The Castle Perilous Series by John DeChancie

Fashions come and go. That's their nature. It happens with clothing styles, with cars--and with a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being subject to the whims of fashion. Like, for instance, books.

In the 1980's and 1990's in the SF/Fantasy publishing business, one of the major flavors of the decades was humorous fantasy. Terry Pratchett may have started the whole thing with his still-very-popular Discworld series but he was not alone in his success. Craig Shaw Gardner wrote a series about a magically-challenged wizard whose spells were apt to produce unexpected, and often painful, results. Another series that was quite popular around about the same time was the Castle Perilous series of novels by John DeChancie. They were quite a bit different from his early novels about truckers in space (more to come on those in another entry sometime soon) but they caught the public imagination and he wrote eight of them before the reading public's taste changed (as it always seem to do eventually) and the books fell out of publishing favor and out of print. Which, of course, provided exactly the sort of opportunity that E-Reads was conceived to exploit. All eight titles in the series are now available once again as ebooks and most are also available as print titles with the last couple just about to become available.

Castle Perilous is a world (or worlds, or possibly universe or universes) out of time. There are 40,000 rooms and each one is an entryway to a different place in space and time. Open a door and step from a stone corridor into a jungle, a desert, an island or, if you're particularly unlucky, as so many of the visitors to the Castle seem to be, into a battlefield or someplace even more hostile and dangerous. Think Marx Brothers with really scary special effects and live ammunition. And sometimes it also resembles the famous Hotel California, where you can check out but you can never leave.

Maybe that last paragraph was a bit too scary itself. The essence of the Castle Perilous series, although it occasionally shows a darker edge, is hilarious contretemps and massive misunderstandings, spiced with wild and unpredictable adventure and, as the stage directions sometimes read, hilarity ensues.

Just because humor isn't the current flavor of the decade, that doesn't mean that we don't all need a laugh now and then (In my opinion, we need laughs as often as possible, to help us deal with the way life keeps surprising us and not always in pleasant ways.) and John DeChancie delivers them consistently, entertainingly and with a style all his own. These books probably aren't quite old enough to be referred to as classics yet but they are destined to be recognized as such as they age. In the meantime, give them a try, then help us figure out why some people didn't find them as witty as anything in the genre. It beats us, since they still make us laugh a lot!