This Lair's Draggin' by garrie keyman
Novice writer Lisa Guilfoil's debut, The Dragon's Lair, introduces a young bar owner whose traumatic past catches up with her. Confronting her demons is Skye Dakota, the supposedly tough-as-Teflon proprietor of the Dragon's Lair, a well-appointed bar on space station Pettit. Set in a nebulous Earth-referenced future where space stations boast not only bars, but also Olympic-size swimming pools and thoroughly-equipped gyms, The Dragon's Lair reads like an early draft of a promising tale that evaded an editor's pen.
Tough, I suppose, because she is a vodka-swilling masochist, Skye Dakota is beaten to a pulp by a couple of bad'uns early in the book. Her recovery is painfully slow, especially for the reader. Skye learns the biggest bad'un of 'em all is the one who had her roughed up and she means to find out why, but her pummeling stirs memories that haunt her dreams.
Enduring countless days of self-induced insomnia using something referred to as stim stix, Skye begins pulling away from her small circle of friends. After surviving on alternating doses of vodka and coffee while punishing herself with grueling work-outs, she at last decides she must return to her roots, where her old friends are apparently tougher than her current crew, and can help her re-gain her 'edge' to face down space gangster Viktor.
If it's any clue about the book's pace, this set-up takes 174 pages.
Guilfoil is a young writer yet to learn what show, don't tell really means. What's more, she tells us over and over and over. Nevertheless, victims of domestic violence harboring revenge fantasies might have spun The Dragon's Lair into a campy cult classic if Kill Bill hadn't come along first.
While The Dragon's Lair is not being marketed as any particular genre, it reads like a romance set in space. Tossed in for that groovy sci-fi effect are words like chronometer and vidcom, while sprinkled throughout is the occasional unexplained (and therefore ever annoying) foreign term. With 287 pages of story wearing 421 pages of text, The Dragon's Lair might have fared better if Guilfoil had turned one of her tale's bloody knives on her manuscript; there are entire scenes and characters that should have been nixed.
Article comments
1 - DrPat
Sounds like you borrowed one of those bloody knives for this review, garrie!
It takes a seasoned writer to accept the value added by an editor - and this is the second review today to call a writer on failure to trim the unnecessary fat! (See the review of George R.R. Martin's A Feast of Crows.
2 - garrie keyman
Ha! Really.
Well, thanks for that tip, Dr. Pat. I clicked over to the review you mentioned and I enjoyed it.
Then I checked out your site and decided both Wicked and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night sound like works to put on my "to read" list, but especially so Curious Incident, being that I'm the mom of special needs kids.
Thanks.
3 - garrie keyman
Ha! Really!
Well, thanks, Dr. Pat, for that tip to the other review. I read it and enjoyed it.
Then I visited your site and decided both Wicked and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night warranted a place on my "to read" list, but especially so Curious Incident, being that I'm the mom of special needs kids.
So thanks!