Review by waynegoode (2005-04-04)
After I finished this, I thought to myself, 'Huh?' I have liked almost everything else I have read by Zelazny, but not this one. There are some interesting characters and a few humorous parts, but the plot is weak. Also, the book is very confusing. So many different things happen that it is difficult to put it together. Parts of the plot are started and then never developed fully. After reading 1/3 of the book, I started over to try to understand it.

The chapters are numbered 2 and 1, alternately. If you read it, which I don’t recommend, pay attention to what you read in chapters 1 versus chapters 2. It will help some.

In the end, I just don’t get it. I finally understand how the pieces go together, but I still don’t get what the book was really about or even why it was written.

I think this is 'literary sci-fi', but I'm not sure. Perhaps like some classic literature, it helps to have notes to explain what your are reading.

Review by kirwar4face (2003-07-07)
This little book (a hundred pages or so) is my favorite Zelazny. Some call it self-indulgent; there are in-jokes I personally don't get, or not quite, though most reasonably well-read readers will recognize most of the people, real and imaginary, who show up in cameo appearances along the Road. And what do you do about an author who sets up a fascinatingly deadly character who then just drifts out of the book? But Roadmarks' tank runneth over with fascinating characters, from Red Dorakeen himself (or 'Reyd' as the co-equally fascinating Lila calls him) to the philosophical ex-Crusader who winds up spit-shining windshields in a parking lot somewhere off C15. The book is full of brilliant writing, such as an encounter between two martial arts experts vying for the privilege of assassinating Red, in which Zelazny notates a series of minutely considered moves that lead inevitably and hilariously to the finish of the less skillful of the ritually polite contestants. Humor runs through the book like the veins of mold in a slab of blue cheese; there wouldn't be a book without it. Zelazny's mediocre books, like the Amber novels, have some of this humor, but don't sustain it for the whole book; in his best ones humor is always lying in wait to remind us not to take ourselves seriously. This is one of his best, maybe his masterpiece.