Reading Recap 2024, Week 2
Shadow of the Conqueror, Alatriste, and a bunch of shorts
Last week I finished two audiobooks and four comics.
SHADOW OF THE CONQUEROR is the 2018 fantasy debut from popular YouTuber Shad M. Brooks, known on the platform as Shadiversity. He’s a medieval enthusiast down in Australia. I don’t watch all of his videos, but his stuff is cool, and he’s a welcome regular on Friday Night Tights with Nerdrotic. An all-around likeable bro, unless you’ve got that Reddit fungus in your brain.
I rate his book 3 out of 5 stars.
What it did well:
—The setting was unique and cool, if I understood it right then it’s a bunch of floating flatlands, like stacked plates in space with huge distances between them, and you can fall off of one into the other.
—The protagonist, Daylen, was challenged in a way that many of his kind never are. He’s a tyrant at the end of his lifespan, a man with decades of war crimes under his belt, primarily murder and a LOT of rape. Like, a lot. Brooks drives this point home repeatedly. Daylen’s hobbies are rape, murder, arson, and rape. In any other book not called Game of Thrones he’d be the villain, and the heroes would be tasked with killing him. Instead, Daylen gets a second shot at youth and goes on a redemption quest to fix a lifetime of sin.
—This is not portrayed as an easy thing, and the weight of his sins is made clear, especially once people figure out who this magically younger version of him really is, and he has to stand trial for what he’s done. You can repent from evil, turn away from it, and do good works from then on, but you can’t restore a murder victim to life and you can’t undo the deep spiritual scarring that comes from carnal violation.
So what do you do instead? Well, the author needs to answer that question. Which brings us to…
What it did poorly:
—It’s clear what Brooks was trying to accomplish, as stated above, BUT, I don’t think he pulled it off in the end. In fairness, that’s a really hard thing to do. He ran boldly at a challenging problem head-on, and in his first published book no less. This would be a monumental feat to get right no matter who you are. The only readers who would ultimately sympathize with a repentant rapist are probably other rapists. So. Tall order there, mate. Hat tip for the bravery though.
—The book was way too long. My friend (callsign Kenny Parrish) who originally told me about the book has remarked more than once that it should be about half of what it is, and serve as a prequel to a true first novel. I don’t disagree. The fact that it’s narrated by Michael Kramer and Kate Reading also makes it feel 40 hours long by default. If you don’t know, that’s the husband-and-wife team that has narrated all of the Wheel of Time and Stormlight Archive novels.
—The magic system straddles the line between “vanilla” and “easy to understand.” Basically there’s the Light and the Dark, the Divine and the Devilish. The Light is more or less God, and when the Light chooses someone, you know it’s God’s will. This dichotomy forms the underpinnings of every hyperbasic fantasy novel ever, so while he’s not breaking any new ground with it, he’s at least trying something difficult with it. Daylen is clearly marked by the Light, and people have to come to grips with that because they know he’s a rapist (didn’t YOU know that? let’s mention it a few more times)
Anyway, my experience with the book was just above middling. Like I said, you can tell what Brooks was trying to accomplish with it, and the prompt was really hard, and he sort of touched on how to get there, but he didn’t get all the way there. 3/5 stars.
The other book I finished was the English translation of CAPTAIN ALATRISTE by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I’ve read this one before and had a sky-high appreciation for it on this go-round. I’m going to do a video on it this week.
I also caught up on some of the Transformers comics that I’ve bought over the last month. I heard they were good but wasn’t sure what to expect, since comics have been ass for a long time, but I finally sat down and started thumbing through it with low hopes, thinking maybe there’d at least ben an inoffensive narrative in there somewhere.
Nope, the new writers know what they’re doing and so far they’re doing it at a high level. These guys are fans. I’m all in. Gonna head over to Upstream and write up a review right now.