Rakuda Ginza

I got about 50 pages into the book before concluding that George R. R. Martin was writing about a disgusting Pedophile – Khal Drogo. I can’t see how an author can write about that sort of thing without imagining the acts themselves in his own mind. No matter how richly the book is written this is unnecessary.
Rating: 1 / 5

I’m less than halfway through this book and I’m not sure if I’ll be picking it up again. I find myself dreading what awful things are going to happen next. As I began reading, I found the story refreshing. I thought, “Finally, a fantasy book that’s not at all derivative of Tolkien.” But, it quickly spiraled downward into a morass of abject suffering and misery. Shocked! shocked, I was. I give it two stars because it’s well-plotted and paced, and the characters are well-drawn. The content is what sinks the story for me.

To me, the appeal of fantasy books is the setting and the characters–swordsmen and sorcerors fight evil and live to tell the tale of their heroic deeds, in a world different from our own, a world where evil never triumphs. But Martin seems to relish placing his characters in a world where amorality is the rule of the day and proceeds to turn them into meatloaf, with no hope of escaping the meat grinder. This isn’t fantasy–it’s horror. Children being raped, children getting drunk, children being murdered, incest, animalistic sex, buckets of blood, animal cruelty–not even Stephen King goes wall to wall with this sort of trash in his books.

It pains me to write a review of a book before I’ve finished it, but what must be done must be done. This George R.R. Martin fellow is a pervert writing for amoral sociopaths, and/or a sadist writing for sadomasochists. If you want your fantasy books full of hopelessness and obscenity, A Game of Thrones is for you. I’ll stick to the Tolkienesque side of the genre.

I’ll consider any unhelpful votes to be proof of the immorality of whomever casts them. Goodnight.

addendum: 5 out of 52 helpful votes? I see a good scolding must not have been in order. The overwhelming response leads me to do the unthinkable: I admit that the sex scenes bother me because I’ve never had sex. No, no–please. Let me finish. It’s tough to read about aristocrats having all the sex and bastard children they can handle when you’re a virgin. Girls look at me like … like … well, like I read fantasy books. All you guys out there who know how to score–I salute you. Especially if you’ve managed to overcome being a skinny white boy.
Rating: 2 / 5