Various Thoughts

Stuart Grosse‘s fifteenth Lich Returnee novella holds no surprises, beyond that I continue to have no complaints. I can’t even quite explain how the various elements manage to combine in just the right way… but they do.

There are two things to be aware of about Devan Drake‘s Corsairs & Cataclysms series which really should have been mentioned in the description. The first is that the protagonist is not simply a pirate, but a slaver pirate (although this becomes less significant beyond the first book). The second is that, as stated in the Foreword, it’s an erotic power fantasy. What that means in practice is that sexual topics come up in conversation from time to time, the love interests all have some degree of domination fetish, and there are a few dedicated sex scene chapters per novel.

While those two things alone will probably be a deal breaker for many, there’s one more potential issue: The exposition. Just about everything under the sun gets exposited upon at some point and it can really kill a scene’s forward momentum when it gets out of hand… though oddly enough, one particular thing (Pandaemonium) doesn’t get any mention at all until it suddenly becomes a central plot point from the third book on. And then less a significant issue but still a general annoyance is how frequently old enemies keep crawling back to cause mischief.

All that said, if you can look past the above then the amusing character dynamics and standard power fantasy aspects are more than solid enough to carry the series. Up to this point anyway. For whatever reason the length of each subsequent novel has been decreasing (and the first third of the fourth is basically a side-story on top of that), which seems like it’s going to be an issue with the fifth presumably being the last despite there being more than a few loose ends still floating about.