Review: Beware of Chicken 4

Beware of Chicken 4 by CasualFarmer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Two of the besetting issues of this series are that there are too many characters, and that each book has a long slow start before getting to the central conflict (if it ever does get there - this one almost does not, and then doesn't stay long).

The two things are related, and this book shows that particularly starkly. The reason it takes until halfway through - not a quarter, not a third, but halfway through - for the plot to get going is that first we have to visit about 20 character viewpoints (not a rhetorical number, it's actually about 20) and have, for each of them, a repetition of basically the same thing: a reflection on past hurt and how now, in the cozy found family started by Jin the cultivator, it's probably going to be OK. All this is interspersed with slice-of-life stuff: building onto the farm, getting new production processes up and running, celebrating festivals, playing puerile practical jokes that everyone finds hilarious and endearing, and drinking too much alcohol.

Then when something resembling a plot does get going, it consists at first of an extended flashback to ancient times as recorded on a crystal retrieved I've-forgotten-how a couple of books ago. It takes until two-thirds of the way through the approximately 120,000-word book before the present-day characters start making plans to do something, they're not quite sure what yet, about the plot problem, which has taken this long to articulate. Sure, it's a strong one. But most writers would have introduced it at about 25%, for good reason: a lot of readers don't like hanging around for 80,000 words waiting for the plot to start, even if the company is pleasant.

And then, once the problem is defined... we're back to the slice of life. There is what could have been a nice bit of intercutting of peripheral characters in a pitched battle against demons versus Jin's wife giving birth to their child, but part of what it does is show by the contrast how flat scenes can be if they lack serious challenge. The birth is a tiring but problem-free experience, with none of the potential issues that get mentioned ever eventuating. The demon fight is desperate and includes great losses, even though the outcome is never really in doubt, but it's narrated in a way that also minimises the importance of those losses.

I find the characters more memorable than the plot in these books, and maybe that's because we spend more time on character growth and insight than we do on plot progression (though the two are inevitably linked). Even though for me there was a gap of getting on for three years between reading Book 2 and Book 3, I remembered the characters fairly well - but the events quite poorly, and the fact that the author provides us with zero refresher is, therefore, an avoidable fault. For example, early in this book, Jin visits a village where Big D, the chicken of the title, has been training a disciple, and there's some sort of sign or something outside the village, and it cracks Jin up when he sees it. This sign was, I think, put there in Book 2. That was hundreds of pages and, for me, several years ago, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. But does the author give even a tiny clue, half a sentence, a few words about what it looks like so I, and other people who've forgotten, can share in the joke? He does not. Tens of thousands of words for atmosphere, but not even half a dozen for recap.

The copy editing continues to improve, though there are still awkwardly phrased sentences ("He headed down a set of stairs and began to descend them") and the odd typo, and errors like equating rabbits and hares (they're different animals). Belying is used for betraying, seller for buyer, match for march, decreed for declared, singular for single, exultations for exhortations, "cadaver" when it's not an entire body but a disembodied head, and "the first thing is first" as probably an eggcorn for "first things first."

And yet, with all these faults, it's still amusing and touching and appealing at times. It's just... it wouldn't be that hard to make it a lot better (IMO). It definitely wouldn't be hard to make it a lot shorter without losing much that I would care about.

While reading this book, I came across a Reddit AMA the author did a few years back, where he says that the published versions are already "half to a quarter" of the length of his drafts, so I hate to think how overwritten the drafts are. In that same thread, though, he specifically references "noblebright" as something he was shooting for - which he achieves, no question. Interesting that the Word of Noblebright has spread to the point that someone who is demographically different from most of the noblebright authors I know (by which I mean he's likely under 40) has heard of it and thinks it's a good thing for a book to be. We're less obscure than I thought - which, honestly, isn't hard, since "less obscure than I thought" is the direction in which there's the most space.

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