I'm slowly making my way through a big stack of old Roger Zelazny SF paperbacks I picked up at a library sale a while back. This one I'm pretty sure I'd actually read before, probably decades ago when I was in high school, but I remembered almost nothing about it.

It's an odd one, though, even for Zelazny. The basic premise is pretty nifty: there is a road that stretches through time, with entrances and exits at various centuries (ones that sometimes change if history is altered enough), and people who know how to find it can travel that road in cars or trucks or horse-drawn carriages or chariots. An imaginative enough conceit, but the structure and the various weird events in the story take it beyond that, to... well, I don't know what. The blurb on the back cover describes it as having a "kaleidoscopic treatment of time, character, and action," and that's probably the best possible description of it. It really does feel like you're looking at the story through a kaleidoscope. Short chapters show us glimpses of various people at various times without a great deal of context. It does all sort of add up to a full story, one focused on a man who drives up and down the road in his pickup truck searching for something, and on the people who are currently trying to kill him, but it does so in a weird, fragmented way that never quite lets you get your bearings very well, often while throwing some very wild images at you. (The Marquis de Sade riding a mind-controlled tyrannosaur, anyone?)

This does not work perfectly, but it does work better than you might expect. (I do also suspect it works best if you read the whole thing in something like one sitting -- it's less than 200 pages and not a very dense read, so that's entirely possible, but, alas, I did not do it that way.) There is ultimately something rather slight about it, and depending on how you tilt your head, it can all seem either pretty cool or utterly ridiculous. It was, in any case, a reasonably entertaining reading experience, though.

Rating: I cannot for the life of me figure out how to rate this. I'm going to call it 3.5/5, but I feel like it almost deserves an extra half star just for its sheer audacity. ( )

I loved banging down the Road in a beater truck that is also a Transformer when it gets the aid of Baudelaire’s “Alexa” device. I totally loved the books qua A.I., in other words. I also think this is one of the better time-manipulation stories because a Road with exits and on-ramps that relate, in some way, to history is fantastic.

Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time (1961) does it better. And Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) does, too. No, those are not the same as Roadmarks, but I would hands down give those five stars. For all its interesting quirkiness, Roadmarks is fairly empty. Readers should read this novel so they know what the heck the rest of us are talking about. ( )

I mean it: spoiler city ahead.

This is one of Zelazny's more cryptic works and I seem to like it more each time I read it. It's structured in a way that requires attention in order to gain comprehension and I wonder if it influenced the structure of [b:Use of Weapons|12007|Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)|Iain M. Banks|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347522037s/12007.jpg|1494156]? Reading it twice makes it all pretty clear if one doesn't quite get it first time round.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN PROTEST AT GOODREADS' CENSORSHIP POLICY

See the complete review here:

http://arbieroo.booklikes.com/post/334914/post ( )

Pure Zelazny: a story that keeps you guessing until the end. I found myself turning back a chapter or two several times during my read to clarify, and even started reading it again once I'd finished. Definitely recommended for fans of this author, and for those who want something that challenges the reader. ( )

Very enjoyable time travel tale with hitmen, humour, and some very cool characters. ( )