THE THIEF OF WORLDS

When the magical horn that keeps all of our planet’s winds in motion is stolen, young Hurricane finds himself leading the chase to fetch it back.

In a tale that suffers from both identity confusion (quest fantasy? Eco-parable? Ontological mishmash?) and a premise that really doesn’t hold water (not to mention air, earth, or fire), Coville sends his protagonist out of the formerly Windy City’s increasingly deadly fug and through a series of portals to a set of highly localized alternate worlds that are, respectively, rapidly drying out, getting colder, or becoming less solid. Instruments controlling each of the four elements, it turns out, have been stolen from their divine or semidivine keepers by Mokurra, an entity composed of the souls of billions of anguished victims of a mad strongman’s unspecified (but probably nuclear) holocaust, in order to create a deathless new Eden complete with a forbidden tree of knowledge. The author drags his readers through a repetitive plot to a thoroughly anticlimactic resolution keyed to the fruit of that aforementioned tree—leaving them to grope after any symbolism or even, for more analytical sorts, to puzzle over the logic of Mokurra’s actions. Additionally, the worldbuilding lacks depth and the characters are poorly fleshed out. A paucity of physical descriptions makes the ethnicity of human characters difficult to determine.

Coville is usually good for heady, high-spirited adventure—but he blows it here.