The Eye of the Bedlam Bride one the one hand takes on the geek card game as its general dungeon challenge (it’s a cross between Magic the Gathering and Yugi-Oh, with a hint of morbid Pokemon, kinda), and on the other it’s set on sort of a ghost Earth, making it a chance for some significant backstory as well as possible foreshadowing. If it wasn’t clear already, the game-master AI is also becoming more of an element of the story, which could both be the sci-fi element and some possible not-super-subtle commentary on the current state of tech. Maybe it’s because I know a little bit about some of the card-game role play referents, but this one felt a little more evenly paced than the previous volume. Considering that this is book 6 or a series that has, since book 2, clocked in at something like 800 pages per installment, that’s not a big surprise; still, when a series gets to the point where you sort of expect slow or less great parts, it can start to drag things down. We’ll see.
The card parts and the backstory parts are really not all that connected which leaves that job to the AI starting to become more of a character, and it mostly sort of works. Add in a bit more Samantha and Prepotente, and there is some coherence, but the whole card game element when it is central to what’s going on doesn’t ever seem to be that exciting. There’s really only one part of the whole card angle that really ends up mattering, and it’s relatively clear pretty early what/who that is, but why and how isn’t really until the end. The problem is that if it’s supposed to be suspenseful, it just isn’t because the whole card thing doesn’t get as developed as some of the other parts.
I still don’t get the whole Pineapple Cabaret thing; I see sort of where it’s going in terms of developing a side story that is relevant to the main one, but I still don’t really get the point of putting that in the side story. I was a little surprised to find out that those episodes are only part of the print books, and not in the audio versions (which are supposed to be pretty good), but I’m not too sure the audio folks are really missing out on that much; at least not so far. There’s probably some big twist where it all comes together eventually, but for now, even with a segment that’s more together than previous ones, I still just don’t really care.
