Category: Bloodsounder’s Arc

The first three pages of this chapter (not that it’s formally split up by the book, but you know what I mean) are about Captain Braylar banging the barmaid he saved from the boorish soldiers earlier, while the scribe viewpoint character is sleeping in the other bed in the same room. This puts me in a difficult position: We’re getting to the point where I should probably put a moratorium on criticizing this book for its over-enthusiasm with how cool Captain Braylar is, but if I do that there is nothing left to comment on.

It is worth noting that the way in which Captain Braylar is built up isn’t as juvenile as you’d expect from a book that just can’t stop talking about how cool this character is. Like, at some point the barmaid gets nervous about potentially waking the viewpoint scribe up and asks to stop, and Captain Braylar stops and gets agitated with her and throws her out. This is not how the scene would go in a typical Mary Sue wankfest (no pun intended), which would not have tolerated anything stopping its protagonist from conquering a woman, and indeed would have gone on for ages about how satisfied she is. But while the squeeing over Braylar’s awesomeness is much more competent – it attributes the woman’s shyness to circumstance, thus keeping Braylar’s sexual prowess unblemished, it has Braylar respect her wish and thus firmly establishes that he’s not a sexual predator, but it also has him react with agitation so as to firmly establish his dominance – the fact that the narrative is doing nothing else but go on and on and on about this guy makes it just as Sue-y as a more straightforward gushing. Jeff Salyards – our author – is clearly demonstrating that he could write a good story, but that he just doesn’t want to.

Then, on page 36, the plot finally arrives:

Continue reading “Scourge of the Betrayer: What Is Probably The Plot Has Begun” →

At least one of the books in the Humble Bundle of books I recently snagged is not a short story anthology. At least three of them, actually, because they’re a trilogy. Or the first three books of an “arc,” at least. Whether they’re also the last three books of that arc, I don’t know. What I do know is that Scourge of the Betrayer is the first of them, and I’m going to be giving that book a poke. Here is our opening paragraph:

My new patron clambered down the wagon, dark hair slicked back like wet otter fur, eyes roaming the stable yard in a measured sweep. He fixed on me briefly before continuing his survey, and it occurred to me, just as it had a hundred times since accepting the commission, that this would be unlike any other job I’d done.

I had to copy/paste that into a word processor in order to get the first two lines to be visible. Smart Publishing should consider getting a better formatting guy. Like, minor formatting errors are one thing. Still kind of unprofessional, but things slip through, no one’s perfect, so long as everything else is firing on all cylinders, I don’t even notice. This is the very first paragraph of the very first page.

The next two pages are a storm of proper nouns unmoored from any meaning. New characters are introduced on a nearly per-paragraph basis, making keeping up with who’s who basically impossible, and a handful of place names are introduced as well. I know there’s some kind of caravan, a military captain is in charge of it, a stable boy and a nomad who seems vaguely Mongol are part of it, and that our viewpoint character is a scribe. Some number of soldiers are involved, but I’ve lost track of which ones are repeat characters and which ones are newly introduced.

Continue reading “Scourge of the Betrayer: A Book About Nothing” →