The Tough Guide to Fantasyland

Modern fantasy as a genre has an uneasy relationship with creativity, in that it’s about fantastic worlds of pure imagination and also more cliches than you can shake a glowing elfmade sword at. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is an acerbic alphabetical list of cliches, in the form of a tourist’s guide to all the things that you might encounter on a QUEST through the KINGDOM.

It’s pretty funny, sidesplittingly so in parts (the entry for HORSE, for example), but the overall impression is a 30 second joke stretched out to 5 minutes. Part of the humor is how long it goes on, but this book was mostly a slog, which is an unforgivable sin in light reading.