Land of Dreams

Rating:
Summary: Not bad if you haven't read Bradbury.
Review: Not a patch on Bradbury's magisterial SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES; but then, not many of these type of books are. Blaylock comes up with the odd striking image - like a giant shoe washed up on a beach, for example - but he does little with them. There are no emotional resonances in the imagery, because the central characters and plot are underdeveloped, as are the various shifts in atmosphere. For a sense of a travelling carnival, I'd recommended Theodore Sturgeon's deeply flawed THE DREAMING JEWELS over this.

Rating:
Summary: Go to any lengths to find this glorious dream of a book!
Review: Read any novel by James Blaylock and I predict that you will end up musing about his unique characters, worlds, and images off and on in a dreamlike way for a very long time after finishing the last pages.I may be slightly biased in favor of Land of Dreams particularly among his books, since it was the first I read. I picking it up largely by a chance selection from a pile of new science-fiction/fantasy paperbacks at a large chain bookstore, never having heard of him before. As I learned that night turning page after page after page, Blaylock's writing is not science fiction. For that matter, most of his novels have a flavor hardly hinted at by the word "fantasy". Land of Dreams is, like many of Blaylock's California novels, set in a coastal community where the boundary between mundane life and the brilliance of new mysteries keeps fraying.Appealing characters, scintillating language, hilarious dialogue and observation, and a sense of the weird and wonderful are what I have come to expect when I am lucky enough to read or re-read something by James Blaylock. Whiffs of Robert Louis Stevenson, P.G. Wodehouse, J.R.R. Tolkien, Baron Munchausen, and Lord knows how many other great story-tellers and writers can be sniffed in the cheery and fragrant clouds from Blaylock's story pipe, but his creations are his alone. I believe he will be remembered as a great fantasist and stylist. He is among the few great fabulists now writing who truly delights in laughter and puzzlement. .I hope others read him, and recommend him to others as strongly as I do. I hope to write more about his other works in the future....but for now...try to find Land of Dreams

Rating:
Summary: A pretty good, it seems to me, book
Review: The feel of Land of Dreams is very similar to the very earliest Blaylock novels, Elfin Ship and Disappearing Dwarf. That means great ideas, great (oddball) characters and, of course, Blaylock's incomparable sense of the fantastic and the absurd -- but it also means some seriously clunky writing at times. (JPB might say, "The writing, it seemed to the reviewer, was, apparantly, somewhat awkward"). It's an enjoyable book, but I can't work up the same unbridled enthusiasm that I have for later Blaylock novels -- Paper Grail, Last Coin, All the Bells on Earth , Night Relics -- wherein his prose skills are sharp enough to deliver on the promise of his wild imagination.

Rating:
Summary: A pretty good, it seems to me, book
Review: The feel of Land of Dreams is very similar to the very earliest Blaylock novels, Elfin Ship and Disappearing Dwarf. That means great ideas, great (oddball) characters and, of course, Blaylock's incomparable sense of the fantastic and the absurd -- but it also means some seriously clunky writing at times. (JPB might say, "The writing, it seemed to the reviewer, was, apparantly, somewhat awkward"). It's an enjoyable book, but I can't work up the same unbridled enthusiasm that I have for later Blaylock novels -- Paper Grail, Last Coin, All the Bells on Earth , Night Relics -- wherein his prose skills are sharp enough to deliver on the promise of his wild imagination.