/lit/ - Literature

>>21814868
The thing about Bakker is that you get these flashes of what might have been an actually good story; a vivid description of a battle here, a dramatic scene that delivers there, and the conceit of the main character being tormented by glimpses into the mythic lore of the setting in his dreams is a compelling way to deliver exposition, and build up the threat of the ultimate enemy ... but its all just drowned out by mountains of shit.

You have to wade through vast quantities of pretentious pseudo-intellectual gibberish about the innermost nature of man and life and birth and death and so on and so forth for every sliver of good prose. And every chapter is like this. There's this constant breathless quality to Bakker's narration, like every moment has to be more powerful and profound and revelatory than the last, but of course after the thousandth earth-shattering emotional revelation the thousandth fucking character goes it all just feels impossibly naff. A good editor would have excised a hundred thousand words from these books and they would be infinitely better for it.