Remember those old movies that blended cartoons and live action? Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or Cool World? This book reminded me of those, perhaps more the latter than the former.

The book starts with promise, presenting some compelling scenes and introducing some believable characters. Than we're introduced to the villain and the hero, two ridiculous cartoons striding through a world of normals. The plot quickly spins out of the realm of the remotely plausible, as the cartoons seem to infect those around them, transforming the hapless humans into wacky, goofy caricatures that can then careen wildly through what's left of my credulity.

Any attempt to prevent spoilers ends here.

I'm actually not that hard a case for this kind of thing. I'm generally happy to suspend disbelief and accept the world that the author wants to present, as long as its consistent and fulfills its objective (in this case, pure entertainment). So, even though I couldn't read the scenes with Diogenes Pendergast without seeing a wild eyed animated Christopher Lloyd in my mind, I was enjoying the book enough for a generally favorable (three stars) review. There were two things that lost me though.

First, I really want characters to have legitimate motivation. Even the villains? Especially the villains! In this book, Diogenes is motivated to spend about a billion dollars, wantonly destroy half a million more in diamonds, dedicate about 15 years of his life to performing about 500 man-years of work in a variety of disciplines that are not remotely related (yeah okay, he's a cartoon, whatever), and kill dozens of people because... well, because he's just crazy like that. You know, there was this thing that happened to him when he was a kid, and it just made him... crazy like that. That's beyond what I can will away by suspension of disbelief.

Second, there's Constance. Why is she there? Why should we care about her? And why does Diogenes risk his whole plan to sneak into her room and seduce her? Okay fine, he's crazy like that he doesn't need a reason, but these are still the most ridiculous and seemingly pointless scenes of the whole book, and that's really saying something.

Well, it turns out that the reason for it all is so that Constance can come from out of nowhere in the end of the book and kill Diogenes by wrestling him into a live volcano. Yeah. A live volcano. She has to do it, because the main character can't bring himself to. She falls in as well. I'm pretty sure the volcano has some ominous name, like Mount Doom or the Gate of Hell or something.

So we have pages and pages of painful scenes that have the sole purpose of manufacturing Golumn so that she can jump into a volcano. It's transparent in retrospect, because there was no other possible reason for those scenes to exist. That's beyond sloppy storytelling.