On the writings of Piers Anthony

[classicdrogn]

This came up in another forum (specifically in reference to the Xanth series) but the analogy I came up with for it tickles my funny bone so I thought I'd share it here too:

Piers Anthony's writing is like that hottie who seems perfect and you can't believe they're interested in you... except after four or five dates you realize they're incredibly stupid and just keep parroting the same practiced conversations over again with different wording, and you're starting to suspect they're actually involved with some kind of freaky cult, and possibly into kinks outside your comfort level. Sure those first few dates are great, but...



edit: To be clear, I cast no aspersions whatsoever on Mr. Anthony himself with regard to intelligence or personal habits, and he's openly an atheist-leaning agnostic so no cults either. It's just a metaphor.

[Shepherd]

Some of his older stuff was actually fairly good, but by the 1990s the quality had plummeted. I was so disappointed when I picked up the eighth book in the Incarnations of Immortality series, published through some minor company I'd never heard of 17 years after the previous book. Much of the action (I can't even honestly call it a plot) literally amounted to: 1). protagonist walks down road. 2). random encounter. 3). encounter quickly resolved. 4). go to 1.

His Xanth series has apparently gotten so bad that Wikipedia's Piers Anthony bibliography hasn't even generated pages for the most recent nine books, just the names and publication dates. Which means not one single person has bothered to do so over the last six years.

[Norgarth]

I know the last 3 or 4 Xanth books have not been released in mass market paperback, just in Hardcover and Trade Paperback formats.