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    A Comedy of Terrors
    Unavailable
    A Comedy of Terrors
    Unavailable
    A Comedy of Terrors
    Ebook210 pages3 hours

    A Comedy of Terrors

    By Graeme Smith

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Segorian Anderson’s an Idiot. But that’s fine with him. It’s a well paying job with no heavy lifting.

    Nobody ever remembers Segorian. It isn’t magic - he just has the sort of face his own mother could forget, and she’s been trying to for years. But being forgettable is a job requirement for an Idiot.
    No, he's not the Court Jester. He doesn’t wear motley (whatever motley may be). That's a different union. He’s the Idiot. In a Queen’s castle, wine spilt down the wrong dress can lead to war, so someone unimportant has to be blamed for it. That’s the Idiot’s job. He’s the Idiot that did it, for any value of ‘it’. Of course, as soon as he’s exiled-for-life out of the castle gate, he uses his back-door key and sneaks back in. But that's not all. Someday, something really bad will happen. Really, really bad. Badder than a bad thing on a very bad day with extra badness. When the world’s about to end (or the washing up won’t get done – whichever comes first), who you gonna call? No, not them. They haven’t been invented yet. You call the Idiot, someone nobody will miss if things don’t work out. And now Peladon has a case of dragon.

    But the dragon may be the easy part. Segorian has woman trouble, and he’s the only person in the castle who doesn’t know it. Because to Segorian, women are an open book. The problem is, he never learned to read.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMuseItUp Publishing
    Release dateJul 31, 2012
    ISBN9781771270687
    Unavailable
    A Comedy of Terrors
    Author

    Graeme Smith

    Graeme Smith. Fantasy author. Mostly comic fantasy (which is fantasy intended to make you laugh, not fantasy in comics).Having Graeme Smith as my pen name is convenient, since it also happens to be my real name. I might try to be funny and say my pen is called Graeme, but then I'd have to admit I don't use a pen. Maybe I should call my keyboard Graeme instead.When I'm not writing (well, or editing my writing. Or re-writing. Or editing my re-writing. Or... Quite. You get the picture), I'm doing other things. Maybe things involving mushrooms. And knitting needles (but the less said about my cooking, the better). Maybe things like online gaming (If you know Bard Elcano, you know me. If you know a grumpy old dragon called Sephiranoth, you know me. If you know a tall, dark, handsome but brooding vampire, charming witty and brilliant - we never met. That's someone else.)So there you are. Graeme Smith. Me. Short, fat, bald and ugly (fortunately my wife has lousy taste in men). Time was, I worked on a psychiatric ward. Now I write about people who believe in magic and dragons, and who live where the crazy folk are the ones who don’t.

    Read more from Graeme Smith

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    Reviews for A Comedy of Terrors

