Contestants began trickling into the city a few days later. They were a bizarre menagerie: men and women, tall and short, haunted and feral, scarred and branded and shaved and tattooed. There was an ambulatory skeleton and an animated suit of armor. They carried swords that glowed and buzzed and burned and sang. A handsome pair of conjoined twins offered to enter individually and, in the event that they vanquished the field, gallantly declared themselves willing to fight each other. An intelligent sword arrived, borne on a silk pillow, and explained that it wished to enter, it merely required somebody willing to wield it.
From Lev Grossman’s The Magician King.
Can’t decide if my loathing of the narrator (snivelly Holden Caulfield with an oversized entitlement complex and, worse, access to unlimited weed) outweighs my desire to revisit Grossman’s provocative and oddity-crammed world of slayer rabbits and ruined gods. One thing that The Magicians did quite well was put a horror of magic in me — some of the scenes are gut-lurching; Grossman clearly takes notes while reading George R.R. Martin. And the writing is of course near edible. But Quentin! I can’t stand his petulance and grousing.
