A wonderfully imaginative premise, a world of magical possibilities, and just enough unanswered questions to test the carrying capacity of my suspension of disbelief. Here’s my review of The Book of Doors.
I wanted to like The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown. I really did. The premise is terrific. A mysterious book allows its owner to turn almost any door into a doorway to somewhere else. Other magical books exist, each possessing its own strange power. There are people who collect them, people who fear them, people who abuse them, and people willing to kill for them. Add time travel, secret histories, friendship, loss, and the possibility that an ordinary life can suddenly open into something enormous, and there is a lot here to love.
For a while, I did. Then I started going backward—not metaphorically, but literally going backward through the book because I was increasingly convinced I had missed an explanation somewhere. How did that character get that book? When was this rule established? Why can this character do something another character apparently cannot? What exactly happened to the Woman? How does the Book of Pain work now? Wait—where did the Book of Health come from?
Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t necessarily that I had missed something. At least not every time. The story had simply stopped convincing me that its own rules mattered, and that’s a problem when your novel is built around magical books with rules.
Fantasy Doesn’t Need to Be Real. It Needs to Be Consistent.
I have no problem suspending disbelief. Give me magical books, doors through space and time, impossible libraries, and mysterious collectors. Tell me there is a book that can inflict horrific pain on another human being, and I’m willing to go along. I’ve already agreed to magical books. I’m clearly willing to negotiate.
But once a story establishes its world, I need the impossible things to behave according to some understandable internal logic. That became my biggest problem with The Book of Doors. The various Special Books often seemed less like objects governed by established rules and more like solutions waiting for the plot to need them. A character would possess a particular book, or a book would demonstrate an ability at precisely the moment the story required it. Instead of thinking, “Of course—that makes sense given what we already know,” I increasingly found myself thinking, “Wait. How did we get here?”
That distinction matters. A good twist makes me want to reread earlier chapters because I can suddenly see the clues I missed. A confusing twist makes me reread earlier chapters because I am trying to determine whether the explanation was ever there. I did far too much of the second. At some point, rereading stops being literary appreciation and becomes an audit.
The Book of Pain and the Book of Health
The later treatment of the Book of Pain is a good example. Pain in the novel is something the book can deliver. That is an understandable supernatural premise. The Book of Pain causes pain—horrific, terrible, supernatural pain, certainly—but the basic arrangement between reader and author is fairly straightforward.
Then the Book of Health enters the equation. The Book of Health appears capable of supporting the body’s resistance to aging and natural disease. Fine. That gives it a definable purpose. But when the story begins using these powers in combination with previously inflicted pain, the mechanics become considerably harder to follow.
What exactly is happening? Is the Book of Health healing physical damage? Is it somehow forcing previously inflicted pain out of the body? Does magically inflicted pain remain inside someone after the Book of Pain is no longer being used? If so, what exactly remains? Is pain now something stored in the body like supernatural cholesterol? More importantly, when were these rules established?
There may be perfectly reasonable interpretations. Readers can construct explanations. We can theorize about how the two books interact and create a set of rules that makes the outcome work, but that’s the problem: we shouldn’t have to write the owner’s manual ourselves.
Mystery is part of fantasy. I don’t need The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Magical Books, including troubleshooting diagrams and a toll-free customer-service number. I do need enough consistency to understand why an important outcome occurred. Otherwise, magic becomes indistinguishable from authorial convenience.
And Then There Is the Woman
The Woman’s fate created even more problems for me. The Book of Doors connects not only places but time, which creates all kinds of fascinating possibilities. It also creates an enormous storytelling obligation: once time travel is possible, the reader needs some idea of what time travel can and cannot do.
The novel demonstrates that Hugo and Cassie can remain in the past and simply live forward toward the present. Once that possibility exists, however, it raises an obvious question about the Woman: why can’t she do the same?
What precisely is the loop trapping her? Why can’t she travel to a point in the past, remain there, and allow time to carry her forward? Why can’t she return to her home while her younger self still exists? What prevents two versions of the same person from occupying the same period? If something does prevent it, what is it? I kept waiting for the rule that would make her fate inevitable. Instead, I found myself constructing one.
Perhaps the loop works this way. Perhaps the Book of Doors won’t allow that. Perhaps two versions of the same person can’t coexist. Perhaps the temporal mechanics operate differently under certain circumstances. Perhaps. That’s a lot of perhaps for a major character’s ultimate fate.
There is a difference between a story leaving something deliberately mysterious and a reader needing graph paper, three highlighters, and a corkboard with red string to explain why a character can’t simply wait until Tuesday. I don’t mind wondering about the implications of a fictional world’s rules. I do mind having to invent the rules so the ending works.
Sometimes Someone Just Has the Book
This may have been the most frustrating recurring problem. The books are supposed to be extraordinary objects, so their possession matters. Who has which book should therefore matter enormously. Ownership should create tension. Losing one should have consequences. Finding one should be an event.
Yet there were moments when the plot seemed to need a particular ability and—presto—someone had access to the appropriate book. This eventually turned reading into supernatural inventory management. Who has the Book of Pain? Who has the Book of Health? Who had that other book? When did it change hands? Wasn’t that one somewhere else? Did I miss a transfer? I began mentally requesting receipts.
And apparently, everyone in this universe also has spectacular pockets.
The Magical Mystery of Everyone’s Pants
The Book of Doors itself is described as a small book, so perhaps we are meant to imagine something closer to a journal than a standard hardcover. Fair enough. But even a small leather-bound journal has dimensions. It has thickness. It occupies space. Try putting one in the front pocket of a normal pair of jeans and then going about your day as though nothing unusual is happening. Now add another one.
