Customer Reviews

Castle Perilous

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

 

 

This book introduced me to the writings of John DeChancie. His writing is imaginative, witty and enjoyable in a way that is sadly hard to find elsewhere these days.

The actual story line of the book can be assertained by reading other user reviews, but suffice to say it's a story about a magical castle that resides at a universal and dimensional nexus.

Castle Perlious is the first novel in a series of 8 that will leave you amused and thoroughly entertained.

One day, someone somewhere will pick up Mr. DeChancie's books and you'll see them made into a TV or Mini-series, possibly into a video game, maybe into a pen and paper Role Playing Game. At any rate, they're far too good to remain cult classics forever.

I've read the entire Castle Perilous series and hooked a few friends and relitives to boot. Hard to beleive it all started back in 1988, <grin>. All are sweet eye candy but what a taste. The story centers around this castle with gateways into so many other relities that few can keep track of most of them, let alone all. The castle inhabitants are mostly people who stumbled though one of the portals and just decided to stay. Some books are strange, some are just plain great. If ya see any of this series I sugest checking them out.

Castle Perilous is a giant castle with 144,000 rooms that are portals to other worlds. These portals are constantly shifting in and out of other dimensions and occasionally they temporarily open up somewhere on Earth. At those times people may stumble into the castle and not be able to get back out. They become one of the permanent "guests" who have great food, luxurious accommodations, and servants to wait on them. Best of all, they get to explore some of the stable portals leading to exotic places. When Gene, Linda, and Snowclaw each stumble into Castle Perilous, it's under siege by the jilted lover of the castle's owner.

Here's a novel that's got some fun and whimsical ideas but never really capitalizes on all of its creative potential. I love the premise and the story is amusing, but it lacks passion and depth. The characters are shallow, we spend little time exploring the other worlds, and the humor is rather juvenile.

Castle Perilous is like one of those cool-looking kitchen gadgets you see on TV. It promises to be awesome, but when you get it you realize that it only does one job well and it takes up lots of drawer space, so you would have been better off just using your trusty paring knife. Castle Perilous is gimmicky and doesn't deliver what it promises. But, still, sometimes gimmicky kitchen gadgets are fun... until you want your drawer space back.

I'd recommend Castle Perilous to a teenager looking for a fluffy fantasy read. Fans of Piers Anthony's Xanth series or Robert Asprin's MythAdventures are likely candidates. Castle Perilous is the first in an eight-book series. Because I like the premise so much, I may give the second book, Castle for Rent, a try, but my guess is that this series is just too light for me.

I view "Castle Perilous" as a wasted opportunity. The novel's set-up certainly has possibilities. We have a magical castle so big that it makes Gormenghast look like a model, magical portholes to our world and thousands of other, characters of all kinds getting plucked up and deposited in various room where they're allowed to do as they please, and a mysterious war between a besieging army and the castle's master. Yet it never actually comes together into a decent novel. None of the individual parts are done at all well.

Let's start with the characters. We've got the down-on-his-luck guy who gets pulled into the magical world, the cowardly thief, the female love interest, the muscular monster who can beat up anybody. Yes, it's a bunch of stereotypes and nothing more. These folks simply aren't worth caring about. Neither is the plot. By necessity, if we can barely remember who each character is, we also won't care much about who wins.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that we never get any idea what the castle looks like. It's really the place that's the key to the entire story. Without a sense of where we are, the entire thing becomes at a loss. Likewise it undermines the action scenes, because we never get much visual sense of what's happenings.

The only good thing in the edition that I read was the cover art. Alas, it seems as if the publisher has decided to remove even that. Frankly, I recommend skipping this one and trying The High House, by James Stoddard. That book takes the 'magic building containing whole worlds' idea and really makes it work.

This is my favorite fantasy series, and when I later researched my own novel, I discovered a Hedy Lamarr movie with the title Experiment Perilous. I suggest it as a title for the next in DeChancie's series.

Castle Perilous is a confusing mess of a story and none of the characters show real depth of feeling or thought. The protagonists,Gene, Snowy, and Linda, are likable enough but just average, run-of-the-mill characters with nothing really to recommend them to a reader. Lord Incarnadine, the lord of Castle Perilous, is an enigma, rarely showing up in the book, and when he does, often times the reader doesn't even know it's him. The villains are one-note, very much driven by simple motives...again no depth of character...every one appears very much to be either good or bad, there is no middle ground in Castle Perilous.

But most disappointing of all is that the writing is as incongruous as the story. The writing was for the most part childlike but then would show flashes of adult content that was completely out of the blue and really had this reader's head spinning as to why it was included in the first place. Also confusing was how characters would show up in a chapter without any name being given to them...new chapters starting at a completely different place and time from the previous chapter with no clues given as to how much time as passed or what happened to the characters that were just a part of the story. Perhaps John DeChancie was attempting to make his writing as confusing and unpredictable as the actual Castle Perilous is in his novel, but all he ends up doing is alienating the reader and making a mess out of a simple story that could have been told in half as many words as he used.

I have no desire to read the other novels and I would not recommend this book to anyone....When I was done reading it, I thought I had wasted my time.

1.5 stars out of 5

This is one of the greatest light fantasy series ever. Humor, action, inventive ideas, often brilliant prose...it's all enjoyable. Don't believe any but the five-star reviews. You can't please everyone, but this series has millions of fans. The only thing I want to know is, when is the next one coming out. It's been too long since the last one!

Bar None, this has always been my favorite book. The only problem I had with it is that my original copy had a great picture on it and was just incredible with the details, this version while it has all of the original....has a boring cover picture.

Interesting concept, bought the entire series, highly derivative. Kept expecting more out of it.