You can also get an RSS feed, but I don’t know what that is.

–M. J. Young

I can see your point about the noir analogy, and it’s well taken. I have enjoyed quite a bit of C. J. Henderson’s writing, particularly his stories involving Teddy London, Lai Wan, or Inspector Legrasse, but the vulgarity of his less supernatural hard-core detective stories repels me, despite the fact that his heroes are generally morally respectable within their contexts. I’ve enjoyed a number of noir films (the original D.O.A. is wonderful), but early Hollywood standards undoubtedly impact these significantly in what I would consider a favorable and perhaps the original authors an unrealistic direction.

Thanks again for your comment.

–M. J. Young

To me, some of them evoke the hard drinking hard smoking detectives from film noir and I was taken by the warnings/idea that everyone carries the potential for good and evil – honor and dishonor – within them. Both the good guys and the bad guys, for that matter – it struck me that the only one acting out of any sense of familial love was on the “bad side”.

I thought that there was a definite recurring theme that power corrupts. The hero raping his ex for instance was as revolting as anything you see or imagine Anakin Skywalker do on his path to becoming Darth Vader – even though that path was started with “good intentions” at some point, there were decisions that no one could pretend aren’t evil and gratuitous self serving that no one could imagine are for a higher purpose. A good question for the sequel might be: Will the central character redeem himself or spiral down the path of chaos, death and destruction he seems to be slipping on? I can’t imagine that he won’t suffer for some of what he has done.

However, I can certainly see that in the sense of choosing our entertainment carefully because “we are what we consume”, this book would not be for everyone. I think you may be correct that it would be more accurate to consider the story to be NC-17 than R.

Having talked to Mr. Riemenschneider a bit about this, I can assure you that he did appreciate your review and the care you took in separating matters of quality of writing and skill of storytelling from your preferences about the story or ethical discomfort with the behavior of the characters. While I think everyone likes to hear good reviews about their work, the quality of this “negative” review is such that it will give people who are thinking about reading the story a good idea of what they’re in for and may will pique the interest of those who enjoy darker fantasy.

So, well done.

(For full disclosure, I’m a friend of the author and was involved in draft reading of the book and play testing of the game worlds he has worked on.)

–M. J. Young