My Hero
Tom Holt
312 pages

This is the story of Jane Armitrage, shlock fantasy writer, whose characters suddenly come to life and need her help. Hijinks ensue in the typical Holt style whilst the plot grows more and more conveluted and the fourth wall is broken with increasing frequency. For sensitive people the visit to the slush pile may be a bit dangerous.

Grailblazers
Tom Holt
357 pages
published in 1994

A few days ago the subject of light comedic fantasy writers came up and I wrote the following about Tom Holt:

[Tom] Holt has the unfortunate habit to put in everything *including* the kitchen sink in his novels, as well as to focus too much on jokes, whether or not they work all that well in the context.

I'll come back to that later. Thanks to that discussion I remember I still had a half read Tom Holt novel on my to read pile, Grailblazers so I grabbed it yesterday, as I was in the mood for some light reading. The nice thing about it, Grailblazers was very easy reading and I finished it in two days of reading, mostly done during small breaks (during luch, on the subway etc). A welcome break from the sort of books I had been slogging through lately.

Grailblazers is all, as you may have guessed from the title about the knights of King Arthur searching for the Holy Grail. Well, the surving knigths of King Arthur and they're not as much searching anymore as running pizza courier services, doing a spot of window washing and selling dodgy goods at various markets while keeping an eye out for anything grail like, if they actually knew what it looked like.

Until that spotty twerp, Boamund returns from his 1500 years beauty sleep and becomes Grailmaster, having been ordered to go on a quest for the grail by an old hermit, as you do. Oh, and he also got an old dwarf thrown in as part of the deal, one Toenail, a very, very very distant relative of the dwarf that put him to sleep in the first place. In the distance are also lurking the lost continent of Atlantis, now the most important off shore tax shelter in the world and its queen, as well as the mysterious and dangerous count Klaus von Weinacht. Not to mention the ghost of Shakespeare, now writing soaps for Channel 4.

Holt's humour is usually of the manic, "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" variety, which is in evidence here, but the plot is less overladen then it was in e.g. My Hero. The description I gave above wasn't totally fair for this novel at least, which is a good thing. There area still no real belly laughs for me, but instead quite a lot of quiet giggles and the occasional groan.