Link to Under the Stairs on Amazon
John (the main character’s name, as well as the author’s) is an English professor with no family and few friends. He buys a run down house and restores it, only to find out that his house is considered haunted, and that cats have a habit of disappearing if they get inside. When his cat, Cream, disappears into the storage area under the stairs, he comes to the conclusion that she has crossed into another dimension. So what does he do? He decides to rescue her, of course. (Have you ever heard of better character motivation? I would follow my cats to another dimension to rescue them, too.) So John ends up in Stil-de-grain, a country of magic where he is mistaken as a powerful mage.
I could tell immediately from the first page that Stockmyer was a good writer, but I was in suspense to see if the story would be good too. The one thing that I did notice was that he really likes exclamation points! For instance, he will write a whole paragraph where every sentence ends in an exclamation point!
So my conclusion? This is a pretty good book, though not the most original. The story of a regular person stumbling into another world or dimension where they become somehow powerful is not a new one. I was reminded strongly of L.E. Modesitt’s Spellsong Cycle, which is a great series, though there are countless other examples. What I did like about this book was the sci-fi aspects of it. The magic comes from light and static electricity, and the world is build out of “bands’ of color. I won’t be reading the next book in the series, mainly because while John himself is a likable character, there just weren’t any characters in Stil-de-grain that he had any kind of connection with. Even John himself doesn’t really care which world he’s in.
This eBook is currently free to download. At the end of this book the author offers the second book for free as well.
Hmm. Two and a half cupcakes? No, I’ll round up to three.
Sami Reviews! 