Review: Tor the Dungeon Crawler Box Set: The Complete Death Goddess Cycle

Tor the Dungeon Crawler Box Set: The Complete Death Goddess Cycle by Jeffrey L. Kohanek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An entertaining sword-and-sorcery adventure series, though in many ways unoriginal and lacking a lot of polish in its details. The characters don't have a vast amount of depth or much in the way of arcs, but at least the central four are a little more than just their archetype and their plot role (though there is a secondary character whose entire personality is "sword-master"). It needs another thorough editing pass for occasional typos, homonym errors and misplaced commas, plus some dangling modifiers and a few of each of the usual issues with tense, number and punctuation. Most of them are minor issues individually, though it's long enough that collectively there are a lot of them (nearly 240 that I noticed across the three books, and I didn't start marking until partway through because I read the sample first, and you can't annotate those). The first book is the worst; the second and third have few typos, but a good many sentences that don't say what they're meant to say or mangle an idiom, and (sometimes basic) homonym errors and other vocabulary glitches. Notably, every time the author writes "crevice," which is often, he actually means "crevasse."

The author tries for "elevated" language sometimes, and mostly achieves stiff, occasionally stilted, and now and then wrong - as when he substitutes "affixed" for "fixed" in phrases like "fixed his attention," or says "he began up the stairs" instead of "he started up the stairs." This is a common error of people trying to write in a higher register than their natural one: they use what they think is a fancier synonym that sounds similar to the word they mean, but it's actually a different word with different usage and connotations. On the other hand, a lot of the time the language is less formal and filled with coarse humour, mostly about the flatulence of the dwarf.

In the first book, there's what looks like a continuity error. Early in the book, the stoneshaper dwarf, Borgli, says that stoneshapers like him can turn crystal into a substance unbreakable by anyone but another stoneshaper. But later, he says that stoneshapers' powers don't work on crystal at all.

The action is definitely up the cinematic end of things, with people swinging from ropes, catching each other as they're falling, and generally performing over-the-top feats of acrobatics and athletics. We get the accidentally-leaned-on-the-hidden-lever trope, the centuries-old-lava trope, the mysteriously-self-resetting-traps trope, the tunnel behind the waterfall, and so on. Don't wonder too hard about what the monsters live on during the long periods when there are no adventurers happening by, either. Puzzles are solved and safe paths are found by making a guess followed by an assumption that turns out to be right, though it could easily have been wrong.

(view spoiler)[At one point, every single guard who happens to be on duty at the time the party returns to their home base, and apparently no other guard in the city, is a member of an ancient conspiracy/cult, and they also have a ship provisioned and waiting to take them (and the McGuffin they steal off the party) immediately to where they want to take it, even though the time the party would return and whether they would have the McGuffin were totally unpredictable. Twice, the supposedly ruthless antagonists leave the party alive and unguarded but temporarily incapacitated, with their weapons and gear conveniently nearby when they inevitably free themselves. Also, the sorcerer is so obviously the god with almost the same name that it's absurd that the supposedly intelligent Tor doesn't suspect anything of the kind. And speaking of stupidity driving the plot, who imprisons a master of the undead in the middle of a graveyard, giving her immediate access to undead minions when she escapes? (hide spoiler)] There's a lot of disbelief to suspend, in other words; it's a switch-your-brain-off-and-enjoy type of book.

The world is mostly generic sword-and-sorcery with not a lot of magic on stage (because the main characters are all some sort of fighter rather than magic-users), apart from things like enchanted lights and weapons and some spectacular set-pieces when they solve a puzzle or trigger a magical trap. There are a couple of times when they have a wizard with them, and those cast fairly familiar-looking spells (fireball, magic missile, lightning bolt...). When we get to a desert country, it's your basic Arabian Nights setup: camels, robes, turbans, scimitars and so on. The Big Bad is even suspiciously similar to the Raven Queen.

The one really original thing about the setting is that the countries, or "wizardoms," are all ruled by wizards, not only at the monarch level but at the level of local lords, which makes sense to me, even if it's seldom seen in fantasy. After all, wizards are powerful, and powerful people tend to end up in charge, especially in a might-makes-right world like most sword-and-sorcery stories are set in. You really need an explanation for why wizards aren't in charge (such as: they're hopelessly impractical; they're easy to kill; there aren't many of them; they're too busy studying Things Man Ought Not to Know to spend time ruling), rather than for why they are.

Anyway, there are plenty of flaws here. Still, it's an entertaining adventure that, at its best, kept me gripped and enjoying the suspense, and for that reason alone it just barely makes it onto my annual recommendation list at the lowest possible level. I should probably rate it three stars, but I've kind of painted myself into a corner with the annual lists giving four stars to anything I largely enjoyed over the past few years, so for consistency, four stars it is.

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