Review: The Eye in the Stone

The Eye in the Stone is a fantasy novel by Allen L. Wold, published in 1988.

So let me talk about In Nomine for a moment. In Nomine is a roleplaying game in which the player characters are Celestials, i.e., angels and/or demons. (The game explicitly assumes an Abrahamic mythos, although it doesn't declare any particular Abrahamic religion to be correct.) One of the decisions the writers of In Nomine made is this: that Adolf Hitler was entirely human, and that his actions were not significantly influenced by Celestials. "Humans, at their peaks and valleys, are better and worse than angels and demons (respectively)," the line editor has written.

In the setting of The Eye in the Stone, this is not true.

It's not mentioned in the story proper, mind; instead, it's mentioned in passing in at least two of the occasional one- to two-page expositions on the setting that Wold uses to communicate details that the protagonist already knows. It's these that present most of Eye's mythos. Eye doesn't quite use the Abrahamic mythos directly, but it does have a knockoff, almost-secular copy of half of it — the half that would allow for the existence of Satanic ritual murders in the setting. (Ah, the 1980s.)

There's enough clearly non-Abrahamic structure alongside that it doesn't, thankfully, feel like someone's just repackaged Fuzzy Christianity as fantasy (see: Knowing, Black Magic Woman). It might even be a slightly Abrahamized D&D-style cosmology (and this hypothesis may make more sense in a moment).

The protagonist, Morgan Scott, is a "[t]wentieth-century sorcerer"; the initial setting is the town of Harborbeach, Michigan [sic], and no other place on Earth; but over the course of the book Scott finds himself in a number of other planes of existence (mostly not of his own volition) as he tries to track down his missing brother, Michael, while avoiding or foiling the actions of the Servants of Evil.

The magic is RPGish, although not Vancian; spells are named (e.g., Heal Wound), draw from a pool of energy, and require both gestures and speech — either of which may be entirely performed in the mind given sufficient skill and familiarity. (The GURPS system comes to mind, and indeed it's not impossible that it derives therefrom: GURPS was published in 1986.) The language-of-spells, which is featured in snippets, deserves a call-out for not being the usual apostrophe-laden twaddle; it has a clear non-Latinate, non-Germanic phonological structure (CV[CV...], C `\in` {hl l r ng k ts d sh}, V `\in` ah ae eh ie, possible final n*). It feels somewhat incomplete given the lack of any back vowels, but not entirely unbelievable.

The story seems to wander as much as the protagonist. If there were, rather than a single, clearly primary protagonist, an entire group of them, I wouldn't hesitate in labeling this a novelization of a tabletop RPG session**. Even without them, that's still how it feels: notably, Morgan has to go on two separate quests for two separate MacGuffins in the course of the story (in both cases, on behalf of the Servants!). It is, at least, not transparently predictable.

The characters are largely not cardboard, but also not terribly easy to empathize with. Their feelings (like so much else in the novel) are largely narrated, not implied by their actions. There's little to say about any of them, so ... I won't.

Still and all, it's not really actively bad. The author narrates too much, but is at least a good narrator, so this is somewhat forgivable. The setting is not (strictly speaking) coherent, but is consistent, and consistently interesting — my dislike of the transference of responsibility for humanity's real-world failures to an ethereal scapegoat notwithstanding. I can't really strongly recommend reading this book solely for entertainment when there are so many better ones out there; but on the other hand, if you're looking for an idea mine for a game setting, there are a few rich veins of possibility to be found herein. It earns ... a single point, I suppose, for at least occasionally being different and weird.

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* The language name "Raen" was neither italicized nor used in a Raen phrase, and may have been formed from the otherwise acceptable and attested syllable "Rae" with the Germanic adjectivizer -en attached.

** Not necessarily a bad thing; see Villains by Necessity for one I enjoyed, though other reviewers have panned it.