The Gaming Outpost

Not so long ago, someone whose name, Adam Reimenschneider, I did not recognize made an open appeal on a forum I frequent, seeking anyone who would write a review of his novel, Kingdom of Ashes.  It was his hope that the novel would help promote the game on which it was based.  My sympathies were touched.  I, too, have written novels in the hope that they would help promote the game.  My impression is that it does not work terribly well that way; rather, it gives you two products to promote to two audiences who do not overlap as much as might have been hoped.  However, remembering how important reviews are to me as part of the promotional package, I responded favorably, and he mailed me a copy of the book.

I soon found myself in an awkward position.  To say that I did not enjoy the book would be understating the matter seriously. I was still a couple chapters from the end when I wrote a very negative review in which I went so far as to say that I did not care how it ended; indeed, I read the rest because I generally do finish books I start reading, and I believe I ought not write a review without having read the entire book.

At the same time, it seemed to me that it was not a bad book.  It was a good book, and a good fantasy book.  It was well written.  Reimenschneider has a solid command of language, painting vivid images and compelling plotlines and credible varied characters woven together in a coherent story.  The editing was commendable.  No book is perfect, and there were still a few knots in which my own fine-toothed comb snagged.  A few of these appeared to be vocabulary problems, where Reimenschneider had heard an expression but used the wrong word in putting it to paper–tenants where he meant tenets, low instead of lo.  Most, though, were the sort of simple typos that can evade an author’s or editor’s eyes for years–the wrong correction made by a spellchecker, or to instead of the, or a dropped word.  For the length of the book (251 pages in small but sharp legible print), the number of problems was not significant.

Thus my own dislike for the book bothered me, and I had to step back and consider what it was that I did not like.

Reimenschneider has painted a very dark world.  In the midst of all this darkness shines another darkness.  We can divide the world into three groups, but we cannot find any hope for the world in any of them.

The first group is aptly named The Order.  These are supernaturally gifted beings who have chosen to use their power to make themselves the de facto rulers of the world; they are united with each other, and combine supernatural abilities with their complete control of everything that matters to mold public opinion in the direction they favor.  In this world, there really is a right-wing conspiracy.  The government works for The Order.  All major corporations and banks are controlled by them.  The media reports what the Order tells them.  Whatever suits the Order, that is what the world believes.  They have even created a completely fictional rebel group, performed acts of sabotage and carnage, and reported in the news that their fictional group has claimed credit for it, and that public opinion favors a tightening of security protections, curfews, travel restrictions, invasions of privacy, and the mobilization of paramilitary units to patrol the streets to protect the citizens against this non-existent dangerous group.

Against them we have a confederation of supernaturally gifted beings whose unifying feature is that they are all opposed to the Order, but most of whom also oppose any order, structure, law, regulation, or restriction whatsoever.  They are against the order because they want to be permitted to do whatever they want, without regard for how it affects anyone else.  These are ostensibly the heroes of the book, and I will have more to say about them.

The third group is the functional equivalent of Harry Potter’s muggles.  These are the mundanes, the vast majority of humanity, having no supernatural gifts and completely unaware that such gifts exist.  Unlike the muggles, though, this is the group that the supernaturals want to manipulate and use for their own self-gratification.  They are sheep.  If the supernatural factions had been vampires, they could hardly have viewed the mundanes worse–at least vampires recognize that they need ordinary people for food.

In fairness to Reimenschneider, he stated in his original message that the book if made into a movie would have an “R” rating, due to violence.  Violence does not generally bother me, even if it is gory, and this rarely approaches gore in its descriptions (although it might if rendered to the screen).  The statement that someone was sliced in half and bled out on the ground reads to me like a factual statement of the injuries; a considerably more vivid image would have to be created to offend my sensibilities there.  However, the Motion Picture Association of America might have a hard time justifying anything so mild as an “R” rating based on three other factors, all of which did bother me.

The first factor was the language.  It has the virtue, if it can be called virtue, of being realistic–a realistic representation of the mode of speech of the seamier elements of society.  It may have been George Carlin who said that a certain particularly offensive word could be used as almost any part of speech, noun, verb, adjective, adverb.  Reimenschneider’s characters seemed to expand that list to include preposition, conjunction, and several others.  If people used language like that in my house, I would ask them to have more respect or leave.  These, though, are the heroes of the book, the people we are supposed to like.  I had a difficult time getting past their language.  I felt like the people I was supposed to like were crass, crude, and rude to the point of incivility.

The second factor that would almost certainly have pushed the rating was the sex.  I don’t expect, as Woody Allen described it in The Purple Rose of Cairo, “we kiss, the screen fades to black, and we’re off making love in some perfect place.”  However, the descriptions in some of the scenes would have found a home in online pornographic literature, and any director attempting to bring this to the screen in something below an A-17 rating would have had a very rough time here.  Further, these pieces, although not exactly gratuitous, serve primarily to develop the characters of the primary players, to show us that they are the sort of people who use sex in these ways.  That makes me think that they are not only crass but shallow.

The third factor with which the Motion Picture Association of America would have had problems was the pervasive emphasis on drugs.  It was not merely the background, that these were being used at the parties which formed the setting for a number of meetings (where there was also ample gratuitous sex in a background of drunken debauchery).  That is undoubtedly an effort to recreate a setting alien to me but familiar to a specific minority of mostly young urbanites.  It reached beyond this, though, as drugs were part of many of the rituals used by the heroes and their allies in their efforts to achieve their objectives, and the use of these was justified not as a bad means of reaching a good end, but as a good tool for doing so.

I had problems with the characters.  The stars in this story are the sort of people I find most alien to my notions of “good people”.  This is apart from the repeated emphases on the fact that they are smoking and drinking at every turn.  I suppose that I have too many negative experiences with such people–people who have robbed me and those I know, people who have destroyed their lives with alcohol and drugs, people who have cruelly hurt others while putting on a pleasant face–who fit the images of the heroes of this book, and I could not buy them as heroes.

The central character is in some ways the worst offender.  In a scene that seems almost incidental, he uses his supernatural abilities as a sort of psionic Rohypnol to get a girl about whom he once cared deeply to perform sexual acts believing that this was what she wanted to do–clearly a case of date rape, and the fact that the girl never realized she had been subtly coerced did not mitigate that.  He then admits to himself that he did it specifically to “get her out of his system”, so that he could use her and discard her and never think about her again.  This typifies the selfish nature of the character the book extols as its hero.  Yes, the “good” “chaotic” side has some admirable characters in it, but those who might actually be accused of virtue are kept on the fringes of the story and never explored, and for the best of those who are major supporting characters the highest praise that can be offered is that they did not seem to be as bad as the hero.

The best thing I can say about the hero of the story is that the end of the book sets up a sequel in which he will suffer some consequences of his undisciplined selfishness.  Although I would like to see that, I don’t imagine either that I would buy the sequel or that Reimenschneider will send me a review copy.

I’ve created a lot of worlds, and read about many others, but rarely have I encountered a world where it seemed a good nuclear war would be the best solution to the problems.  I am sure that there are people who will like this book.  It is a well-plotted story well told.  I do not think I know any of those people myself.  I wish Reimenschneider the best with his book, but I think his audience is going to be rather limited.  It’s a shame, really, because he is obviously a talented writer who probably could write something I would enjoy very much.  This, though, was not that.