Yuletide unofficial chat

This is a novel in verse about King Xau of Meqing (fantasy China). Much like Maia in The Goblin Emperor, Xau is the youngest of four sons, and after his father's death, he's the only one left to take the throne; he then proceeds to astonish everyone by his Incorruptible Pure Pureness, in particular, not thinking himself better or more important than ordinary people.

Let's consider the "novel in verse" part first. I can be very picky about free verse. I usually prefer formal constraints, like rhyme and meter. Often, I find that contemporary poetry written in free verse also tends to be inscrutable. Especially in academia, there's a lot of "reading the same few lines over and over again to try and figure out what it's getting at," it's not just "the curtains are blue" but there's that same "hopefully the professor can tell us what's going on because I don't know." In speculative outlets, I sometimes feel that the borderline between flash fiction and free verse falls into this "incomprehensible word salad" category, to its detriment.

I am happy to report that "The Sign of the Dragon" avoids this problem. Most of it is free verse, but not in an inaccessible way: more in the way that a drabble or very short story might just pick out a few details or sentences, leaving the reader to infer the rest of the plot from a few highlights. I wound up turning off my poetry goggles for most of it and just reading it as flash-adjacent prose, and I think that's totally fine. There are a few sections that became more rhyme-based (especially the horror parts; there were several lines about slaves/caves and chain/pain, etc. that repeated over and over in the "monster" POV sections, I would have liked more different kinds), and others that are sort of loosely haiku-structured.

Also, obligatory shoutouts to Enlai the bard. Enlai composes songs and ballads about how great and heroic and legendary Xau is, and Xau always tries to avoid them, because it's embarrassing. But, like...the entire story we're reading is the poetic saga of how great and heroic and legendary Xau is, as much as he tries to downplay it. So I don't think we can be too hard on Enlai!

Many of the poems were previously published in various speculative journals. This surprised me, because it didn't feel like the proper names and stuff would make a lot of sense without context. Maybe I'm just being sour grapes about "well if I tried that I'd probably have no luck," but also, I can't see myself wanting to write a novel in free verse anyway so hopefully that's nothing to worry about?

Okay, now the rest of it. In Maia's case, he came to the throne because his father and all three brothers simultaneously died when their airship crashed. Xau's father died of natural causes, and all four brothers went to the mountain of the titular dragon. The other three, one by one, fail to return, so they send Xau; he impresses the dragon enough to be allowed to live and be crowned king.

Page 16:

"We are angry, not sad--
our father should have warned them."

I think, to me, this caused me to misinterpret this as Xau having been warned, or having some kind of foreknowledge of what to expect from the dragon? But he really didn't. The dragon decided Xau's father would make an adequate king, despite him being a terrible person by comparison, but Xau's brother Keng, who cared about him and gave him a nickname and who Xau names his first child after, doesn't pass. And Xau just winds up shooting the breeze with, and going to get advice from, the creature who killed this brother and all the others. I don't buy it.

There's a fairly heavy tonal dissonance between the book at its lightest and its darkest, and for me, this undermined it pretty severely. Explaining why will go into heavy spoiler territory, so.