Thursday, October 26, 2006

Savage Messiah

By Robert Newcomb

The first book of the Destinies of Blood and Stone; it's pretty much a rehash of the first trilogy, The Chronicles of Blood and Stone.
OK. I have no excuse for reading this book other than it was a new book at the local library. This is a small town library and their selection of new books is pretty lean. I knew what I letting myself in for, having read the first trilogy. Newcomb's prose reads like something written by a high school kid. His characters are caricatures. Newcomb seems more interested in their outfits than in giving them any real depth.
This is a swords and sorcery epic, with the usual monsters, bad guys, spells, implacable evil, and so on. Tristin is the prince of a land under siege by a changing bunch of baddies with supernatural powers. He has to try to defeat the baddies even though he really doesn't know what he is doing and just to seems to get by mainly on luck and intuition. There is lots of blood and guts.
If you like swords and sorcery stories, you may like this. I think Newcomb's stories would work better in comic book form.


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