1) Half-Breed by Joe Jackson (no relation?) 3/5 stars
Eli is a 15-year-old tief–I MEAN, HALF-CORLYPS. [Technically, I think tieflings are half DEVILS, while Eli is a half DEMON, but don’t quote me] He works for the assassin’s guild, but not AS an assassin, rather as an … assassin bodyguard? It seems a bit of a convoluted setup, but Eli’s desires and goals are put forth pretty straightforwardly, so I ran with it. Unsurprisingly, something unexpected happens on the job he’s assigned, and his loyalties are tested.
Certainly not terrible, and perfectly readable, though I never much cared about any of the characters. Eli was basically given two choices in the story, and both were ‘do this or die,’ so while there were certainly STAKES, it never felt like he really did much of his own volition. I was curious to see what Jackson’s written, and it turns out I already own a copy of the first 6 books in his Eve of Redemption series. It sounds interesting, and I’m curious to give it a shot.
“What do you think a hero is? It’s just the right person in the right place making the right choice at the right time.
2) The Dwarven Dragon by Jeramy Goble 1/5 stars
An incredibly uneven bildungsroman about a young dwarf. Far too much time spent on meaningless details in the opening section, and I didn’t much care so I didn’t get very far. But let me tell you about what I couldn’t stop thinking about! In the beginning, the narrator tells us about how her dad would bring back some trinket he’d made at the smithy that day, a new one NEARLY EVERY DAY. Being generous, assuming dwarven smiths have 5-day workweeks, that’s still around TWO HUNDRED trinkets per year. Sure, they weren’t necessarily big or detailed, but can you IMAGINE this kid’s room? Was she surreptitiously throwing some out the window every week? Let’s say this went on for roughly a decade. That’s TWO THOUSAND trinkets. If you came across this kid’s room in Skyrim you’d assume a serial killer lived there! It’s insanity!
3) Fresh Off the Boat by K.S. Villoso 4/5 stars
Despite an ending that’s a bit too pat for my tastes, this is a wonderful little tale of a newly arrived immigrant in a new land, searching for his wife and finding mostly problems. It rings true in so many ways, and the characters and scenes pop. While reading this, I thought, ‘man, Orbit should grab this author up. S/he (turns out it’s she) writes in a way that reminds me of the Orbit books I’ve tried.’ After reading this, I looked her up, and she has a bunch of stuff published by Orbit. Good deal. Now on my wishlist.
4) Paternus: The Death of Osiris by Dyrk Ashton 1/5
This appears to take place in Dyrk’s *Paternus* world, which is fine, BUT that world seems to be the real world, except inhabited by at least the Egyptian gods (Horus shows up quickly, and Set & others are name dropped). Stuff like that interests me not one whit, SO on to the next …
5) Small Teachers by Jeffrey Hall 4/5
Ah, poor Liddle. If only he lived in Golarion, the world of Pathfinder, he’d feel more at home. He prefers traps & trickery to outright combat (and, I dunno, I think he’d work well as an alchemist), and everyone looks down on him because of this. He dares the boss to give him something to handle, though, so the boss gives him something that says the threat is “little” and off he goes.
I 100% assumed we’d find out that “little” was someone transcribing Liddle’s name, and that would be a twist, but nope, that never plays into it (although there is a twist). My problems were that there seemed to be a lot of made-up words and creatures, etc, when it really wasn’t necessary (how damn big is a slavad? Somewhere between 7 and 12 feet tall was the best I could figure out). Also, the resolution to the problem was a bit … like, if you think about it for more than five seconds, it makes zero sense, and kind of sends the wrong message. But still, eminently readable and I don’t regret reading it.
6) Is Dumb by MD Presley 3/5
A rogue kobold helps a human sway some goblins by defining “hero” for them. Not terrible, and one bit made me chuckle. Quoted below (I’m also trying to pull in the quotes whenever the story goes out of its way to define “hero” because it amuses me).
