many, many years of flipping pages. So the effort was really there to create an "authentic" relic so, it seems a bit of a misstep to have anything typed in the entire book.

As this is a licensed Blizzard product -- says so on the spine! -- it's safe to assume that everything contained in the book is canonical. This would also lead me to believe that reading it would be a good primer from Diablo III (whenever it ships).

 

         

 

I liked the illustrations and sketches on nearly every page. Some of the pictures really stand-out but others there's seems to be a bleed from the WarCraft and StarCraft games into Diablo. (There are a couple of illustrations where it seemed to depict a straight-up Zerg unit.) Much of it seems overdrawn in the style of Todd McFarlane, with a lot of teeth, pointing bits, and angelic lines and halos for the good guys.

This was one of those guilty little reads I toted with me during my commute on public transit. You know what kind of read I'm writing about. It fills one's brain with useless information, the kind of knowledge that has no bearing on day-to-day living and will never be included in a Jeopardy! category. But it was kind of fun to read and see what kind of fiction the people at Blizzard have built out around the Diablo series.

 

         

 

What kind of took me aback was how many random, and often well-dressed, people would start a conversation with me after seeing me with the book, usually with the line, "Oh man, I remember Diablo!" And a rambling discourse would ensue. This is something that has never happened to me with any other work of, you know, actual literature.

Book of Cain (Diablo III) retails in hardcover for $35US.

- Aaron Simmer

(January 24, 2012)