Review: The Twelve Trials of Doug

The Twelve Trials of Doug by Jeremy Brundage
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Let me state upfront that I'm a tough audience for comedy.

Having said that, the approach this book takes in attempting to be funny completely failed to raise even a small smile from me. It consists mostly of anachronism (it's set in mythical Ancient Greece, but has many contemporary cultural references; for example, the protagonist works for a yoghurt franchise in a food court, and is, of course, named Doug). There are also footnotes. I assume the footnotes were inspired by Terry Pratchett, but just because Pratchett made something work for comedy doesn't mean that someone else can do the same. The footnotes are frequent, intrusive, and mostly asides that are intended to be comedic but, as I said, fail to hit that mark as far as I'm concerned. I stopped reading about 10% of the way in, just before the announcement of the quest that I gather forms the main plot, so I can't comment on how well that plot is handled. To me, a would-be comedic book that fails at comedy can redeem itself by having characters that aren't just stereotypes with silly names, and a plot that works in its own right as an interesting story. I hadn't yet seen any evidence of character depth, but I'll give the plot the benefit of the doubt.

The book has probably had a very good editor go over it, since the mechanics (as far as I read, and in the pre-publication version I got via Netgalley) are mostly correct, apart from a couple of instances of dialog where the tag is incorrectly punctuated as a separate sentence. That's rare in the books I see these days, and deserves to be commended. So if your sense of humour is more like the author's than mine, this may very well be a good book for you.

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