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Mar. 4th, 2023 09:01 pmI am actively trying to buy fewer books at the moment, but sometimes something comes into your hand at a used bookstore and you realize that you are physically incapable of leaving it on the shelf. Such for me was John DeCles' The Particolored Unicorn.
You will note that the unicorn on this cover is not particularly particolored. This is not the fault of John DeCles, who painstakingly described his unicorn as having a bright yellow left-front leg, a dusky rose right-front leg, an olive green back-left leg, a scarlet right-left leg, a green-and-black tail, a mottled orange back, a rose-pink mane, and a dark blue head with a bright yellow circle around one eye, but the cover artist appears to have understandably decided that this highly specific vision was beyond him.
(The unicorn also speaks in obligate iambic pentameter and sings Mozart but I understand that these attributes would be impossible for a cover artist to captured.)
This book proudly boasts the most lukewarm inside-cover blurb I've ever seen as Esther Friesner politely states, "The Particolored Unicorn most certainly does run through a full spectrum of adventure."
And Esther is right! It truly does!
It is hard to convey my roller coaster of emotions about this book. Ten pages in, when Piswyck was sloshing through piles of lovingly-described manure to buy the iambic pentameter-spouting unicorn from a unicorn slave pen to stop it being killed and eaten that very night, I felt fairly sure it was one of the worst books I'd ever read. Twenty pages further on, when they decided the only way to escape from the country was to create an apparatus out of spider-silk and teach the unicorn how to hang-glide, I felt equally convinced it was in fact one of the best books I'd ever read. When Piswyck's sexual favors were demanded by every woman he met along the journey, I sighed; when he tripped and fell into an elf orgy on board a ship while participating in the Sacred Dance of the DNA Spiral, I rolled my eyes; when his participation in the elf orgy led to him banging a nice young elf man with the exact same air of 'this might as well happen', I admit I was pleasantly surprised! Then they got off the boat, and the unicorn composed an 'anti-shanty' to express its displeasure at the sea, and Piswyck met a nudist wizard in Bermuda whose life's work was attempting to recreate the pterodactyl and decided to use one of the leftover pterodactyl skeletons to make another hang glider to break into a mad scientist's castle on neighboring Coney Island and I gave up on anything except attempting to hold onto the rest of the ride for dear life.
Did I mention that Piswyck's main skill is that he is a trained gymnast? He is also highly skilled in water ballet. The book makes a point of mentioning his tutor's shrine to St. Esther Williams, revered from before the Great Sundering, because this fantasy land is also of course postapocalyptic. According to prophecy, Piswyck is part of a great alphabetical line of heroes, starting with Astwyck and ending, eventually, with Zedwyck, the chosen one. All of that is one hundred percent irrelevant to this narrative, but the book does end on a cliffhanger, and -- to my genuine amazement -- it appears the author published a sequel in 2009, 22 years after the original, as part of (says DeCles' Amazon bio) "a projected twelve volume epic." So who knows, perhaps Zedwyck will one day appear and restore the before times!
(If anyone else would like to experience the Particolored Unicorn in all of its glory, please do let me know; I would love to send it along to continue its full spectrum of adventure.)
You will note that the unicorn on this cover is not particularly particolored. This is not the fault of John DeCles, who painstakingly described his unicorn as having a bright yellow left-front leg, a dusky rose right-front leg, an olive green back-left leg, a scarlet right-left leg, a green-and-black tail, a mottled orange back, a rose-pink mane, and a dark blue head with a bright yellow circle around one eye, but the cover artist appears to have understandably decided that this highly specific vision was beyond him.
(The unicorn also speaks in obligate iambic pentameter and sings Mozart but I understand that these attributes would be impossible for a cover artist to captured.)
This book proudly boasts the most lukewarm inside-cover blurb I've ever seen as Esther Friesner politely states, "The Particolored Unicorn most certainly does run through a full spectrum of adventure."
And Esther is right! It truly does!
It is hard to convey my roller coaster of emotions about this book. Ten pages in, when Piswyck was sloshing through piles of lovingly-described manure to buy the iambic pentameter-spouting unicorn from a unicorn slave pen to stop it being killed and eaten that very night, I felt fairly sure it was one of the worst books I'd ever read. Twenty pages further on, when they decided the only way to escape from the country was to create an apparatus out of spider-silk and teach the unicorn how to hang-glide, I felt equally convinced it was in fact one of the best books I'd ever read. When Piswyck's sexual favors were demanded by every woman he met along the journey, I sighed; when he tripped and fell into an elf orgy on board a ship while participating in the Sacred Dance of the DNA Spiral, I rolled my eyes; when his participation in the elf orgy led to him banging a nice young elf man with the exact same air of 'this might as well happen', I admit I was pleasantly surprised! Then they got off the boat, and the unicorn composed an 'anti-shanty' to express its displeasure at the sea, and Piswyck met a nudist wizard in Bermuda whose life's work was attempting to recreate the pterodactyl and decided to use one of the leftover pterodactyl skeletons to make another hang glider to break into a mad scientist's castle on neighboring Coney Island and I gave up on anything except attempting to hold onto the rest of the ride for dear life.
Did I mention that Piswyck's main skill is that he is a trained gymnast? He is also highly skilled in water ballet. The book makes a point of mentioning his tutor's shrine to St. Esther Williams, revered from before the Great Sundering, because this fantasy land is also of course postapocalyptic. According to prophecy, Piswyck is part of a great alphabetical line of heroes, starting with Astwyck and ending, eventually, with Zedwyck, the chosen one. All of that is one hundred percent irrelevant to this narrative, but the book does end on a cliffhanger, and -- to my genuine amazement -- it appears the author published a sequel in 2009, 22 years after the original, as part of (says DeCles' Amazon bio) "a projected twelve volume epic." So who knows, perhaps Zedwyck will one day appear and restore the before times!
(If anyone else would like to experience the Particolored Unicorn in all of its glory, please do let me know; I would love to send it along to continue its full spectrum of adventure.)
