[I was] unable to finish Philip Farmer's Dark Is The Sun. Its 400+ pages grew stiff beneath my despairing gaze and would not turn…. My problem is I'm unable to read fast enough and carelessly enough to enter the hypnagogic state demanded by this sort of book. Dark Is The Sun is meant for speed readers whose high-speed attention will construct from the asphalt of the prose a world of low resolution and high escapist involvement; not a novel but a daydream in remedial-reading English. It doesn't work on me. Like a skeptical visitor to Disneyland, I find my attention straying to all the inauthentic details…. (p. 48)

Without perpetrating any real, and possibly amusing, howlers, the prose clunks and thuds and hobbles from one perfunctory thrill to the next. The imaginative component is of a piece with the prose: one composite animal follows another, but not one is scary...