend it posthaste, indulging in whatever pleasures you hold dearest, before somebody nails a loop of your intestines to a tree and chases you in an ever-diminishing circle." Very cool reading.

Here are just several of the loopy concepts in BAD MAGIC: zombie thin dogs, the Lockjaw of Doom, the religion of the Geoduck, San Diego as the hotbed of evil, werejaguars, a flying house, moths who worship us as gods, dolphins who have humans as their totem animals, the use of H.R. Giger artwork to help combat the forces of the night...My favorite concept may have been that of being able to steal away a homeless person's sense of invisibility (because no one ever notices the homeless, right?) and spinning it into an invisibility cloak. With eight prickly characters who don't like each other yet depend on each other for survival as they fight the good fight, there isn't a lack of juicy verbal sparring or of sincerely felt animosity. These are NOT nice people - and they're the good guys. My favorite of the protagonists may well be Al Rider, a synesthetic mage of no mean talents but of dubious character and who has a tendency to panic. I'm also fond of the enigmatic Creedon Thiebaud, who reminds me somewhat of the Shadow (but scarier), while the taciturn and socially awkward elemental, Maggie-Sue Percy, elicits the most sympathy.

On the negative side, I would've liked to have seen more of Rider's masterpiece, the Egg, or rather what it birthed. More focus on the bad guys, the Vulture cult, would've been also nice, and the ending may well have been a bit abrupt, although, come to think of it, it did seem to fit the author's quirky sensibilities. But, believe me, these are all minor quibbles.

With this debut novel, Zielinski has put the reader on notice. He is definitely one to watch out for. I really can't wait for his next book to see what new sorts of bedazzlement he'll offer us. But, in the meantime, if you haven't yet checked out this wild, rollicking, and darkly funny tale, I urge you to do so. But before you open the pages, make sure you've got some Tibetan rock salt on hand. Just in case your third peeper accidentally opens.

Most people are unaware of paranormal entities residing in this world, but those that use the third eye see the creatures of myths and legends quite clearly. An octet with wide open third eyes wants to eliminate these cretins who cause suffering and pain in innocents. One of these individuals manages to remove strands of pain and takes it to his laboratory for study.

This underground group comes to the attention of the Vulture Clan who wants to control the San Francisco human and non human population; the Vultures see this group of eight as a threat to achieving their objective. They send magical dogs to kill the enemy, but the group escapes, but not before one of them were turned into a werewolf. Using their varying magical skills, the octet plans to stop the Vulture Clan, but first must retrieve a jaguar from South America to use in a spell that will convert back to human the werewolf member bit by the dog. Then they will challenge the Vulture Clan knowing that each one of them will probably die in the ensuing battle.

Though a bit difficult to keep track of who's who amongst the champions as BAD MAGIC has eight heroic protagonists, each is eccentric in their own way. Stephen Zielinski's debut novel is an edgy roller coaster ride of thrills and chills as the classic confrontation between good and evil plays out with no guarantees as to whom will triumph. There is plenty of humor as the heroes and the author looks at the upcoming altercation with a tongue in cheek attitude that makes for even more fun reading.

Harriet Klausner

I enjoyed this book overall; I'd happily read nonfiction from this author, and I'd love to see the roleplaying campaign this story is obviously adapted from. (Which puts it above Ed Greenwood's books...not that this is strong praise).

That said, the ending is one of the most poorly-designed and anticlimactic set pieces in the history of fiction. Allies and villains pop up and fall down like rodents in a whack-a-mole game, and display about as much depth and character development. Many parts of the plot read like the author came up with them by rolling percentile dice and checking some sort of random adventure table.

This is a book I could happily quote from, but not one I could recommend.

I randomly picked this book up from the local library, and while reading it was simultaneously entertained and annoyed.

Zielinski uses a unique style of writing which is unusual, and, quite frankly, didn't appeal to me. Take a look at a page or two before you buy this, to see if you can stand it.

If you can stand the style, then you will appreciate the characters, world, and environment he has created. I was particularly fond of the characterization of anything worth buying being priced in terms other than money. The various forms of currency, and the system of magic that seemed to reside behind it, are unique and interesting.

Overall, a 2 of 5. I just couldn't finish it...