At various points, characters seem able to carry these books—and sometimes multiple books—with remarkably little concern for the basic laws of pants. Much of the story doesn’t take place in weather where everyone would naturally be wearing a heavy winter coat with enormous interior pockets, either. So where exactly are all these books going? Perhaps the Special Books possess one additional power Brown neglected to mention: they turn every pair of trousers into cargo pants.
It sounds like a ridiculously minor complaint, and on its own it absolutely is. If my biggest criticism of a fantasy novel were insufficient discussion of pocket dimensions, I would probably give it five stars and move on with my life. But the pocket problem illustrates something larger: these are physical objects around which almost the entire plot revolves. Their physical presence should matter.
Carrying one should be noticeable. Carrying several should require a bag, backpack, satchel, cargo pocket, or some acknowledgment that books—even magical ones—occupy three-dimensional space. Strangely enough, those mundane limitations could have made the magic more interesting. Which books does a character risk carrying? Which ones have to remain protected? Can someone conceal one? Can another character see the suspicious rectangular bulge in a pocket? If you need four Special Books for whatever supernatural catastrophe you’re planning this afternoon, congratulations: you now need luggage.
Limitations create choices, and choices create tension. Instead, the Special Books sometimes begin to feel less like physical artifacts and more like inventory in a video game. Need the Book of Illusion? Slot three. Book of Pain? Apparently right next to it. Book of Health? Hang on. Other pocket.
When the reader starts wondering whether the secret to controlling the world’s most powerful magical artifacts is a trip to the cargo-pants aisle, the world-building may need another pass.
A Surprisingly British America
There was another, smaller issue that repeatedly pulled me out of the story. Although much of the novel takes place in the United States, some of the dialogue, expressions, and rhythms didn’t sound particularly American to me. They frequently felt distinctly British.
Gareth Brown is Scottish, so British linguistic influence is hardly surprising. And obviously, every American character doesn’t need to wander through the story carrying a cheeseburger, discussing the NFL, and yelling about the Fourth of July. But dialogue helps establish place. When characters supposedly rooted in America consistently use phrasing that doesn’t sound natural to the setting, the effect is subtle but cumulative. Each instance is tiny; together, they created another layer of distance between me and the fictional world.
Normally, that wouldn’t bother me much. But this novel was already asking me to keep track of magical books, changing ownership, supernatural powers, multiple timelines, time loops, paradoxes, and apparently an underground global market in pants with unusually generous storage capacity. My available processing power was becoming limited.
Which Is Frustrating, Because There Is a Very Good Book in Here
That’s ultimately why The Book of Doors frustrated me so much. I didn’t dislike the idea; I liked it enormously. The central concept is exactly the kind of fantasy premise that can carry a novel: an ordinary object with an extraordinary ability, gradually revealing a much larger hidden world. The early sense of discovery works. There are moments of genuine imagination and wonder. The possibilities created by the Book of Doors itself are fascinating, and I wanted to know more.
That’s very different from being bored. A boring book is easy to put down. A frustrating book can actually be harder because you keep seeing the story you think it might become. You keep giving it another chapter because the underlying idea is good enough to deserve another chance. That was my experience here.
The farther I went, however, the more I felt that whenever the story reached an obstacle, another ability, another book, another interpretation of an existing power, or another wrinkle in the rules could appear to get everyone where they needed to go. That’s dangerous in fantasy because if magic can solve anything, nothing is particularly dangerous.
The Difference Between Mystery and Confusion
Perhaps my biggest takeaway from The Book of Doors is that mystery and confusion are not the same thing. Mystery says, You don’t know yet. Confusion says, I’m not sure the story knows either.
A good fantasy novel can withhold enormous amounts of information. It can deceive the reader, introduce rules gradually, and even reveal that previously understood rules were wrong. But when it does, the eventual revelation should make the earlier story clearer. That’s the payoff. You look backward and think, Oh. That’s why that happened.
By the end of The Book of Doors, I too often experienced the opposite. The more answers I received, the more questions I had about the mechanics that produced them. That made the emotional ending much harder for me to accept. Instead of simply experiencing what was happening to the characters, part of my brain was still standing in the back of the room with its hand raised: “Sorry. One more question about the time travel.”
Nobody likes that guy. Unfortunately, during parts of this book, I became that guy.
I Still Wanted to Love It
And maybe that’s the strangest compliment I can give The Book of Doors: I finished it wishing I liked it more.
Brown created a concept with tremendous potential, memorable characters, and a world I genuinely wanted to explore. There is imagination all over this novel. For many readers, that sense of wonder may be more than enough to carry them through the places where the mechanics become fuzzy. It wasn’t enough for me.
Once the novel established that these books possessed specific powers, I wanted those powers to have meaningful limitations. Once time travel became central to the story, I wanted its rules to remain consistent. Once possession of individual books became important, I wanted to understand how those books moved from person to person. And once everyone started casually carrying several of them around, I apparently wanted an explanation of their pants. I didn’t expect that going in, but that’s where we ended up.
I can happily believe that a magical book can turn an ordinary doorway into a passage across the world and through time. That’s the easy part. What I struggled to believe was that whenever the story needed another impossible thing to happen, there always seemed to be another book, another interpretation of its powers, or another exception conveniently waiting to make it possible.
I wanted to walk through the door Brown created. I just wanted to know where the door led, what rules governed the trip, who currently had the book that opened it, and whether that book was somehow stuffed into the front pocket of a pair of khakis.
Apparently, even my suspension of disbelief has a carrying capacity.