Book #89 of 2024:
The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown
I love the initial premise of this novel, and I still feel like many of its subsequent elements have some potential charm to them. But the execution is beyond abysmal, beginning with the heroine with a severe case of written-by-a-man-itis: “She caught her reflection in the mirror on the back of the door and regarded herself dispassionately. She was always slightly disappointed whenever she saw herself in reflections or photographs. To her own eyes she was too tall and too thin. She thought her hips were too narrow and her chest too flat, and her eyes were big and wide like a startled deer’s. She never wore makeup, because she had never really learned how to do it, and her blond hair was always flying off in different directions no matter how much she brushed it.”
So that’s not a great piece of characterization to start from. But the plot is weak too, with an astonishing degree of important points that fall apart upon a moment’s consideration. This is, as it turns out, a story about time travel, even though that aspect doesn’t appear anywhere in the publisher’s official description of it. The titular book that the protagonist receives from a dying acquaintance doesn’t merely open any door to anywhere in the world; it can also reach anywhere in time as well. (Or theoretically, at least. For all their wide-eyed talk about the possibilities of this power and how people would kill to possess it, the characters never once visit the future and go no further than 50 years or so into the past.) Among collectors of such magical tomes, many don’t think this particular volume exists, and when speculating about it before it’s discovered, one remarks confidently that traveling back in time would surely represent a closed loop, with the traveler unable to change established events. The opposite he dismisses as “what you see in science-fiction stories” — ignoring the many entries of that genre that are very much built on the drama and irony of time travelers going up against immovable fate — and his baseless supposition about how it works in this reality is for some reason taken as fact by his friends. And even when the evidence does belatedly support that claim and everyone knows that history is truly fixed, several of them continue to fret about somehow altering the timeline. They also neglect to use the magic to investigate a pressing mystery when possible, and there are multiple instances of fakeouts with illusions from a different special book, making witnesses and readers believe someone has been violently killed when they are ultimately rescued by a time traveler later on.
I realize that was a long and esoteric paragraph, but I wanted to get all my frustrations with that part of the novel out of the way so that I could move on to discuss a few other weaknesses. Let’s talk about how when the hero learns that two young women have found the wonderful Book of Doors, he casts a spell on one of them to make her forget ever meeting him or learning about the text, supposedly for her safety. It’s an arrogant act that could be frustrating yet understandable in an intentionally flawed character, but makes no sense when he doesn’t likewise dispatch her roommate — the one I quoted earlier looking into her mirror to neg herself — in the same way. (It’s not like the book is bound to her or anything! Her protection is from simple plot armor at this point, and because she’s already become his designated love interest.) The first girl subsequently gets magically tortured by a villain with pain so extreme it makes her lose control of her bladder all over herself and breaks through the other guy’s memory block. So what was the point, if not simply an excuse for author Gareth Brown to write a woman in agony? She’s also one of the people who gets pretend-murdered by a bloody gunshot to the head, right in front of the friend who’s just lived through a decade in the past trying to find a way back to her. Which I don’t mind spoiling for you, because it’s such a cheap trick to play on our emotions.
What else? The antagonists are egregiously racist and sexist, descriptions of one person are fatphobic from everyone’s POV, and the heroine who finds herself stuck for ten years waiting to catch back up with the present seemingly spends that whole time romantically fixated on the brooding older man who upended her life and only knew her for a day or so before they got separated. It’s a real mess, and a waste of what could have been a fun concept in other hands.
★☆☆☆☆
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