Tag: Fantasy

New Book Review 11: Obsidian Son

The next book I’m reviewing is Obsidian Son, the first book of the ‘Nate Temple’ series by Shayne Silvers. The books is billed as a supernatural thriller, but it was more of a modern/urban fantasy thriller with some overtones of detective drama and comedy. There were aspects of the book that I really loved, and some other aspects that I really hated.

But first, the premise. The protagonist, Nate Temple, is a tough, wisecracking, handsome bookstore owner whose parents owned a multi-billion-dollar tech company. He also happens to be a wizard. In this world there are wizards, werewolves, living gargoyles, the monsters and gods of Greek mythology (albeit quite a ways past their prime), and all kinds of magical shtuff. The story takes off shortly after Nate’s parents die under mysterious circumstances. Soon Nate’s bookstore is being attacked by strange incendiary women, Nate’s magical powers start going haywire, and everybody in town is in search of an ancient book about dragons. Nate’s investigations lead him into the thick of a plot by scheming, shape-shifting dragons to establish the Obsidian Son, a kind of dragon übermensch who will usher in an age of dragon world domination.

It’s a fun concept, made even more fun by the comedy delivered by the book. There’s great banter among characters and great wisecracks from our hero, but even apart from that the situations and scenarios in many cases are genuinely hilarious. Saying too much about them now would spoil the jokes for potential readers, but the jokes are definitely a strength. The action is written as it should be in a thriller. It’s fast, it’s vivid, the details are all there, it’s all working great. There’s only one thing about the action that doesn’t work so well: Nate Temple is so powerful that he never seems to be in any real danger. The reader never has to wonder if he’ll survive a fight. With his plot armor securely in place, the fights have a somewhat cartoonish quality to them. His absolute wealth also allows many problems to be resolved simply by throwing money at them. That’s not so bad though. It’s entertaining anyway. It bothered me a little that there really wasn’t really any character development in the book, but it’s a thriller. It’s entertainment. I can accept that.

There’s one big thing that did bother me about the book: the majority of female characters in the book served the primary purpose of being (to use Nate Temple’s term) “eye candy”. Every single female character has supermodel looks wear skintight clothing, when they wear clothes at all. The dragons vying for domination consist of a kingpin-like figure and his “harem” of females, all of whom appear as usually-naked supermodels when they are in human form. Nate Temple’s love interest (whom he doesn’t mind forgetting about when he’s ogling the other female characters) does literally nothing in the entire book except be sexy and serve as the love interest. The story could follow its exact same plot without her ever appearing. As far as I remember, the only exception to the every-woman-is-a-sex-deity rule was one elderly Christian secretary who was just in the story for one comedic scene in which she reprimands Nate for being too sinful. Now, I’m not about to try and be the moral arbiter of the genre. And, there’s nothing wrong with a character being attractive. But with the exception of the elderly Bible-thumper, every woman in the story has sexiness as their first and most defining characteristic. Their value to Nate starts with their sex appeal. It bothers me. As I said, the book is just entertainment. It’s not going for anything profound. Still, it bothers me, and I can certainly see it bothering other readers.

So, I can recommend this for fans of action and thriller novels, and for fans of modern fantasy, and for readers who live in the common ground between the two. The writing is not at all bad and I had a lot of fun reading it. I’d like to hope that if I read any of the author’s other books, I won’t find in them the same issues that I found in this one.

And now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8–New Book Review 9 –New Book Review 10

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 10: Incanta|Soul-Catcher

The tenth book I’m reviewing is Incanta |Soul-Catcher, the first book in the Lost Souls series by Avie Adams.  The genre is dark fantasy, which tends to mean fantasy with strong elements of horror. Now, for this particular book I was almost too skeptical to start it. I’m afraid that I judged it by its cover, which in my digital edition depicts a teenage girl with white skin, black hair, and red lips in front of a background of mountains and fog. It looked too much like YA goth supernatural romance, something like Twilight (not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not my taste). But, once I started reading this book, I quickly found that it wasn’t like that at all. It was more serious, more ominous, and far more engaging.

