@StephenMerlino
I cannot tell you how much of a sucker I am for Epic Fantasy. I read all the Conan stories in my teens before I realised that most were rubbish. I needed to be more discerning and actually read the ones by this guy called RE Howard. It was a lesson to me that perhaps the publisher is not the best guardian of an author's legacy. That's what it's like to be a reader in your teens. You become obsessive about one author or genre, regardless of quality.
Epic Fantasy is a genre so dependent on cliché, groaning under a weight of stereotypes, that it is almost impossible to dissociate your story from the rest. GRR Martin pretended Game of Thrones wasn't about magic and dragons until his first book was almost finished. However, he does what @StephenMerlino achieves with The Jack of Souls, and that is to make everything as real as possible, the dialogue as believable as possible, and the characters people whose story you want to follow. That's the important bit. That and the story. Everything else is window dressing. Do it nicely and hope nobody spots the mistakes.
He does this with deft touches and little flicks of cheering creativity. I really like the idea of immortal horses! His world is raw and dirty, believably wild. The lead character, Harric is a young Han Solo, depending on his wits rather than simply “sticking them with the pointy end”. He's a cheeky chappie who gets out of scrapes by the skin of his teeth. The story clips along at a fair old rate, throwing the reader into the action straight away, revealing Harric's curse and that he's doomed to die on his nineteenth birthday – right at the start of the book. There's no mucking about here. We are not going on a long journey to find out how to read a book which might tell us what language the curse is written in. We are in there straight away, the Great Evil getting down and dirty from the off.
I wish more writers of Epic Fantasy would do this. Please don't tell me about the wonderful world you have created in massive chunks of information. Please don't write a five page history of the city gates that the hero walks beneath. Just... get...on...with...it! Tell the damned story. Like @StephenMerlino does.
Sadly, since I last looked at The Jack of Souls, @StephenMerlino has taken down the bulk of it for contractual reasons with Amazon. They will only let him post 10% of the book on other sites. I wish him well with it and I look forward to the next instalments.
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