THE LUCK OF MADONNA 13, the first in author E. T. Ellison’s series of books titled “The Last Nevergate Chronicles”, offers some well-crafted and nimble world-building in the service of a glorious McGuffin. The setting is the New Mexico town of St Coriander in the mid-26th century, and our hero is Glendyl Fenderwell, a young woman who is sent on a quest to discover the Nevergate, a “syndimensional” device that enables travel between “parallax universes” that has defeated countless of her predecessors. The artifice of these terms is intentional; when it comes to humor, Ellison is a little less wry than Terry Pratchett, but more acute than Robert Rankin. They are also fascinated with, as it were, the nuts and bolts of writing; a paean to the glory of the footnote in fiction is resounding and welcome. This fascination also shows in an (Douglas) Adams-esque delight taken in language; the novel abounds with strikingly absurd neologisms. In the realm of food, we find “munchburgers”, “hamanegg” pastries and “marvosauce”; instead of the proverbial fly in the ointment, we get the “gnat in the soufflé”.

The main issue with the book is not the plot, but the structure, with a massive infodump taking up the opening section of the novel. THE LUCK OF MADONNA 13 bears the weight of being the first book in the sequence, so it might be said that this was unavoidable. Still, it places a substantial burden on the reader, who finds themselves confronted with 60 pages or so of dense prose before the story gets going. Ellison knows this, and their damn-the-torpedoes attitude towards the idea of front-loading the novel with exposition in this formidable format is, in its way, indicative of the remarkable confidence in one’s own flights of fancy that enables a work of this sort to reach fruition. The dizzying range of narrative beats, which include satires on consumerism, parodies of magic realism, and metatextual commentaries benefits from a steely self-belief that convinces the readers that its stranger conceits are just as central to the work as characterization and plot.

A remarkable flight of fancy, E. T. Ellison’s THE LUCK OF MADONNA 13 benefits from rich world-building, and flits between genres with easy grace.

~Craig Jones for IndieReader