Gail Z. Martin's THE SUMMONER

For someone who studies fantasy, particularly epic fantasy, I realize that I don't particularly read a lot of epic fantasy. At least stuff written after the year 2000, anyway. So, after reading C. Palmer-Patel's The Shape of Fantasy: Investigating the Structure of American Heroic Epic Fantasy (Routledge, 2020), a worthwhile structuralist account of the genre, I made the concerted effort to read Gail Z. Martin's The Summoner (2007), the first book in her Chronicles of the Necromancer series. Considering that this book is about -- wait for it -- a necromancer, it was a natural starting point for Palmer-Patel's chapter on the heroic epic hero's confrontation with death.

I'll divide this quick review into the good and the bad.

THE GOOD
  • It's epic fantasy mixed with ghost stories! 
  • The cover of the book is sweet.
  • Um, vampires? I think there's vampires, at least according to GoodReads, since I didn't bother reading much past 200 pages. But vampires are cool.
THE BAD
  • Pretty much everything.
The good guys are . . . good, I guess? But let's go with bland instead. The hero-prince-necromancer fella never achieves any more depth than "lead protagonist." There's a bard, and a fighter / guardsman, and a mercenary whom Martin vainly attempts to make sound mysterious and grimdark hard. The evil usurper prince is just as bland, a figure who twirls his mustache and hates upon the common people with almost every sentence he utters. Sadly, The Summoner just repeats every genre fantasy trope. Beyond the ghosts and a thinly described multi-aspect Goddess figure, there's just nothing original or competent here. And those ghosts, btw, are not scary or even spooky. In fact, I had a tough time wondering why all the main characters were superstitious, given that this storyworld seemed pretty chill with the concepts of ghosts otherwise. The prince-necromancer dude keeps wondering to excess what his friends will think once they discover his abilities, but nothing ever comes from this plot point.

The writing itself is just bad, filled with clunky dialogue, wearisome exposition, and characters who "chuckle" or "grin" every other paragraph. The jokes are heavily forced "Oh this character likes pretty girls! This character likes drinking!" types of things. Video game fantasy jokes, basically. And evidently Martin decided that tension, suspense, and horror are simply extraneous concepts when dealing with an epic fantasy ghost story.

So, needless to say, I think I'll be skipping the rest. But sometimes reading a book like this, which is so amateurish that I cannot believe an editor ever found it publishable, makes me wonder why I've devoted so much scholarly concern to epic fantasy.***

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***
But then, last week, I read Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker, and I remember again how awesome the genre can be in the hands a good writer.

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