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Red Orc's Rage

Jim Grimson had never planned to eat his father's balls.Him and 99.9999999999999999% of all living people I guess (my own addition).This book was published 14 years after the previous one. That one could have been the end of the tale, but two major people were left practically in limbo. My guess was that Farmer lost interest in them. Much later battling his own demons Farmer came back to the series; the result was disastrous. It could be predicted from the first sentence I quoted: if the author had to start a book with such shocking revelation, it is a bad sign. Fans of long-running unfinished series take notice. The main character Jim Grimson grew up being abused by his father. By the way is it me, or happy families with normal parents are practically non-existent in literature? It is so easy to justify a character's weird behavior by saying that he/she was abused during childhood that it became a bad cliche. Anyhow the poor guy ended up in a psychiatric hospital. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest this book is not. Read the classic and forget about this one - you can thank me later. It turned out both Jim and his doctor are big fans of World of Tiers series (yes, this one; its first 5 books to be exact - this is book number 6). The doctor was so big on the series (self-promotion much, dear P.J. Farmer?) that he developed a method of helping his patients based on it. Each patient pretended to be one of the character from the series, tried to enter the world by using different meditation techniques, and took a peak at the World of Tiers through his/her character's eyes. In layman terms they loosen their already unstable grip on reality by pretending to be somewhere else. Jim choose Red Orc to be his avatar. Let me just say that this future creator and ruler of our own world had exactly the same abusive father - I take it Jim could not imagine any other situation. The whole book is about Jim's hallucinations. At this point the following question comes: why is his book a part of the series? We have nothing related to the actual world except for one poor guy pretending to be a character from the series. I managed to read 10% of the book. At that point I realized I have to either stop reading it and start just looking through the pages, or outright DNF it. I choose to exercise my willpower and look through the rest 90%. My conclusions are the following:1. It really has nothing to do with the series; it does not work even as a side story.2. It is really bad.3. People that like books 1-5 can safely skip this one; see #1.One star rating is probably a little harsh and if I thought really hard I could have given it 2 stars, but I tend to be a tough critic reviewing bad books from authors that could write much better. Avoid this stinker.
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