Completed: The Gateway

originally posted August 26, 2011on tumblr

Harbinger of doom vol 1
this was that free book i was excited about a few days ago…
ok… written by Glenn G. Thater. this is a fairly short fantasy novel with a pretty straightforward concept…. and i’m about to drastically over simplify it.

Imagine a world where things that we consider to be myth, legend or religious readings to be 100% truth…. all of it… and while that's not really the entire concept it’s the easiest way to describe it.
The story begins by introducing his main concept and stating that an odd figure known as Theta appears in lots of different reading material from all over the world but historians don’t care but he did lots of research to try and make an interesting story with him as the focus. I don’t mind when books have prefaces BUT…. i honestly felt like he could have trusted his audience to either….

a) looked up info on Theta themselves… that way they enrich the story in their own way instead of being told information that we don’t care about since we haven’t even met Theta yet
b) know a bit about mythology and theta before even going into the book.
or..
c) write interesting characters so all that back story, while helping to enrich the character, isn’t necessary

when the actual story starts we are with some people who we (at the time) know nothing about getting surrounded by fog and getting murdered.

then we follow the murdered mans son who is kinda upset that his dad hasn’t come back from this odd Fog.
Enter Gabriel (yeah i’m pretty sure it’s ‘that’ Gabriel) a mysterious man who is amazing with weaponry and has never been bested by anyone/ anything.
then eventually enter Theta, a mysterious man who is amazing at everything and seems to be able to pull whatever out of his magic bag…i didn’t enjoy his character too much if you couldn’t tell.
so they all go out with an army, find out the fog is demonic and caused by cultists to summon lords of choas and then the story begins proper… kind of.

I really wanted to like this book, it was free o nthe kindle store and i thought there was no way i could be disappointed with something free.
Granted it is Written well enough and it has a good concept but in the end…. i didn’t give a shit about anyone. At all….. ever.

Theta especially is an annoying god moding prick who is never challenged therefor nullifying any and all conflict… he either uses magic or strength but he is way too perfect. i know this is book 1 of a series but we barely learn anything about him at all and what we do learn we either don’t care about or already guessed.

Also it seems to be stuck in an odd place… the story throws you into the middle but never really moves forward…. it felt like we barely got through the 1st threshold in all it’s 100-200 pages… normally i liek being thrown into the middle but there are rules… you have to revela some things about the characters past… you have to move the story forward and most of all WE HAVE TO CARE ABOUT THE CHARACTER

there was one moment in book that actually got me quite irate…. lets see if we can tell why…

“I am Brother Claradon Eotrue, Lord of Dor Eotrus” he shouted. “you killed my father; For this you die!”

not even paraphrasing…. that's the exact passage. i mean… really? unfortunately if you say the like “you killed my father” and it’s going to automatically bring up comparisons to Princess Bride… but this seems to take it the step further and i had a little rage moment.

finally as the book ends you get a glossary… again i felt a little insulted because I already knew what most of the mythological references were… i didn’t need to be told afterwards…. i would hope most people would know about them… just from common use not even from study. I personally felt like the author just didn’t trust his audience that that just left a bad taste in my mouth.

Granted this is all personal opinion…. it is a fine enough book… it’s not the kind of book i get into since i really invest in characters… but if you like well written mythology based stories with heavy descriptions and lots of gore… then yeah, please go for this… like i said it’s free on the kindle store so for some people it may be worth a shot… i’m sure it probably gets better as the series goes on… i will probably never know.