The book’s world is utterly alien, and adjusting to it takes some time. The protagonist, a teenage girl named Cytriah, lives on an island where the buildings are molded from obsidian. She is an Incanta, a low-level acolyte in a religious order that specializes in something similar-to-but-never-outright-named necromancy. The society is ruled over by (get ready for the moral panic!) snake-like and spider-like Daemons. Within the context of the society, everybody thinks this is normal. Cytriah has a hard life, but it’s the life she knows. Intimidation by Daemons is a common threat, the cruelties of her superiors are a common threat, and it’s a fact of this world that if she fails in her role she will be condemned as a ‘Promise-bearer’, an imprisoned bearer of children. That’s her world. Cytriah’s world falls apart when she obtains new knowledge about the way it works, and why it works the way it does. That’s where the plot gets moving and the threats against her become more tangible.

The level of detail in the story is great. The world, the magical processes in it, even the gritty and foul aspects of the necromancy, are described credibly and with powerful texture. Besides this Cytriah and the secondary characters have complexity which manifests in various ways throughout the story. The only contention I really have is that in a few crucial points in the plot, there were some logical stretches. Characters took actions which were crucial to the development of the plot, which I didn’t see clear motives for. There were only two points in the story where I saw this, and it’s not a huge problem. Many stories have done this far worse.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I was worried that this would turn out to be a poorly-written supernatural romance story. There was a romance aspect to it that didn’t manifest in the plot until quite a ways through the book, but it wasn’t anything like the helpless-infatuation romance stories you expect of the genre. The romance in this story is dangerous, with consequences as ugly as all other consequences in this hideous world.

To wrap this up, I do recommend this book, though with discretion. Fans of horror may like it. Readers with qualms about blood and violence and that sort of thing will certainly not. I enjoyed it.

Now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8–New Book Review 9

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 8: Demorn: Blade of Exile

The eighth book I am reviewing is Demorn: Blade of Destiny, the first book of the Asanti series by David Finn. This cross-dimensional dark modern fantasy adventure has the distinction of being both ridiculously fun and outrageously confusing. I read it all the way through, and to be perfectly honest I cannot recount the story’s plot trajectory at all. The only other story I’ve read that I can say that about it William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, which is outrageously confusing for other reasons.

Here’s what I can say with certainty about the story. The protagonist is a young woman named Demorn, a master swordfighter endowed with biting wit and a sarcastic fatalism born from the fact that she has traveled through both the past and the future of the universe and has consequently seen how it all ends. She’s also a lesbian, but that’s not so crucial the plot. Although, I would say it served to avoid some of the clichés we’ve too often seen about female protagonists. Throughout the story we see different facets of Demorn’s identity as she appears as a bounty hunter, a devotee to an ancient religious order, an exiled princess, a time traveler, a loyal sister, and a queen. Demorn finds these identities as hard to keep track of as the reader does, because she seems to have some condition along the lines of amnesia. She doesn’t know exactly where and when she’s been (time travel, remember?) or what exactly she’s done in the places and times she’s been. As far as I could understand, this disorientation is never fully resolved.

Demorn’s confusion about herself is conveyed in the storytelling in that the scenes did not seem to be in a specific order. Perhaps if I reread the book I’ll find patterns, but on a first reading the order of the scenes seemed nearly random. Using such confusion to convey disorientation and amnesia is a rare but useful trope I’ve only seen once before, in the Christopher Nolan thriller Memento. If you have the patience to push through a narrative without always understanding what’s going on, the effect is actually quite engaging.

One aspect of the writing that really stood out in this was the texture of the story. That’s the most accurate adjective I can use. Throughout the book are ice and bullets and lasers and electric shocks and soil and water and a thousand other sensations, and the writing is of such a quality that the reader feels every single one of them. More than anything else the texture kept me interested in the story when the plot was too much to handle. This texture, however, is a double-edged sword (or in the case of this book, a two-edged burning-with-purple-flames katana). The level of detail was so engaging, but at the same time the level of worldbuilding was near impossible to keep track of. A glossary to the book would have helped, as Demorn’s path is impacted by a bewildering variety of spells, magical objects, aliens, monsters, historical events, deities, and characters who alternatively serve as either allies or enemies.

To keep this review from running too long, I’m content to stop here with saying that I enjoyed this book quite a lot, but I wish I understood it better. Fans of fantasy, science fiction (soft sci-fi, probably not hard sci-fi), sword-and-sorcery, and fast-paced action stories will take pleasure from this book.

