As an avid Coheed and Cambria fan, I was beyond-excited to read this 350-page ‘companion piece’ to their latest album, Year of the Black Rainbow. However, what I encountered was a poorly written farce of a novel, which not only couldn’t live up to the majesty and depth of the band’s music, but also couldn’t live up to the ideas it itself contained.
The novel tells the story of the origin of the Amory Wars, the concept that provides the lyrical content for the entirety of Coheed and Cambria’s musical catalogue to date. It is set on a system of planets known as the Keywork in a futuristic universe where inter-planet travel is (apparently) easy, and the guns are “pulsers” (?).
The Keywork is taken over by the evil mage Wilhelm Ryan, who rules with an iron fist, but is also loved. Somehow. After his son dies in riots, a man called Doctor Hohenberger swears revenge on Ryan. With some help from the mystical Prise, he creates a group of IRO-bots (half human, half robots) called Coheed, Cambria, and Inferno. Using their incredible, robotic powers, they start to fight back against Ryan’s troops. However, things start to go awry when Hohenberger’s wife Pearl gets captured.
The complex ideas of Year of the Black Rainbow deserve a trilogy of dense prose, gradually revealing a fantastical world steeped in mystery. What they get is the unsubtle writing of a child who has forgotten about his creative writing homework until the night before it’s due in.
