The Crimson Claymore
The brave warrior Searon is haunted by the deaths of his wife and children at the hands of the savage reptilian draeyks, who are on a bloodthirsty rampage. He walks the land of Calthroia alone and thirsty for vengence. He hunts the creatures down one by one, showing no mercy.
But Searon is a one-man army, and no match for the legion of murderous draeyks. Lucky for him, the powerful wizard Karceoles finds him during his travels and enlists Searon in this coming war. Karceoles believes Searon can unite the races to defeat the draeyks once and for all.
Searon discovers he can do more damage with Karceoles and a band of warriors they find along the way. But as the war rages in earnest, Searon must make a choice: Is it more important to destroy the draeyks at costs, or will his quest for vengeance endanger the lives of his new brothers and sisters at arms?
That's the back cover of the Crimson Claymore. It set off some warning bells in my head, and so did this timeless poetry when I opened the book to a random page and found this:
The music was still light when the two dancers walked up to their table. Both smiled and looked from Searon to Karceoles.
"You two seem like you have seen a long journey," the brunette said.
"Yes,we have. Too long," Searon smiled.
"It is but fate that we travelled so long and so far to stumble into this place. Both of you are so skilled with graceful dance, and beautiful faces, that it puts our mind at ease after such long traveling. We may now rest east this night knowing we sleep in an inn where there are kheshlars or angels, for surely you must be one of the two because your beauty and grace surpasses all," Karceoles said.
Searon turned to glare hard at the wizard, but he seemed not to notice as his attention was turned toward the dancers with a courteous smile. There seemed to be an aura of charm about the wizard, and he seemed to glow. His face was stern and his smile genuine, but no wrinkles stained his face as Searon had thought did on the road. It was a clean face, still without beard or mustache, and it seemed to be mature, as if he knew more about the world than anyone.
"You are too kind," the blonde said, curtseying at her knees. "What is your name?"
"I am Karceoles, and what are such fine women as you two called?"
"I am Berethana and this is Annettera. We are both pleased to meet you," the blonde said.
"My name is Searon," he said, but neither seemed to notice him in the slightest.
Both were blushing as they looked at Karceoles with large smiles on their faces. Searon shook his head and took another long drink of his whiskey.
"Perhaps we'll see each other again," Annettera said shyly.
"I count on it."
The two women giggled and walked off, with glances over their shoulders at him, and holding hands to whisper in each other's ear.
That excerpt should tell you a lot about the author, and about my superhuman patience at reading this.
So here's the deal. Crimson Claymore could have been a decent story. Really. It could have been fun, but everything -except- the base idea is badly done. The last time I read dialogue that bad, it had been written by a man who was 80% deaf. No joke.
I've talked about the boar-roasting scene, but that's just pieces of it.
See, Searon has superhuman strength, speed, and senses. Or so we're told. Once, when they're being chased by critters, he smells granite and marble and steers the group to, it turns out, an ancient lost city in the capital. It's this large, organized, stone city, utterly abandoned. The palace, we're told, is immense, with "walls rising for leagues in height".
Fuck, man. Fuck. This, supposedly, is not far from a capitol city. How could they NOT notice the black needle off in the distance and gone to look when they moved in?
Or, ooh, how about the non-character! The party splits up, and run into kheshlars and--
--what is a kheshlar? I suppose I'll have to explain that. Kheshlar are elves with light-blue skin, silver eyebrows, and the female lead of the novel is THE kheshlar with the biggest rack of her race. No. Seriously. Character description and everything. All the characters get a profile in the back of the book. You, dear reader, wouldn't find out what a Kheshlar is in this book until several pages of 'you're near kheshlar lands' and all that. It mentions the word several times but you never find out what they are until you see one turning heads around with a hammer.
Starlyn
Kheshlar-320 years of age
Birthplace: Sudegam
Appearance: Bright Blond hair, electric gray-blue eyes, thin eyebrows, cunning smile especially when the stars are about. Pointed chin and high cheek bones with the fullest bosom of all the kheshlars. She wears midnight blue chainmail under golden bronze and blue hued plate mail.
Weapon: Large steel hammer with spike on backside.
--So anyway, they run into a Kheshlar patrol and the captain, who knows and respect Starlyn, offers a loan of the best archer he has, Erenuyh. We're told he's taciturn and he doesn't interact with anyone very much. The party gets attacked by wolves, the backup hero, Andron, loses his pinkie, the archer loses two fingers because wolves come flying by like bullets or something. Later, they try to talk to him, he gives monosyllabic answers. Then they're attacked by creatures made of translucent crystal that only attack at night when they're -fuck hard- to see, he shoots the critters with arrows to make out heads and arms and such, and then gets his head pulled off. And the warrior elf with the big hammer somehow isn't shattering the crystal men all over the place.
That's seriously the character's involvement and reason to be in the book: Get them past a fight with critters that aren't mentioned before, and aren't mentioned again, in the book. Then he's killed.
As for bad characters, you meet Searon's brother. Searon wears crimson and gold armor. His brother wears blue and silver. And his brother's name is Noraes.
Yes. 'Searon' spelled backwards. And no one mentions this. The brothers do not catch each other's eye and groan about the travesty their parents inflicted on Noraes.
I could really go on. Give me more time and I might just do that. There's all kinds of things, like how Starlyn's rack reduces all men to staring, drooling nitwits for minutes on end, and the graceful way a mage (not the wizard) handled this. Or how the author can't find the trigger on Chekov's gun. Or the fallout of the excerpt at the top, where it turns out the wizard, being such the charmer he is, sleeps with both the dancers at once and knocks up one of them, and how he handles that.
But also how the enemies somehow pop up like JRPG random encounters in a pine forest.
This one irks me. We have pine forests around here.
Imagine a pack of six or eight human-sized creatures running up on people by surprise in that.
Oh, right, plot, I forgot about that. The book has one, in as much as it has a sequence of events and they follow more-or-less logically, but that'll be for the next rant.