‘The orcs Waglug and Wabhagh – for the life of him Dakbe could not ascertain if they were siblings or lovers, and judging by the cries issuing from their tent some nights, neither could they…’
‘“You do not know ‘hero’?” He knew damn well they did not. “It means a goblin who fights with the warren although he will take no spoils. It means a goblin who cares more for his kin than what he eats that night. In fact, it means a goblin who will give his last darkbloom mushroom to a whelpling to see her survive. It means blocking a tunnel and being killed by sunlight-walker invaders so some of the warren might escape.”’
7) Final Word by Mike Shel 5/5
Oh, good, Mike Shel’s here! I was lucky enough to be an advance reader for his Iconoclasts trilogy & have enjoyed the short form fiction I’ve seen by him in other places.
This follows a member of the Syriac League and her comrade/lover while they’re up in the Northeastern reaches. One of the natives finds out they’re looking for a way to capture the last breath of a dying person (they’ve seen it perform resurrection) and invites them into an obvious trap.
For … some reason … they go, and I won’t spoil anything, but it’s a trap. This was the one part of the story that baffled me. It’s so painstakingly obvious that the whole invitation is a setup, I have no clue why these incredibly intelligent people would have ever followed. I guess it’s meant to showcase the hamartia of those in the Syraic League: curiosity has it as out for them as it does for cats. Still, it felt a little forced.
My favorite part of this story is that not once does anyone bring up the idea of what being a hero means. This world has no interest in heroics or heroes, and that’s fine.
8) What Needs To Be Done by David Benem 4/5
THIS story, however, is ALL ABOUT what makes a hero. You can see in the quote below that this story firmly posits that part of being a hero is being remembered for it - which implies that someone who does the right thing unwitnessed is NOT a hero, but rather just … a good person? I guess? That part of the syllogism remains a mystery.
I liked this story overall, but I felt like it could’ve really used a bit of editing. The one bit that annoyed me is that the protagonist thinks very early on about how he hears his brother’s dying screams every night in his dreams. Then he TELLS this to someone else a few pages later. Pick one! This is a short story, not a novel, where you can get away with repeating info like this. I DID like the way that the “twist” got telegraphed at least twice, and I missed the first one (though the phrasing was odd enough that it made me realize by the end that I’d missed it, which is, again, a good thing).
“You all have the chance to be heroes! To do the right thing and be remembered for it.”
9) Hardgrave by Phil Tucker 5/5
All right, some Phil Tucker. I’ve never made it through any of his longer-form pieces, but I’ve enjoyed multiple short stories from him. This one was no exception. A very quick little piece about the few who remain after most of a town has evacuated due to an invading force moving through. The line “a cat just had kittens” has never been quite so heartbreaking.
10) Holding Out by Derek Alan Siddoway 3/5
This was an odd little tale about an older gryphon rider who, for vague reasons, becomes the protector of a small family in the sticks. They’re a proud, stubborn family, and they should have moved long ago, and this obviously leads to tragedy. The rider helps out, but it’s all very murky.
I don’t mind the nihilistic Western feeling, but I had a really hard time connecting with this story. Is it because I’m not a fan of gryphon/dragon/whatever-riders? Maybe. The writing was a little sophomoric in places, but not terrible. I made it through the whole story, at least.
“How long you gonna keep running from whatever broke that proud heart of yours to pieces?” (It’s not a subtle piece)
“A hero, eh? Only doing it for the good of the cause?”
11) The Custodian by Matt Moss 0/5
Uuuuuuugh. There’s a “twist” that happens in this story, and I don’t want to give it away lest anyone out there DOESN’T catch it when it happens (I did, and I bet you will, too, if not immediately, then at least fairly quickly), but it pretty much just renders the entire story meaningless. If the twist WASN’T a twist, and the story just played out the way it seemed, I actually would have enjoyed it a bit more for going against modern stereotype. But … alas.
