While a lot of my reviews tend toward the negative, there are a few truly awful books out there. The Meq is one of them. Steve Cash attempts to write fantasy outside the swords & sorcery high fantasy sub-genre. Unfortunately for him, his book is crap.
The premise is that a race of immortal humans has been propagating for hundreds of years, sheltered by the Basque ethnic group. They grow to age 12, and then age no more. At least until they mate, at which point they will begin aging again. Oh, and they have super-human powers of recovery; it takes near-total destruction of a Meq’s body before he/dies. The book is the story of Zianno Zezen who safeguards one of the ancient stones of the Meq. Not so shockingly, it has magical powers. Zianno’s foil is the Fleur du Mal, a much older Meq, who delights in killing.
Fortunately for me, I can’t give you any spoilers, cause I stopped reading the book after a few hundred pages. There’s little coherency to the story. It consists of long stretched out sojourns for Zianno to various locales where he accomplishes little. Toward the end of each trip, whatever it is he’s looking for decides to come to him but it turns out that the individual quest-lets are worthless once the object is found. Interspersed with this are return visits to St. Louis, where most of his mortal human companions live. The biggest problem besides the long drawn out trips is that the characters are all dull. In addition, even with that, it’s hard to care whether they will live or die because they are immortal. They don’t die. I think the writing technique that leads to this is that Cash introduced too many characters with not enough back story. But then, I don’t know writing that well. And I don’t care to try to figure out much more than that why I disliked this so intensely.
Title: The meq
Author: Steve Cash
Series: The meq, book 1
Imprint / publisher: Del Rey / Random House
Format: Paperback
Length: 404 p.
Publication date: January 2005
ISBN-10: 0-345-47092-3
Subject: Immortalism — Fiction
Subject: Children — Fiction
LC classification: PS3603.A865 M47 2005
