I Didn't Finish "Crimson Queen" By Alec Hutson

O-VER WRIT-TEN (clap clap, clapclapclap)

Boring, like watching a painting dry.

All genre writers struggle with balancing storytelling and world building, because scifi and fantasy require extensive amounts of both to keep pacing sharp. Too much of world and you veer into a Death Gate Cycle where the world itself stands above the characters. (Death Gate is good, I just never like Weiss and Hickman’s obsession with songs and legends and cosmology) Too much of character and you veer close to Ninefox Gambit. (Again, a good book, but they never explain anything to how the tech works!)

But man, Weiss and Hickman might be too much for me, but this obliterated whatever criticism I had for them. It’s been a while since I’ve had a book this utterly self-indulgent in every little impulse that the writer reached out for. Alec Hutson is in dire, desperate need of an editor, because this book sprawls all over your hands like a corporate oil spill, covering you in muck and slime and forcing you to spend weeks with Dawn dish soap figuring out what the fuck you’re even looking at.

Crimson Queen is, in theory, about a lot of things. Keilan is a young boy from a fishing village who has sorcerous powers, and he’s outed about this and sent to the paladins to be Cleansed of his magic. A decent hook, as in this world the Pure is an order of magic-immune and sorcerer-sensing knights created to end the tyrannical rule of wizardry. But he’s rescued from his captors by a sorcerer and his team of rangers to be trained in magic, because [Chosen One narrative goes here]. At the same time, Alyanna is an immortal at the side of the Pure’s mighty Emperor and is quietly directing events in the background, including her possibly-former-lover Jan, another immortal and bard who has memory loss.

You might be thinking, so, Luke Skywalker in a fishing village, then we’re going to get some sort of YA training book with Keilan, right? And the answer is, no. Keilan is instead going to go on a road trip with a bunch of other people, which includes seeing a lot of places and meeting people. Why? I honestly have no idea, it was mentioned once and never again. He will be trained in swordplay for ten minutes. The rest of it will be spent with banter, switching to other characters, and lengthy descriptions of history and nations. His training is presumably going to start in the next book, at the fireworks factory.

Crimson Queen seems to think it is a soaring epic, but it’s not — it’s a bad, cliche-riddled tabletop novel padded to shit and back with indulgent prose, contextless proper nouns, and bloat. Keilan’s rescue party wanders off to some ruins because Vehlan the sorcerer wants to see them. It is never explained why they didn’t do this the trip over or why they have no urgency given Keilan’s such a high priority for the balance of power in the kingdoms. They discover a secret entrance and find some ancient scrolls, are attacked by spiders, and are rescued by the paladin that took Keilan.

Why did this happen? Again, I have no idea. There’s an offhand mention of valuable scrolls, but we’re off to the next location. The paladin vanishes from the story.

We then are introduced to Xin, a warrior from a far off land who has some sort of mental bond with his other soldiers and — no shit — talks like a hanar from Mass Effect.

There’s a gap between ‘derivative’ and ‘I just borrowed this,’ Alec.

We spend a few chapters introduced to them before they are (again) attacked. Keilan instinctually uses some ancient magic to save them but Xin’s brothers are killed, sinking him into a depression, and then we’re moving on to the meeting with some royals. I continue to not have any idea where we’re going or why. What was even the point of introducing Xin’s warrior-bond if it’s immediately taken away?

Alec tries to massage the text, giving the characters some relationships between each other, but they’re all so boilerplate that it doesn’t even faze you. Keilan teaches the gruff warrior Xin to read, he teaches Keilan swordplay. Vehlan knows everything about everything, and wows Keilan with his brilliance. Keilan crushes on Nel, Vehlan’s sidekick and personal level 8 Rogue, and she considers Keilan a likable child.

If “crushing on a cool girl as a teenager” seems intriguingly messy, maybe leading Keilan to be moody and irritable and flawed, don’t worry — it immediately ends when Nel tells him that and his sexual interest vanishes, never to be mentioned again. Phew, thank god! We almost had something intriguingly human out of these people!

Speaking of Nel, why is she a skinny ninja with daggers instead of a hulking bodyguard to the sorcerer? Well, that’s anyone’s guess, but a huge part of it might be because this is a tabletop novel, and so when they enter the spider catacomb I mentioned earlier, she needs to be there to check for traps, since she has the Trapfinding perk and 10 points in Search.

She’s not an especially interesting character either. She’s pretty much exactly the archetype you think, being a sensible, fast thinking, masculine woman who keeps the distractible, stubborn man Vehlan in check. In case it wasn’t obvious that she’s the tomboy, we have a stock ‘gross girl has to be pretty’ scene.

Is this a moment where her short temper and direct speech offends a fancy dinner party and bungles a delicate social situation? No, absolutely not, they find her mouthiness charming. Because if she made mistakes, then she’s bad at something and this is yet another writer terrified if getting hit with CinemaSins dings for characters having flaws.

We have dinner with some royals, they consult birds for guidance (this is never explained), and we’re off to a grand library to find out why the monsters that attacked them are in this region of the world.

Again, I still have no idea where we’re going or why, or how any of these events connect. They’re not individual stories stringing a longer narrative, akin to Avatar: The Last Airbender where each little story advances your understanding and evolves the cast, it just feels like busy work until the plot kicks in. Which it never does.