Now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

 

New Book Review 5: Rise of an Orphan

The fifth book I’m reviewing is Rise of an Orphan, the first book in the ‘Sky City’ series by R.D. Hale. The book defines itself as a biopunk epic (now there’s a genre you don’t hear about every day) and has overtones of science fiction, fantasy, and dystopian fiction. It was also voted winner of the Wattpad Award in 2014, so it’s had some publicity and popularity in the past.

The book is set in a future version of a parallel reality in which religious fanatics of the San Teria cult (I don’t practice Santeria, I ain’t got no crystal ball…) have taken over a Blade Runner-esque society and implemented a strict social order in which elites live in grand aerial cities while the poor scavenge for existence in disease-ridden slums. The hero, Arturo Basilides, is a teenager from the slums who gets caught up in a revolution against the San Teria government after he meets Dynah, a ‘transhuman’ girl whose body has been turned into a kind of supernatural weapon by government experimentation.

Robots! Superheroes! Ghosts! Cavemen! Sasquatches! Mutant monsters! Dystopian religious fanatics! Drugs ‘n’ sex ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll! This book shoves together the most diverse and random of tropes and tries to make them work together in a world that has echoes of various other fictional worlds but stands alone in its originality. There are old tropes in the book, certainly. Dynah, the lab-created superhuman, is much like the cast of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series or any number of characters from the literary tradition of comic books (she has a lot in common with Dark Phoenix of the X-Men comics, I noticed). Some descriptions of the divisions between the upper and lower stratums of the book’s society were very close to similar divisions in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games series, and the mutant monsters which populate the book’s landscape could have been lifted from any number of sci-fi sources. This is not to say that these tropes are bad. They were used pretty effectively here. But, they are familiar tropes and they were used in familiar ways.

The story tries to do a lot and fit a lot together. Its storyline includes attempted revolution, failed romance, prison break, car racing, plague epidemics, and other elements. It’s undeniably fun, but the lack of cohesion does get to be an annoyance after a while, especially considering how long the book is (I read the ebook, but the print length is 439 pages). The book has a central plot, but along the way that plot is constantly delayed by the numerous side-plots. Some of the delays are great, but some of them completely stop the plot for long stretches (in one part Arturo and his sort-of girlfriend Myla go on a mission to Sky City and spend all of their time, and several dozen pages, exploring local entertainment and shopping).

Despite its lack of cohesion, the characters are engaging, the plot is interesting, the dialogue is witty, the action is entertaining, and the fictional world is quite spectacular. Fans of dystopian fiction, action fiction, and soft sci-fi/fantasy will enjoy it. Of the five books I’ve so far reviewed on this blog, The Rise of an Orphan is so far the best one.

Now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 3: Dirt

The third book I am reviewing is Dirt, by C.C. Hogan. This book is the first of a fantasy series of the same name, which at this moment includes the stories Dirt, Bloody Dirt, The Fight for Dirt, Hope, and Yona and the Beast.

The story is set on a fictional and fantastical planet with the notably less-fantastic name Dirt. Considering that our own planet’s name is synonymous with the brown substance that plants grow in, this name is not as strange as it sounds. Dirt is inhabited by humans, dragons, and various fictional animal species invented by the author.

The story centers on Johnson Farthing, a young man who is among the poorest working-class folk of his hometown. When Farthing’s sister Rustina is abducted, Farthing gets a magician named Weasel to help him in his quest to rescue her, kicking off a journey that takes these and several other characters across several continents of dirt. This makes for a fun adventure, but in many respects our brave protagonist becomes overshadowed by the more dynamic characters who surround him. In fact, for a fairly long stretch he fades into the background while the spotlight is stolen the magician Weasel and the dragon Fren-Eirol. These two are excellent characters in their own right, but they become more interesting than the protagonist and the reader somewhat loses sight of the protagonist due to them. Weasel and Fren-Eirol’s story shines, yes, but in shining it dims the light of Farthing’s story.

The book had a quite clever balance between being grounded (heh heh heh) and being whimsical, which for the most part I appreciated. The balancing act offered its challenges though. A lot of the story, most notably the parts where the dragons were prominent, felt like it could have been geared toward young adults or even children. Alternatively, the characters swear quite casually (well, not a ton of swearing. They say “shit” several times, but that’s all) and there is an underlying threat of rape throughout the story, a threat which is frequently invoked to serve a reminder why rescuing Rustina is important. In some respects I feel like the book struggled to find its tone, but in other respects I appreciate the mixture of the two moods.

