A new book, and a soundtrack for it - along with an online trailer as if it's a movie. What do you all think? Has anyone read it yet?

Brace yourself. You may not like what follows.

In my entire collection of several hundred Alice related books this is unquestionably the worst one. I know the Lewis Carroll Society hated it as an utter betrayal of the spirit and content of AiW/ATTLG but I had no problem with any of that. My problem was that the book is rubbish utterly devoid of any redeeming features. The writing runs the full range from quite poor to bloody awful, the story is trite with just about the worst pacing I have encountered in any novel in any genre. The plotting is derivative and at times downright ridiculous. The characters are dull and uninteresting. As you know I am an obsessive collector of Alice books and even I haven't been able to bring myself to buy the sequel "Seeing Redd" or any of the related Hatter M comics. I understand there are also card games, role-playing games, music and for all I know fridge-magnets, frilly underwear and novelty condoms related to the series.

About the only positive thing that I can find to say about Frank Beddor is that he's a much better self-publicist than he is an author.

Sorry about the rant but I absolutely hated this book.

Actually, your rant makes me feel relieved that I didn't bother to read it but instead just returned it when it was due back to the library.

Thanks for the review, and I'll keep an eye out for those possible condoms so I can send you some for your collection. I'll be laughing about that for a long time.

those possible condoms

A goodly item for anyone's cabinet of curiosities next to the Japanese Windows Vista toilet tissue (link).

The Hatter M comic books look pretty cool. There's also American McGee's Alice, a computer game about a knife-wielding Alice in a Wonderland asylum. I think the coolest Alice spinoff is Jan Švankmajer's surreal stop-action animation.

I have to agree there.
The Hatter M comics do look pretty cool and if I hadn't been put off by just how bad Looking Glass Wars is I might have gone out of my way to get them.

I also have to agree about American McGee's Alice although I confess I played it using various cheat codes as I wanted to see it all and couldn't be bothered to spend the time required to play it properly as I'm not really a gamer.

And I have to agree about Jan Švankmajer's version too. Easily my favourite animation though Jonathon Miller's black and white, live action, faux-Victoriana versio is pretty damned good too.

There is a Hunting of the Snark movie which I'd like to see... and it seems that Švankmajer has a film called Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta (Jabberwocky).

I'm familiar with the Jabberwocky film by Švankmajer. Like all of his work it is an extremely interesting piece of surrealism. However it has nothing discernible to do with the poem apart from the poem being read over the top of the bizarre montage of images.

A youtube clip can be found here.

I'm not even sure the poem is included at all on the original version. I'll dig my copy out tomorrow and have a look.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

Bob, you probably have it already, but if not, I highly recommend Robert Sabuda's intricate pop-up book, based on the Tenniel illustrations & complete with excerpted text in tiny book inserts:

check it out