Review of "The Spitting Post"

I love stories which are reminiscent of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,  where a hero or heroine is whisked off to another land and you're not entirely sure whether what's happening is a hallucination, coma dream, or reality.

While not a children's book, Jason R. Barden's The Spitting Post is firmly rooted in that tradition. Our main character (or so we are led to believe) is in a car accident and wakes up in another world. He then embarks on a quest to find the love of his life, The Green Maiden, at a location she has specified. Somehow our main character has inhabited this world before, though he has no memory of it.

The strength in this story lays with the gruesome details and imaginative antagonists the author developed to inhabit his imaginary world. The protagonist is propelled along on a series of quests, and this is a plot definitely driven by events, not by character development.

My three biggest complaints are as follows: I never really connected with the narrator. Some of the extensive song lyric inclusions seemed like an attempt to get word count up and didn't really lend to the story. Finally, I read up to the shaggy dog ending and it hit me like a brick wall, and not in a good way. The ending could have used some rethinking and a polish, since the reader does not get a real sense of growth or change in the final perspective.

Part Secret Window, and part Tarnsman of Gor this book draws on a lot of source material that readers will find familiar and satisfying.