Fantasy Book Critic: SPFBO XI Finalist Review: Jester by Tim Carter

Tim Carter writes fiction, video games, and movies. He draws inspiration for his fiction and movies from a lifelong love of strategy and role-playing games, especially Dungeons and Dragons.

He lives with his wife and two dogs in Vancouver, Canada. He is best known for writing the console game Sleeping Dogs, writing and producing the Dead Rising series of movies, and producing the digital series Mortal Kombat: Legacy.

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CHELS

In Jester we follow our main character Shelly, a toilet cleaning goblin slave on an adventure to solve a murder. This book is a dark fantasy, with a comic element that often felt a little heavy handed for my taste. I enjoyed the world we are dropped in and the time I spent with Shelly, definitely an underdog character that I was rooting for.

JACK

Jester follows Shelly, an unusually clever goblin enslaved in the unusually incompetent Castle Halfsock. Shelly seems doomed to spend a lifetime cleaning the castle latrines, but war and unexpected intrigues present opportunities for him to seize control of his fate.

This is a comedy with a lot of heart. The author has excellent comedic timing and I laughed out loud more than a few times, but there’s substance beneath the humor. Shelly’s emotional journey and internal struggles are enough to carry the story on its own. His recurring self-doubt (can a slave who spends his days scrubbing dirty diapers really outsmart all the political movers of the realm?) makes him both relatable and sympathetic. Granted, it's not a perfect book. The plot seems to move too quickly at times, jumping from one challenge to the next without many slow sections to let the emotions breathe. Shelly’s role also feels a bit mis-paced; he’s a highly active protagonist in general, but there’s quite a few pages left when he actively affects the course of events for the last time. Despite all that, I had a great time from start to finish. This is a book I’ll be recommending to people.

ŁUKASZ

Jester is a funny, dark fantasy romp with a very strong voice. Shelly, a goblin slave working as a latrine cleaner in a castle, is a great protagonist, mostly because he's about as far from the usual fantasy hero as you can get. He's scared, self-deprecating and aware of his own limitations. But he's also clever and observant. It turns out that knowing the castle, its people and its plumbing better than anyone else can be surprisingly useful.

I particularly enjoyed the first part of the book, when the murder mystery and political intrigue are the main focus. There's something genuinely fun about watching Shelly notice things that everyone else ignores simply because nobody pays much attention to the goblin cleaning their toilets. The story has some clever twists here, and the first-person narration gives it a lot of personality.

And yes, it's funny. Very funny. Sometimes too funny. That's probably my biggest problem with Jester. The book is almost constantly punching out jokes, profanity, grotesque humor and sarcastic observations. A lot of it works, and I definitely laughed, but after a while I started getting tired of it. There are some darker and more emotional moments that could have landed harder if the book had occasionally just let them breathe.

I also thought the book became less interesting once it moved away from the murder mystery and political intrigue and towards the bigger spoiler spoiler storyline. It's still entertaining, but the strange combination of goblin slave, murder investigation and castle politics was much more distinctive to me than the more conventional fantasy stuff.

Still, I had a good time with it. Shelly is a character worth following, the voice is memorable, and there's plenty of genuinely funny stuff here. I just wish the book had occasionally taken its foot off the accelerator.

A fun and very readable fantasy romp with a great protagonist and a distinctive voice. Just a little too relentlessly funny for me.