While reading:
-- Wow. What editor had a chance to look at this? Info dumps, showing and telling of the same thing in the same paragraph, overly loquacious words where a simpler word or phrase would do...
-- Author insertions. Ugh
-- I have yet to find a character I can identify with or feel sympathy for.

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Okay, The story had started to improve enough I thought I might actually read the entire book. Then the author placed the primary POV character doing something that is physically impossible and any hope of suspended disbelief was gone.

To say there are issues would be nice. It would also be easier to read than the overly conflated vocabulary the author chooses. The dialogue is formal and stilted, doesn't feel like it flows smoothly at all. There are scenes where the author tells, then shows, sometimes on the same page. All the references to the older form of measure kept kicking me from the story. In one or two places, I found shifting POV from Third Person limited to Omniscient then back. Too much backstory is dumped, as is details regarding what may or may not be relevant to the story.

The wise old dragon imparting information on the clueless young warrior. The deadly spider... *yawn* cliché much?
Though if I were honest, the dragon seemed the best character up to the point I gave up.

As I said, too many bad writing hurdles for me to continue reading. Not even worthy of a full star. ( )

In Forged in Death, Torg or The Torgon is a powerful Death Knower. He can enter death to restore himself and, as a result, he has lived for over a thousand years. Invictus, an evil young sorcerer has invaded Tiken and is corrupting the land and all its inhabitants and Torg is the only one powerful to stop him.

Forged in Death is the first of six books in Jim Melvin's The Death Wizard Chronicles and it makes for an interesting start to the series. It is a fairly short book, unusual for epic fantasy, and, despite the occasional sex, it is definitely high fantasy, Manichean rather than realistic. There is a great deal of magic, a quest, the hero (and make no mistake, he is a Hero with a capitol H) is almost invincible and the characters tend to be one-dimensional where the good characters are very, very good and the bad are positively evil. There are few moral ambiguities here. Think Tolkien rather than Erikson.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism - although I prefer the gritty realism of writers like Cook and Abercrombie, there is still a place in my heart and on my bookshelves for the moral righteousness of high fantasy and I look forward to seeing where Torg's quest takes him in future installments. ( )

Torg, the Death-Knower wizard, the main character in Jim Melvin’s The Death Wizard Chronicles is like a mixture of Merlin and Conan, but with a Buddha twist. “The Pit” is book one of the six book epic fantasy, were readers get to know Torg, king of the Tugars, the mystical warrior of the Great Desert. He’s up against the sorcerer, Invictus, who has threatened to engulf the world in darkness.

Invictus is the greatest threat the land has ever known, and can’t be defeated by ordinary means. The Death-Knower believes that in order to combat this great evil, he needs to perform an act of virtue, something even the scales between good and evil. A selfless act of such magnitude, it would set off larger forces into motion.

When the Death-Knower gives up his freedom in order to save the free people of Triken, he does so knowing this battle will not be fought on an ordinary battlefield. He ordered the Asekhas, who are Tugars of the highest rank, to not follow or try to rescue him from the pit where he was to be imprisoned.

The Death-Knower does escape the pit, but runs into Vedana, a 100,000 demon who is also grandmother of Invictus. Could the product of their brief union be what’s needed to destroying Invicus? Or will something even more disastrous come to be? It’s hard to tell as Melvin’s tale isn’t predictable. We’ll just have to keep on reading to find out.

Note: All reviews posted here are followed by a book raffle at http://j-kaye-book-blog.blogspot.com/. ( )