So...this review will disappoint many fantasy readers and my cousin who loaned me this book in the first place. I don't often leave a book unfinished, but I barely cracked a hundred pages with THE GREAT BOOK OF AMBER. I couldn't finish it. I couldn't even finish the second book in the series, THE GUNS OF AVALON. I tried. I really tried. But I couldn't.

*cringes against oncoming horde* Okay, okay, you've probably gotten over the "whAT" reaction and are eager to hear the why, right? Maybe?

My reasoning was highly personalized and had a lot to do with me rather than Zelazny's skills. In fact, I think Zelazny's a brilliant storyteller. His austere style is unique in the high fantasy genre: no where else have I found such stark prose married so happily to a mystical concept, nor that style used so effectively to tease out a book's mystery. Even though the concept of Amber and Shadow is simple--there's one world in which all the multiverses are based on and it's ruled by Oberon and his children--it takes the reader awhile to figure this out. Zelazny has mastered the technique of telling the reader exactly what they need to keep going and absolutely no more.

So if Zelazny is so great, why didn't I finish the collection?

Because style isn't enough to get me through a story. In the end, I didn't care enough about Corwin as a character to keep going. Don't get me wrong: he seems like a cool dude. I like the way he narrates things. I like his determination, his bravery, his bluffing, his resilience, his problem-solving skills. In the first book, I sympathized with him trying to get his memory back. That's a sympathetic cause, yeah? But then, BUT THEN, he totally lost my sympathy in GUNS when it became clear that for the rest of the books he was just going to try to sit on Amber's throne. After manipulating and decimating two planet's worth of population in his last attempt. After cursing his supposedly beloved forest into some weird demonic hellscape. After shunting almost all the female characters as either paragons of virtue, wiley snakes, or uncooperative, selfish simpletons. After admitting that it was really the principle of the thing that he should sit on the throne, not that he would be a better ruler than his brother. After deciding that, worse come to worse, everyone he's not related to is expendable.

What. A. D**k.

See, I don't really see the point of his need to topple Eric. What's so great about Corwin being King of Amber if he doesn't have some grand scheme to improve it? Why should I care who's on the throne of Amber if they don't give two cares about me and my "shadow" realm (and how freaking ego-centric is that: what if Amber is a shadow of Earth??). I just...what. As a person, I don't value power and influence the way Corwin does. That's not the way my ambition lies. I don't see the point of power for the sake of having power. I don't care about power-acruing stratagems enough to sit through 900 more pages of it. I'm sorry. Please enjoy Amber's world without me.