“Nobody’s born a hero; a hero is born from a sequence of choices.”
12) The Altar by Daniel Potter 3/5
This read more like an anime to me than anything else. A healer, fed up w/the gods’ wars, has a run-in with one of the less likable divine, and finds some upsides to the relationship.
13) All Ends by Quenby Olson 2/5
This felt very out of place. The writing isn’t bad, but definitely not my cup of tea (present tense; eugh). This had a bit of a Neil Gaiman flavor to it, so I’m sure it’ll appeal to many (Victorian-ish setting, what seems like a murder mystery set at a house of ill repute that turns into something more, etc.), but I had a hard time getting through it.
14) The Savior of Garden’s Gate by Will Wight 4/5
For whatever reason, I always think Will Wight wrote the Silo series. Did it get popular right around the same time as the Cradle series? Why do I do that? In any case, I was not a fan of the Silo series, and assumed I would not enjoy this story. Happily, I was proved wrong and really enjoyed this tale.
Somewhat similar to Holding Out in that the protagonist, Ziel, is beyond his prime, but this time he’s far more pathetic - he even has to drag his warhammer around rather than looping it on his belt (a great image, I thought). This story doesn’t “do” much, but I really enjoyed it as a little slice of life looking in on a hero long past his prime.
15) Indomitable by Andy Peloquin 1/5
Not exactly subtle (the main character is “Earaqi”), and the story didn’t really grab me. It might be that the setup was a little too close to The Custodian that really put me off here, but I definitely was not feeling much here.
16) The Ashmoore Affair by Michael J. Sullivan 5/5
Starrian Hadrian & Royce from Sullivan’s Riyria Chronicles, this was a fun, simplistic little heist tale that is like 85% banter. Sullivan knows what he’s good at and gives us the goods. I think I read about half of his first novel and liked it so much that I put it down, swearing to go back whenever the story was finished since he’d claimed he was influenced by things like Babylon 5, where hints were dropped early on & paid off in spades much later. (Which is especially weird if you think about it, since B5 was heavily influenced by the structure of … novels, where this sort of thing is done all the time.) I knew my memory was not good enough to appreciate long con games like that.
In any case, this was fun.
17) False Heirs by JC Kang 2/5
The setup (assassin second guesses why he was sent to kill the current target, has a change of heart) is old & staid by now, but I was willing to give it a chance. It just didn’t grip me much, and the ending felt incredibly abrupt and like the whole thing was nothing more than a teaser of Kang’s other work. I’ll pass, thanks.
18) Ulfroc’s Redemption by Ben Galley 2/5
I had fun with this one for a while. It starts as a good noir tale, with a down-on-his-luck orc boxer getting embroiled in something over his head. But it quickly added in a lot of characters, and I sort of lost interest. One of the things that really makes this kind of noir work for me, I think, is the POV of an interesting character. Ulfroc had that potential, but the choice to use third person here actually kneecapped the story, in my opinion. Also, it was set in a Max Gladstone kind of fantasy land, with skyscrapers, etc. I get that was probably done to give it a bit more of a Blade Runner feel, but it put me off.
‘About this whole fetching malarkey…’
[stop trying to make fetch happen!]
19) Ratman by Laura M. Hughes 2/5
Oh, man, did I really WANT to like this one! Such a great premise: a skav–RATMAN necromancer, and no one really likes him on the bad guy squad. I don’t even remember why I lost interest, but perhaps the fact that I can’t remember any “plot” beyond that setup might be a big part of it. Also, Galley & Hughes both have incredibly long stories here, and I think I just hit a point where it’s like, ‘would I rather read this long story I’m not loving, or move on to something else?’
As you can see, I didn’t love everything in here, but I still love this & Lost Lore for what they’re aiming for. I got a couple of new purchases/wishlist items out of this, and overall had a great time.
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- Harry ChilcottReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 14, 2020
There is a reason this book is award winning