    4.5/5

    3 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I actually heard about this book reading the author's pitch on Query Shark; it sounded intriguing and I discovered it had been published, to my delight. As far as I'm concerned, this was a decent read that unfortunately didn't quite reach the potential that summary promised.Let's do the good first. I liked the premise of the book, and it had several fun concepts in it - the protagonist, the teenaged dragon, the sergeants, how the halflings work, the entire Idiot business, and smaller touches throughout. When the humour worked for me, it worked. I liked the concept of the threat too.What I felt undermined that work was twofold: lack of clarity, and a rather dated air. I'm going to delve into that a bit because I don't want to just throw criticism around.Basically, there are several intersecting factors that contribute to the writing being unclear, and unfortunately that meant I found myself regularly being confused about what was going on. Not just the overall plot, but what was actually happening on the page. There's the overall plot, which is complicated in a vaguely noirish sort of way and gets slowly revealed over time. There's the protagonist, who is an unreliable narrator despite being first-person, and holds back crucial information. He's also supposed to be slow on the uptake, and not understand women (of which more later). There's also the setting, which is a comedic fantasy world in a very self-aware way, so people make jokes about not having invented the French yet, and use lots of references that don't exist in their world. There also seem to be some explicit laws of drama that exist in the setting, although I couldn't quite work out what they were (which is itself a bit of a problem) as well as a set of Rules that the narrator understands to apply to the events of the story, but which are themselves only discussed right at the end. And finally, sometimes the actually writing just isn't very clear. There were sections that I reread two or three times while I tried to work out whether something was a description of what was happening, a description of something that happened in the past, a comedic aside, or something else entirely. There are flashback sections (I think?!?) and time cuts, which add to the confusion. The comedic asides often tend towards being back-and-forth misunderstanding routines that get quite long, and the writing wasn't tight enough to maintain clarity for the reader while the characters are confused. (I think there were also some issues with line breaks, which meant dialogue and description sometimes ran together in ways that seems odd - that added to the confusion, but I can't fairly ascribe that to Smith)I don't want to say that the writer was trying to do too much - it's pretty complex as I said, but I don't think he was overstretching himself - but I feel like this whole book could have really done with another editing pass and at least one more round of (new) beta readers to try and nail down the clarity issue. I personally enjoy comic fantasy and was interested in the plot, but I know some people would have given up because they told me so when I talked to them about this book.I also felt that the ending fell rather flat, because essentially it felt like a deus ex machina. I'd tentatively guessed at the Big Secret (which I won't reveal) but that didn't matter. However, the solution to the problem involved a lot of trickery around those aforementioned Rules, and unfortunately I didn't feel like they'd been sufficiently well-established during the story to really support being the crux and key of the predicament. So it sort of felt like, having created a powerful threat, the author was suddenly introducing limits to that threat and immediately using those limits to defeat it. I might have missed something during reading, though.So, that second issue. The style of the book, or specifically its comedy, felt rather dated, and that comes down a fairly fundamental part of the book, which is gender. The protagonist's inability to understand women is a constant refrain, but it's a fairly blunt feature. Essentially, he's completely oblivious to even explicit female interest, even in his thoughts. Alongside this is a steady trickle of the sort of thing aging comics used to do onstage: men are clueless dullards, women are cryptic and emotional, both are incapable of taking the slightest step to overcome their misunderstandings. It didn't bother me, it just didn't do anything for me either. I was intrigued by the book's tagline that "To Segorian Anderson, women are an open book. The problem is, he never learned to read" but I suppose I was expecting something a bit more complicated than this.I didn't dislike this book. I enjoyed it on the whole, and I thought the premise and multiple aspects of the book were interesting and had a lot of potential. I felt quite invested in the love triangle, for example. Unfortunately I thought the writing detracted somewhat from both the plot (by confusing me) and the humour (by getting in my way). I also felt that the reliance on a specific style of gender humour missed opportunities - I feel like Segorian's naivety and his dynamic with Sandy and Sonea could have been exploited with more variety, even without shifting from the basic premise of "doesn't understand women". Given the intriguing touches that Smith throws in elsewhere, I think he could have managed it.I'm rating this 3 stars, which for me means I'm glad I read it, but have enough reservations that I don't immediately want to buy his other books or recommend it to my friends. I'm interested to see what Smith can come up with in future though.
    • 5/5
      Sagorian is an Idiot. Not just any idiot but the Royal Idiot. Most days his job is simple and only gets exiled for life but that's not a problem since he has a key to the back door. But when a nonexistent dragon shows up in the kingdom it takes an Idiot to go be it's not dragonslayer, and that's when the job really gets tricky.In this story the twist and turn happen not only in the plot line but in the characters conversations as well. This is not your traditional fantasy story as fantasy may not yet have been invented.
    • 5/5
      This book is a humorous fantasy story about the Royal Idiot, the Queen, and a dragon named Sandy and their fight to save her kingdom from an evil demon who plans to eat everyone. The one problem they have is they don't know where the demon will appear, which is important because they must stop it in the few moments after it appeals or it's all over. They also face a number of other problems, such as the Royal Idiot climbing up a wall covered with poison ivy, but these are minor things compared to being eaten by a demon.Now, that's the basic story, but the telling of it is... quirky. The writing is fresh, new, and gloriously funny. It could be described as Tom Robbins meets Douglas Adams -- characters refer to things not yet invented (such as French), strange beings are strange (such as Peskies -- think evil pixies), and lots of confusion. The characters are, well, characters and very interesting in their own little warped ways. The plot moves along nicely, if not with a few bumps here and there (it's the dwarves), with the ending a surprise.Honestly, I'm not a big fantasy reader and I usually find humorous stories lacking, but this one held my attention from beginning to end. Heck, I even bought an ereader so I could finish the book after reading the sample!