Slayers: the Ruby Eye

Slayers: the Ruby Eye by Hajime Kanzaka, 2004, Tokyopop

I picked up this book because I found the anime series based upon the novel series to be very entertaining. I will admit that I wasn't sure if the goofy humor in the TV show came from the books themselves, or if it was added by the director. It turns out that the goofy humor came from the books themselves, which is both good and bad.

It is good, in that the book is humorous, and humorous books are usually much easier for me to read than heavy, pondering books. It is bad in that the humor isn't very good. One example of the humor in the book revolves around one of the bad guys, a werewolf named Dilgear. The lead character, Lina, takes to referring to the werewolf in her internal monologues as "Dildork." This is done a lot. Other humor revolves around making fun of the lead character's physical underdevelopment, and the fact that her sidekick, Gourry, is dumb as a box of rocks. So, rather juvenile humor, and I would expect a more developed sense of humor from a good fantasy novel. You know, something intelligent.

The other thing that I didn't like about the book involved Lina's internal monologues. There are a lot of these, and they wouldn't be annoying except that a lot of them deal with Lina's "color commentary" on what is going on around her. This also wouldn't be a problem, except that Lina thinks everyone is an idiot, so this generally devolves into Lina giving everybody stupid nicknames to describe how dumb they are. I should also mention that this book is short, slightly under 200 pages, also they use double-spaced lines, so you really have about a 110-page book here, which they charge $7.99 for. You might find that to be a good value, but I do not.