This just does not work for me. There's too many stories stuck together randomly, the "hero" is uninteresting and the cat even less so (he's supposed to be comic relief, I guess, but the whole thing is silly so that doesn't work either). I think I got far enough that I saw where all the threads will attach, but I was completely uninterested in following them along. And the fact that every kill is described (and sometimes re-described several times) in full gory detail was the final straw. Poooor Lyrec is a pacifist but a really good killer. And the auctorial fiat allowed by the magic trick of extracting information from everyone's mind...oh, come on. Sorry, no. I quit in the middle, and I do that very seldom. ( )

Princess Lewyn and her Father, King Duker, are attacked and she is taken captive while her father is murdered. Enter our hero Lyrec. Lyrec is not from this world and is searching for his lost love Elystroya, who has been kidnapped by the evil Miradomon, destroyer of worlds. With the help of another of Miradomon's victims, Borregad, who in this world has taken the form of a large black cat they start on a terrifying quest. Join Lyrec and Borregad as they learn how to travel among the human world trying to locate their enemy who is now trying to wreak havoc in this one. Great way to spend and afternoon in the sun. ( )

Slow going, hard to get into, generic fantasy. I picked it up and put it down countless times as new books I was waiting for came out and demanded to be read first. ( )

Lyrec is a fantasy adventure novel first published by Ace Books in 1984, and now available as an ebook through a writer's collective, Quolibet books. I was provided it through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers' program, and read it using the Kobo app on my phone.

What appealed to me when I saw it among the handful of Early Reviewer titles available to my country was its seeming resemblance to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, one of my favourite fantasy series. Sadly it arrived on my phone about the same time as Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, which I'd been waiting to read for months. So Lyrec had to wait a while. Then I went on a bit of a 'classics' kick, and Lyrec definitely didn't fit in with that. No.

Comparing Lyrec to the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series would be fairly unkind to Lyrec, as Leiber was one of those handful of geniuses who choose to work in genre fiction. Other readers of this kind of thing may not be as particular as I am about prose style. Lyrec's might at best be called 'workmanlike'. It never sings, but then few books do -- but sometimes it scrapes its fingernails on the blackboard. A good editor might have made a difference. There are scenes, especially early on, that slowly die amid long elaborate impenetrable descriptions of 'glowy magic' that make you think the author probably had a clear and beautiful vision of what was going on, and that this vision was a lot like an early 80s fantasy or science fiction movie. But this vision doesn't make it off the page. Perhaps a genius could make such scenes come alive, but the author of this book, as of most books, was not a genius. Perhaps it's also unfair that I review it after mainly reading geniuses for months before and after. These scenes serve as a good lesson to the novice writer about the importance of writing for your medium: don't write something that would look good on the cinema screen, because you don't have one; better to modify your vision to something that reads well than to try and fail to capture the incommunicable.

I've put off reviewing Lyrec for months after finishing it, partly through laziness, partly through busyness, and partly because I've doubted I can give it a 'fair' review. I like fantasy as a genre, but I've mainly read the best stuff, the top 1%. Lovecraft, Leiber, Howard, C.L. Moore, Eddison, Tolkien, Moorcock, Zelazny, Wolfe, Donaldson, Pratchett, Murakami. It doesn't quite seem fair to measure an 'ordinary' genre writer against these titans, as I've read very little of the ordinary stuff, like this, that constitutes most of the genre, and I plan to keep it that way. But now, sixteen weeks later, finally the guilt of having received a free book on the understanding that I would review it has prompted me to put fingers to keyboard.

After the first few leaden chapters I put the book down for a while, but when I picked it up again I warmed to it. There's a definite sense of improvement as it goes along, and characters who come to life and do surprising things. It's kind of fun. There's a sense of growth across it, enough that I wouldn't be surprised to learn the author has written much better books since.

It starts like a lot of fantasy; there's stuff going on here, then some unrelated stuff over here, another bunch of unrelated stuff over there... and while I know it'll come together eventually, it feels like I'm putting in a lot of effort chasing a goose through molasses and not enjoying myself in the meantime.

I might have been able to stick with this book better if it had unique elements, but it doesn't. It may have been more readable with better editing, too. If just one character had interested me enough to wonder what might happen next, I would be a happier reader. ( )