The Swords of the Damned by Richard Tongue is a licensed fantasy fiction book published under the Adventures Dark & Deep banner. I have the Kindle version, and 90% of my reading of the novel happened in one bathroom or another. What can I say, it made for decent bathroom reading.
The Good - it mostly keeps to the usual "D&D" tropes, including vancian style magic. As for the story itself, the pacing is decent, the plot was good, most of the main characters are likable and it's better fantasy fiction than most of the crap put out by TSR when it treated fiction like shovelware. Yes, it was an enjoyable read and probably the first novel I've read straight through in over a year. If you have Amazon Prime, you can read it for free with your Kindle or Kindle app - wish I had realized that prior ;)
The Bad - I am not the grammar police, but there were more than a few instances where the writing was just plain awkward, and the use of pronouns got me confused with more than one "he" or"she" being referred to in the same part of narrative.
The Plain Old Ugly - if I make a spelling mistake on this here blog, it's no big deal - you aren't paying for my shit ;) Not that I like the mistakes, but sometimes the built in spell checker doesn't catch it all, or it changes words and the like. If that happens in a novel I'm reading every minute or two, it fucking sucks. I understand that this book is basically self published, but use more than a built in spell checker to fix your spelling and typos. Use your mother, your sibling, your girlfriend. Pay someone 20 bucks. Little sucks more then getting into a story and seeing "stares" for "stairs" and "threw" for "through" and "sand" for "said" and a crapload more where they came from.
Overall, decent read, needs a shit ton of editing. If you have Amazon Prime, nothing lost by checking it out.
While this might be an exception (or not), most self-published titles would be hard pressed to make back that $20 for editing, even if they could find it that cheap (usually it's more by about a factor of 10 or 20)
ReplyDeletethere are folks that would do it for free just to add the credit to their resume.
Deletethis book was not put before a new set of eyes before being released into the wilds, that much is obvious.
I just got in touch with the author, and a re-edited version will be forthcoming soon.
ReplyDeleteJoe, I'm glad to hear that, as it's a good enough story to deserve decent editing.
DeleteI've been toying with the idea of Chronicles of Amherth fiction, probably a collection of short stories. I just find it encouraging that people are interested enough to read self-published works. Good deal.
ReplyDeleteVery cool. All stories by you or a collection of authors? Both types could be fun.
DeleteWell, ideally I would like a collection of various authors. Just not sure how compensation would work since I'll probably offer it up as PWYW.
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