BASEMENT MEDICINE
BOOK REVIEWS

In the chance that the cover illustration somehow fails to convince you, this book was hand-selected for awfulness. I found it in the Science Fiction/Fantasy bookcase at ReCycle North, and God knows it had a lot of worthy competition from the battered paperbacks that surrounded it. What initially piqued my suspicion that this might be something special was the front cover. Additionally, this, unlike most of the books around it, had no quotes of praise printed on the back, where, instead, I found a semi-accurate synopsis that had me hooked for good.

The bulk of the story takes place in another universe, one of the sword-and-sorcery type, and centers around the sorriest bunch of protagonists I’ve ever met. In the kingdom of Coramonde, Prince Springbuck is supposed to fight his half-brother Strongblade to see who gets to be king. Prince Springbuck doesn’t want to do this, because he knows that Strongblade’s mother Fania and Yardiff Bey, the court magician, are going to make sure he loses. After unsuccessfully trying to abdicate, Springbuck has no choice but to escape, which consists of digging some war hardware out of storage, tying up his girlfriend so she doesn’t tell anybody, and running away as fast as possible.

He’s the hero. Just keep that in mind, because, despite high moral carriage, Springbuck often seems woefully underqualified for the tasks he sets himself to – tasks that amount to nothing less than civil war. Doomfaring.

Springbuck beats it to a town called Erub, where he meets up with his only hope for resistance – the wizard Andre deCourtney and a scholar called Van Duyn. Van Duyn is not of that universe, and some time ago he was a scientist in the United States who found a way to get between worlds using a machine he built.

Located in Erub is an ancient castle which deCourtney and Van Duyn, flanked by their village followers, have holed up in to brace for a coming attack. As a matter of fact, Yardiff Bey has sent over a dragon to squash them, and this is where the book – until now almost hilariously cliché – actually starts to be interesting. Van Duyn, with the help of deCourtney and his sorceress sister Gabrielle, has decided to summon help from home, an attack vehicle to fight the dragon.

What they end up getting is an APC, summoned out of the jungles of Vietnam. Led by Gil MacDonald, APC Alpha Nine – “Lobo” – abruptly appears in the middle of a field in Coramonde.

Daley’s unique style – which I’ll cover later on – is wildly uneven, but I will credit him with being good in the places where it really counts. The hardest kind of writing to do is the kind with no real-world reference, and in this case Daley had to fabricate from whole cloth the experience of being in Vietnam one minute and being in what Gil calls “Fantasy Land” the next. The following is one of the best exchanges in the book, and it takes place between Gil and another member of the Lobo crew, a man named Pomorski:

They saw an unusual building rather like a small castle on a nearby rise, some copses of trees and a primitive village farther back down the meadow.

“Cut the engine,” Gil ordered. He needed to hear himself think

Slowly, Pomorski said, “MacDonald, what . . . what’s happened? MacDonald?”

“What is this, Jeopardy?” The sergeant roared back. “Am I buzzing my answer buzzer? Am I?”

Things settle down after a crash course in acclimation (Daley actually makes a reasonable case for why everybody can understand each other). The men, although annoyed, are talked into fighting the dragon, a fight they win. Before they are sent back, Gil agrees to consider coming back when his tour of duty is up in Vietnam. After he leaves, the Doomfaring coalition heads toward the city of Freegate where, hopefully, they can rally some support.

I was confirmed on my expectations that the sheer lunacy of the book’s premise – that men fighting in Vietnam could be spirited across dimensions to shoot down a dragon – would aid, not hinder, my enjoyment of the book. Some of my favorite works of fiction are based on the concept that mixing two stereotypes together will make for quality entertainment. However, “Doomfarers” had a few surprises that caught me off-guard.

The big one was the structure of the plot. What I had originally imagined, based on the summary on the back and the cheesy cover illustration, was that Gil, his buddies and his machine would be summoned to Coramonde, they would kill the dragon, and then they would be persuaded to return to the capital and open up a can of vintage whoopass on Yardiff Bey.

What actually happened was, as I said, Gil and company are actually sent back to Vietnam and the Doomfarers set out for Freegate in order to put together a coalition of the willing. Which is kind of… odd. The standard plot structure for any fiction story is beginning-middle-climax-end. What happened here was that the plot rises up and falls back, again and again, like waves beating on the shores of my mind. But I was totally down with that, because after a textbook on snack foods (BM: 3/27/2008) and the most sanctimonious novel ever written (BM: 3/13/2008) I was ready to just faceplant in the worst book I could get my hands on.

But I failed.

Shortly after I bought this book, I did a preliminary recon mission over at Amazon, and I was startled to discover that that “Doomfarers of Coramonde” was still in print. I’d only read a chapter or two at the time, and this new information baffled me. Surely this book couldn’t be good… could it?

Well, it was and it wasn’t and it was. My original guess – that this would be a flawed but enjoyable book – proved correct, but not in the ways I expected. Daley’s writing was (mostly) stronger than I’d supposed. I had sort of imagined the plot as being drawn with a fisted crayon, shakily scoring a thick line from A to B. As a matter of fact, Daley had woven an intricate latticework that sort of fell down around his ears a third of the way through. Various details are prepared for the reader – Andre deCourtney has a magic stone, for instance, that has special properties – and are then just sort of set aside. Alternately, some things – such as Yardiff Bey’s demonic airship – more or less appear from nowhere. Yes, it’s a special airship, and he somehow lost an eye in obtaining it, but details sort of peter out there.

But at the same time, strengths appeared where I didn’t expect them to be. Not every hero can be Luke Skywalker. Sometimes you’re just some poor bastard with no natural talents or attributions other than a good moral compass and a rightful claim to the throne. Springbuck – and his allies – are all likable characters with personalities of varying intricacy.
And Coramonde – which I kept pronouncing “Cormorande” – is actually a pretty interesting place to be. Van Duyn said early in the book that, if Coramonde ever became as boring as the United States he’d left behind, he could hop aboard his machine and head to another universe. But he stayed. And so did I.