There were a fair number of typographical errors, not as much as it could be but still enough to be occasionally jarring. These errors tended to travel in herds: I noticed sets of two or three pages which had several errors (confusing “desert” and “dessert” or “rode” and “road”, for example) followed by long stretches of error-free pages, followed by another set of pages with frequent errors. Perhaps during the editing process these places were gone over when the author/editor was working late into the night while carrying the burden of exhaustion. I can sympathize, but the classes I had to take to get a bachelor’s degree in writing have irrevocably damaged me to the point that I can’t see a typo without physically cringing.

On the whole, it was a strong addition to the fantasy genre, and I wish the author the best. I will probably read others in the series at some point. At the moment I am occupied with God Emperor of Dune, and it will take a bit of time to finish.

Now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.

New Book Review 1: Sand and Scrap

I’ve decided to do a series of posts offering my review of recently-published books, with a focus on indie authors. This post is the first of the series. I’m reviewing Sand and Scrap,  the first novel of the dark fantasy series ‘Dregs of the Culver Waste’ by Chris R. Sendrowski. At the time of this post the  book is only available as an e-book.

This author, I think, likes Dune. If the sandworm wasn’t a dead giveaway, the use of the word ‘melange’ in a phrase spoken by a wizard certainly was. Nothing wrong with that; Dune is currently my favorite science fiction novel. In many ways the world in the novel resembles Frank Herbert’s desert world Arrakis, but more prominently it resembles the post-industrial hellscape of George Miller’s ‘Mad Max’ films. Slaves toil in impossible conditions, there is radiation and mutation and the abandoned scraps of a now-dead civilization, but the story finds place for more traditional fantasy aspects as well. There are wizards of sorts, spells and curses, and mystic monsters roaming or hiding in the landscape. The post-industrial aspect gives allows stand-ins for fantasy races as well. A Tolkienesque world would have its men and elves and dwarves and goblins, but this world has humans in stages of mutation depending on their place of origin. It’s a smart way to present an alternative to more typical fantastical races.

The world is hideous and brutal, and very well designed. As far as fantasy goes, I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. The story within the world is quite good as well. Most of the major characters are memorable, and the situation they are drawn into has suspense and dangers and obstacles to overcome which make for a very interesting adventure.

One trouble with Sand and Scrap, unfortunately, was that it felt terribly unpolished. There were mistakes in the writing, lots of them. The prelude the worst for it. The mistakes get to be less frequent as the reader gets closer to the end of the book (and in the final thirty pages there are almost none), but even so, I cringed every time a word was misused or a punctuation mark misplaced or a paragraph improperly indented. There is a difference between a hyphen and a dash, and there is a difference between “it’s” and “its”, but errors in the use of these are all over the book. These problems could have been resolved by editing, either by the author having an independent editor or by the author putting in the painstaking hours to take care of all the edits himself. It’s a long and frustrating process, but this book needs it badly. I hope I haven’t upset Mr. Sendrowski by saying so, but this is what the book needs. The further books of the ‘Dregs of the Culver Waste’ series need to be more polished. They need to feel complete, as opposed to two drafts short of complete.

The story also contains what could certainly be read as a lot of homophobia. I was uncomfortable with in the same way that I am uncomfortable finding casual racism in books from, say, the Victorian Era. However, I don’t know exactly how the series is going to develop. Homophobia can be an aspect of the hellish wasteland without the series necessarily being homophobic, just as rape and misogyny an aspect of Westeros in George R.R. Martin’s  ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ while the series itself is not misogynistic as a whole. I’d prefer to withhold judgment regarding the prevalence of homophobia in the Culver Waste, but as it stands with just this one book, I have the impression that the book might just be irredeemably anti-gay.

Another problem is the way the point of view works. The reader is jolted back and forth between several different points of view (which is not a problem), in many cases put into the point of view of a new and unknown character who the reader has no reason to be invested in (which is a problem). This happens throughout the book, and the way it’s done is very disorienting.

To summarize, I really enjoyed the setting and I thought the story was fairly good, but the high number of writing errors in the text and the way point of view operates were real problems.

Now, the plug. If you liked this book review, you can see my others here:

New Book Review 1–New Book Review 2–New Book Review 3–New Book Review 4–

New Book Review 5–New Book Review 6–New Book Review 7– New Book Review 8

If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.