It's summer, and traditionally this means I go up to Queensland, lose my mind in the heat, and ill-advisedly buy a swathe of new Australian fantasy to read while I loll about on the couch crunching ice and jeering at the cricket. Often I manage to wangle these in the form of Christmas presents, but this year I had a brain blip in Melbourne, somehow thought half a Stephenson novel would be enough to tide me through a three-week stay (well, it is Stephenson) and have been forced to take matters into my own hands. Which would have been fine, except this is Gladstone, the town with eight pubs, three sex shops, and no bookstores. (Thanks, Justin.)

The pickings at Big W were paltry, if I didn't feel like reading further Twilight books (and I won't until they lobotomise me, and even then I hope that some deeply entrenched hivemind memory will not permit me to hand over money for the dubious privilege). But I had, actually, been eyeing off Prophecy's Ruin by Sam Bowring in bookstores, partly for the spiffy-looking cover, and partly because it sounded marginally interesting. Stalemates! Two sides of a story! Potential for interesting character-driven stuff!

I got two chapters in. I'm a very neat reader, do you suppose Big W will let me return it?

It's not that it's bad - it's not! It's written as competently as any current Australian fantasy, with some literary flourishes that are sometimes delightful and sometimes overwrought. But in the first two chapters we were introduced to various of the forces of "shadow", comprising:

• a cold, cruel, ruthless and unattractive overlord;
• goblins, complete with claws and casual homocidal (or goblocidal, I suppose) impulses; and
• an inscrutable, feared lich (well, what do you call an undead mage? Yeah).

"Oh good lord," I said. "This isn't just a Tolkien rip-off, it's a Peter Jackson inspired Tolkien rip-off, complete with stupid special orcs. There'll probably be wolf-riders for no good reason later on."

(I feel like maybe I should also point out that the bad men - sorry, perfectly nice men on the side of goblins and vicious overlords and liches, what the fuck was I thinking? - are called Arabodedas. I don't know how that got past an editor.)

I am a post-Tolkien fantasy reader. Good vs evil is boring. More importantly, good vs evil tells us nothing about the complicated, ambiguous, shades-of-grey world in which we live, and it's my opinion that good fantasy should hold up a distorted mirror to reality, using its freedom from that reality to show us new things about it. But mostly, it's just that it's boring.

And in this particular instance, it's probable that a lot of my dissatisfaction comes from the fact that I picked it up purely because the blurb sounded like it was a story full of compromise. Shadow and light (not evil and good) and a "hero" on both sides! Poking around the internet has revealed a couple of reviews using words like "balance" and "ambiguity".

So perhaps he's just establishing cliches of "light" and "dark" in order to ruthlessly undermine them later? Seems a little unnecessary, considering how insidious those facile terms are, especially in the genre. And TWO SODDING CHAPTERS (plus more - that's just where I stopped, and he seemed to be rather excited about his goblins catching up with the pretty blonde sorceress of the light) is completely unnecessary. Make it a prologue. GET ON WITH THE INTERESTING STUFF.

Though I am, now, considering trying it a little further, just to see if it does get interesting once the actual heroes show up. Except I am just so violently opposed to the establishing work he's done. Any shades of light that the "shadow" hero brings to the thing are going to be in contrast against the cliche, and the slow tarnishing of the side of "light" has been done before.

Of course, if I can't return and can only exchange, what the hell am I going to exchange for? Not even this is as bad as Stephenie "without your man you're nothing" Meyer.