We’re on a road trip to hell today, Obscurists—or, well, hell adjacent. In any case, today’s book is Eric Balch’s “Assault on Devil’s Den,” a sword and sorcery hack and slash fantasy adventure.
***The Non-Spoiler part of this review***
What I love about this book:
This will come as a complete shock, but I’ve been known to play a little Dungeons and Dragons here and there—nearly every week. So, “Assault on Devil’s Den,” which reads exactly like the setup and execution of a D&D campaign, is right up my alley. I love the adventuring, the sword and sorcery aspect, and generally the whole aesthetic. It’s important to note that“Assault on Devil’s Den” is like D&D in many ways, but it isn’t officially a D&D book, and it very much does its own thing with its own lore.
One of the things I really liked about this novel is how Balch dealt with one of the queasier aspects of old D&D, which is how it dealt with race. Spoilers it didn’t do it well. The central problem is in any Dungeons and Dragon’s setting, a lot like Tolkien’s Middle Earth setting, there are various intelligent races other than humans, like elves, dwarves, orcs, and so on. That in itself isn’t bad, but, both in Tolkien’s fantasy world and the game inspired by it, there is also the conceit that there are goodly races and not so goodly races—which is a fictional form of racism. Balch eschews all of that in his novel. There are plenty of trolls, orcs, and goblins who aren’t evil because of genetics. In his fantasy world, whether a person is good or evil depends largely on individual personal character traits, not inherited by race, you know, like the real world. There are even examples of demons who aren’t evil just because they’re born a demon.
Also, as a fan of a good old-fashioned fantasy dust-em-up, that last fight at the end of this book was a real knock-down-drag-out fight that the story had been building the entire novel. After the wait of nearly the whole book, I found it very satisfying.
What I don’t love about this book:
It is exactly like reading a D&D campaign setting. I know, I just praised this, and I pulled a somewhat similar trick in a review recently about another independent author. Part of the problem this time around is how involved Balch gets into his world-building. A story device I’ve become less and less enchanted with the more books I read. Suppose story should be primary, followed then by characterization. In that case, world-building is third in elements—maybe—but when it’s the primary element of a book, you get into odd moments where you know more about things and places in a story than the people going to those places to retrieve those things.
For instance, a whole aside in this story takes place at a blacksmith’s shop in a town where the heroes buy new equipment. It’s lovingly rendered down to such fine detail of how much the equipment costs, how long it will take to create, the materials used, et cetera, et cetera. How much does this impact the narrative? Very little. The time and words could have been used to develop the characters more through interaction, or maybe we could have got more background on them with insight into why they are who they are.
The thing that grounded on me the most, though, was the combat dialogue. There are rarely any good conversations during a pitched battle for nearly exactly the same reason there are seldom any good interviews with players immediately post-football game. The same things get said—a lot. Balch’s word is “impressive” or “impressed,” and it happens in nearly every fight scene if not all of them—there are also a lot of “final form(s)” and “you have no chance(s).”
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Author’s Website: https://ericbalch.com/
***The Spoiler part of this review***
***Ye be warned to turn back now***
The quick and dirty synopsis:
Pelagius, an old adventurer, sits despondently in a tavern with his best friend, a bird person hybrid, and a powerful sorcerer named Bojan. Why Pelagius is despondent is because after a long adventuring career, he fears he’s lost his mojo after freezing up in a fight, and it might be time to hang up the old adventurer cloak. Bojan tries to cheer him up and shake him from his melancholy but what really snaps Pelagius back is the town he and his friend are resting in gets attacked by some notorious soul hunters led by a green-eyed man.