work, and in expressing my thoughts
about the novel I find I must first acquire an understanding of this
particular style that he uses, because he seems to purposely write this way,
rather than for lack of storytelling skill that greatly improves the more
one writes.
Firstly, before I get into that, I
admire Mason's vision and passion which drives him to write. That out
of the way, he writes primarily in thought fragments, slices of dramatic
description and feeling which accumulatively lose the reader in an onslaught
of incomplete sentences followed by a comma and series of periods, like
I,......for example,....am doing here. Many paragraphs start off as
incomplete sentences and run rabid without punctuation and good narrative
prose guiding us along. Oftentimes, I had no idea what was happening
in the story, mostly due to how it was written. I can see talent here;
I think this is one of those cases where a potential literary visionary has
to re-evaluate how he expresses his story on paper so that others could see
it the way he's seen it in his head. I think his method of being
poetic and dramatic outshines what would be better enjoyable in layman's
terms and sentence structure that's less distracting, especially in
the case of Black Crystal, Ebon Death, because it is a balls-out
sword-and-sorcery work and is also told in the literary spirit of such
works, with the English language modified toward the flavor of the genre
just short of using thou's and thine's. Basically, the book
entails the long and dark journey of Lv'an, a young half-Elven, towards his
destiny in a dark and dangerous world full of dragons and sorcerers and
magic.
Now, I admire T.M. Mason.
He's extremely opinionated, philosophical, and is very passionate
about his writing, and increasingly prolific. My honesty regarding my
personal experience and opinion of this particular work is what it is.
He writes what he writes, from War of the Storms: Souls of Chaos to
the Dark Fathers Saga, short stories, and essays on politics,
theology, and psychology. Mason is also, and I quote from
http://www.writers.net/writers/32831, "a firm believer that the populace
has been beguiled by the 'hair splitting, re-defining' of the common usage
of phrase-ology and wordage."
There may be a method to his madness in going off-road in the way he writes,
and don't let this one solitary review fool you. If Mason tightens the
harness a little bit and rides off in the right direction, and seriously
considers this review as constructive, he can do exceptionally well in this
realm of Fantasy and get his works in the hands of a broader audience who,
with a more proper presentation, eats this kind of stuff for breakfast after
purchasing it eagerly the day before.
