[In case you’ve been wondering how my left eye is doing, post-surgery (cataract), I woke up this morning with clearer vision that I’d had when I went to bed. I believe it’s now better than it was then – but such things are hard to judge when the progress is slow. My retina surgeon led me to believe I’ll have permanent diminished sight, but the cataract guy thought he could restore it substantially. I await the final resolution of this contest of expertise.]

I knew this one was going to be strange, but it looked like it could be fun. And I guess it was, more or less. David E. Sharp’s Lost on a Page is a literary fantasy, in which characters from different genres interact, fighting and making alliances in a struggle against their own authors.

We meet Joe Slade as a hardboiled private eye in a typical urban nighttime setting, when he gets lured into chasing a strange group of people. They lead him into a library (or bookstore, I forget which), and somewhere in a maze of shelves they pass through a portal into a library in another world. There his new acquaintances reveal themselves to be an elf, a dwarf, and a wizardess. They reveal their discovery that they are characters in fictional fantasy stories, and they have decided to invade the World Where Books Are Made, to get revenge on their author for all the awful things he’s put them through. They’ve read Joe’s stories, and consider him just the ally they need for this violent job.

As they jump from fictional universe to fictional universe, they’ll find themselves in a Regency romance, a space travel story, and a zombie apocalypse novel. They’ll learn that there are things that the rules of fiction won’t permit them to do, and that different powers work differently in different worlds. And, of course, love with blossom.

Lost On a Page was a creative and original book, and amusing in places. I enjoyed the author’s self-mockery as the characters complained about their working conditions. However, I think the author also bit off more than he could chew. The book was awfully complicated, with settings and rules changing from scenario to scenario. And the author’s vocabulary wasn’t up to his challenges. For instance, when they jumped into the Regency romance, he tried to adopt the literary style of such books, with unhappy results: “Any afficionado would lecture this was a wine to be savored slowly and to which one should pay great homage.”

I finished the book, but it annoyed me. You might like it, though, especially if you’re a Jasper Fforde fan.