If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley

[lightreads]

If at Faust You Don't Succeed by Roger Zelazny

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


A thief takes the place of the selected representative of humanity in a history-hopping contest between heaven and hell for the destiny of humankind.

Picked up because I wanted something light and fun. Finished because sometimes my hatred for a book is so strong I have to see it to the bitter, misogynist end to fully grasp its awfulness.

Truly terrible. Flabby and unfunny – unpunny? – and, um. Look, I expect a certain amount of misogyny from Zelazny. I mean, don't get me wrong, I dig a lot of his books, but with a few exceptions the dude was not good at conceiving of women as something other than vaginas with legs. But there's that and then there's whatever the hell this is, and what this is is the fuck not okay. At one point a woman character notices all the shit going down and is like, "you realize you're a raging asshole who treats women like objects to be stolen from other men, fucked and then traded for favors with other men, and discarded, right?" And then the book is like, "oh, huh, yeah, I guess. Let's get back to that, though!"

Ick. I need to scrub my brain out.




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Comments

[jadelennox]

Sigh. I haven't read that one, but Zelazny's so hit or miss. His good stuff is so amazing I'm willing to bear the awful, awful misogyny. I regularly read This Immortal and it's kind of unbearable on that vector: it has hot, evil vaginas with legs and hot, awesome, personality-less vaginas with legs, and sometimes doomed-to-messy-death vaginas with legs. But that means his entire range from mediocre (most of the second Amber series) to terrible (the rest of the second Amber series) is kind of unreadable. Only the great stuff is readable enough to see the great.

[lightreads]

Yes, exactly. But some of the great stuff is so genuinely fun and funny and clever. I also imprinted on him too early -- like eleven or twelve -- so it's only now as I'm going back that I can tell one pile from the other.