Keilan, the protgaonist, gets no development or training, he’s just kind of hanging out with Vehlan and co, so our main character is closer to Anakin in Phantom Menace. Just a blank face who will do something important in the climax. I mean I assume, I didn’t finish it.

Again, for a fantasy novel, fine. YA protagonists are usually a little caught off guard by the weird world they inhabit; in fact that’s part of the fun. But Crimson Queen keeps jumping perspectives, to Alyanna scheming in the background, or Jan blundering into the plot with his immortal amnesia.

Was that swing from wacky banter to ominous plotting as jarring for you as it was for me? I assure you reading it in context doesn’t help. You’re whipped between Adventures of the Goofus Brigade and Dark Plotted Whispers in Bedrooms, and they’re stitched together inexpertly since they barely intersect. The most you get is Alyanna sending the monsters to kill Keilan’s band without knowing of him, which sends them to the library. But then the library ends with them discovering Alyanna’s name, implying she’s immortal and ending the chapter abruptly. This would be an incredible revelation for the reader, if she didn’t talk extensively about her immortality several times before now.

A YA protagonist to lead the story could, in theory, work. Early, simple, childish life brought to bear against great evil is after all the entire appeal of fantasy since Lord of the Rings. But this is where we get to the real issue with this book that I keep coming back to, and that is how unbelievably, impossibly bloated it is with self-indulgent prose.

I want you to look up at the page I posted above and re-read the way they talk about ‘gethenki’ and ‘kith-kan’ and ‘shape-changer’. The entire book reads like this, where characters say (or think) complex world history and proper names (the Betrayers, Dymora, the Skein, the Empire of Wind and Salt, Umaltha, the Fist Warriors, etc etc etc) we have no context for, and without that context none of it means anything.

“Indulgent” barely begins to describe it. I have yet to read a book as in love with its own voice since watching The West Wing. Someone will pass the orange juice and start thinking about their mother, Priscilla, who used to juice the oranges by hand, and she’d teach them how to twist it to the left, because the fruit of Moroba has pulp aligned to the right, and myths say that long ago the goddess ‘Haderp-a-derp’ cursed her disciple Queefburger to have only one right hand, and ever since oh my god who fucking cares

Everything stops, over and over, to give you a Bardic Lore check about the climate and chief exports of the city the cast just entered. None of this prose is fun to read or engaging, it’s just cumbersome. It’s like every character is afflicted with the Skill river from Assassin’s Quest — nothing can be one thing, it must stretch into the past, forever, until you go mad thinking about every moment of a piece of furniture’s life, who sat on it and what tree it came from.

What did we learn here? That sorcery works like Dungeons & Dragons, apparently, but Keilan doesn’t learn anything and neither do we other than ‘long ago it was different.’ Again, this is the fingerprints of a tabletop novel, where the writer understands establishing magic is important, but not how or why. So we get a paragraph of what magic is, just so it's said and then promptly forgotten about. You know, arcane magic! Somatic spell components and all! Since when is magic and a chosen one who's going to be the best it all sorcerers this boring?

(Also, yes, “climbing into the sky to coax rain from the sky” — like I said, in dire need of an editor)

I saw a lot of praise for this book being ‘epic’ and 'having great world building’, and I can’t for life of me figure out why. Good world building is small, organic, and sticks in your mind. As much as I gripe that Brandon Sanderson is a mid-level writer at best, Mistborn introduces a ruling class, a slave class, ‘burning’ metals to produce magic, the mist monsters, and Feruchemy. They link together because the book makes you have context for them by giving you characters to hang out with.

Crimson Queen does none of these things because every new function of the world exists in isolation and has no emotional connection to the story. We don’t know how sorcery works, we don’t know how paladins work, cities and people are introduced once and forgotten, monsters are dangerous and then vanquished, etc. I can’t even get a good handle on the events of the story because we keep whipping back to Alyanna doing something villainous I don’t actually need to know about because it doesn’t go anywhere. You could cut something like a quarter of the book or more just by getting rid of Alyanna scenes.

At the 70% mark, it introduces two new protagonist characters that suddenly make the book feel like it just restarted. Remember the paladin from before? He’s getting sent out now, with a very dark grim dark dark assassin with a dark grim grim dark blade. They’re suddenly attacked by bandits — what is it with bad fantasy novels and ‘we got attacked by bandits because the scene was too boring?’ — and get caught up in a side quest because the bandit group are slavers. A big guy lumbers out to serve as the boss fight for the slaver subquest, which is dispatched by their expert combat skills. I wish I was kidding.

Writers, listen closely; never ever have an assigned ‘heavy’ that nameless grunts summon to fight for them. You are not in a Resident Evil cutscene.

I gave up there; Crimson Queen is a poorly written, derivative tabletop novel with aspirations to be Game of Thrones and has no idea how pretentious it comes off. Compared to the drivel of self-published, it is indeed light years ahead, but I think I prefer the drivel of self-pub because at least the characters get to, you know, do things.

It’s not an irredeemable book, but at least Darkblade Assassin made me laugh in how audacious and incompetent it was. The worst thing a piece of media can be is a solid mid-level 5, and sadly that’s where this deserves to be.