Doing God's Work

Information

Status

Ongoing

Year

2020

Author

Skylark (Dion Sky)

• Final book launches on Amazon
  May 21, 2025
• New story launching on Royal Road
  May 18, 2024
• Amazon Notice
  Sep 12, 2022
• 3. Kidnapping is Bad for Public Relations
  Mar 16, 2020
• 2. Task Manager of the Gods
  Mar 16, 2020
• 1. Putting the Hell in Helpdesk
  Mar 15, 2020

Reviews

Community Reviews(10)

• Cocop (Cale Plamann)Royal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  First of all- this is niche but amazing.
  Don't expect action. The focus is more on humor and exasperation with the banality of even celestial office life while pursuing a mystery/conspiracy.
  The characters are well written and more than anything, the mystery is engaging.  Seriously, I hate mysteries and I'm excited to track this down.
  If you're interested in a character/story driven drama/slice of life read this right now.  It's absolutely top notch.
• Tana NariRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  It's too good for me to argue.
  Okay, I'm not going to do a specific breakdown of the aspects of the story. They're all in the mid to upper tier of professional writing, with no noteworthy flaws and all the platitudes of being clean, easy to follow, and engaging. If you have a problem with this writing, you're a pickier duck than I. And I am one picky duck.
  And the characters, oh the characters. Amusing, affable, even the ones that you're supposed to hate are *fun* to hate, rather than just annoying. Except "Shitface"- he's not annoying or fun, he's goddamn terrifying. Especially since even he is just a cog in a massive machine. I find myself wondering how it's possible for anyone to face what the protagonists are trying to beat.
  So, being who I am, I'll focus on the one thing that I find even the least bit off-putting about this story. I don't know what it is, and I'm not sure it knows what it is.
  Sometimes, it reads like an intense intreague-thriller, with literal world-shattering stakes waiting in the wings.
  Sometimes it reads like a fun and relaxed slice-of-life sitcom. The banter between characters is amongst the strongest I've ever seen, so much so that I read through massive amounts of unimportant dialogue with a smile on my face and feeling completely satisfied that my time was well spent even though a hundred lines of reading had perhaps five lines of plot advancement. AKA: Slice of Life at its best.
  Sometimes it feels like an outright satire with stuff that on the face of it feels silly and illogical to the extreme. Loki and the devil sitting in office cubical complaining about their boss being an asshole sounds like the pilot episode for something on Adult Swim. And it's hilarious.
  This story tries to be a thriller, a mystery, a comedy, and slice of life. It's like someone blended American Gods and Purgatony. And somehow, this seemingly incompatible blend of ideas comes together in a way that highlights rather than distracts.
  In case you couldn't tell, I h
• CoroRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  Good Omens meets American Gods by way of Office Space and espionage. Hundreds of years ago, the christian god and his allies won the war for the universe for real, with all other gods consigned to employment, powerless drudgery, or brutal imprisonment, depending. Now, a depowered god of trickery works at Helpdesk answering prayers with phone calls and a discretionary budget one desk over from their best friend, Lucifer. But things are changing, and revolution is afoot. Soon things will escalate into a labyrinth of prophecy, espionage, magic, and betrayal - pretty rich territory for a god of mischief, powers or no. It's got great character work and intricate plots, and in particular it's meaty and original in a way that goes beyond a lot of what you'd expect from stories on this site.
  This thing is a sleeper hit waiting to happen and it feels much more professional and polished than the vast majority of web serials. Basically, it's doing it's own thing that tilts between intense mythological action, slice-of-life office satire, and dramatic confrontations about the nature of guilt and power way more seamlessly than it should. It feels like it takes a sitcom premise and expands it into an apocalyptic epic without losing any of the charm, which is just remarkable.
  Style: Wonderful. Slides between different genres and tones without losing track of the main character's voice, draws up gorgeous imagery without being overbearing.
  Grammar: Professional quality. I don't recall noticing a single typo in my entire read-through. Clear, unobtrusive prose.
  Story: Intricate, weaving plots, grounded by an extremely strong character voice. If it's not clear what's happening, it's clear why, and the tradeoffs between the two are well-managed and satisfying.
  Characters: A cast of well-developed, sympathetic, and complex characters that each have rich lives and motivations. Absolutely gorgeous. Also, they're gods, for the mythology fans.
• EligosRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  I’m not sure what I expected from the reviews, some sort of smarmy Douglas Adams / Office Space hybrid—but this is really quite a bit better and more complex than the reviews let on. It’s also full of intrigue. There are notes of David Foster Wallace in here, as well as Kafka and a sprinkling of John McCrae. I think the biggest dichotomy between what I was expecting and what I got is there are far more dystopian overtones that are played completely straight than initially expected. Yes, there are elements of parody, and many of the characters are built on framework from existing mythologies, but it’s got a much more legitimate, “what if these characters were real people?” vibe without reaching for the typically glib, “Hurr hurr Zeus can’t keep it in his pants,” typical low hanging fruit.
  It also loves to raise questions, wait for you to raise your hand, then leave you awkwardly standing in the corner. Maybe I just have a personal thing for being casually disregarded but I really do prefer it when stories don’t spoon feed.
  But the best part so far is the specificity of scope. I was kind of expecting this to be one of those floaty, multi-viewpoint affairs, but so far, the story has mostly been about one character and their attempt to navigate their celestially mundane existence. It’s a much stickier POV than you usually see in this sort of story, which results in an incredibly unique read. There are underlying mysteries by the dozen, and questionable motives, and more delectably gray characters than Raymond Chandler could shake an empty bottle at.
  I like it.
  Anyway, I’m a bit hungover right now and want to savor this story, so I’ll come back here to update with an advanced review when I finish.
• KhaimRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  Excellent writing, interesting plot, and characters with some real depth to them. This story is highly polished; I don't think I noticed a single typo.
  It's a lot like Good Omens, only with more diversity and less random infodumps about how the highways are a demonic rune or whatever. So y'know, it's pretty good.
• vladeragRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 5.0

  It is not a new idea to imagine the heavens as a corporate dystopia.  The idea of angels or devils working a nine to five shift has been explored in many different works and with varying degrees of drudgery.  I, personally, have often found them to be too much mired in the mundanity of corporate culture.
  An angle, after all, should still be an angel even if it has to work at a desk.  Surely, in my mind at least, the humour would come from the justaxposistion of a powerful, glorious being having to fill out paperwork and getting dumped on by their supervisor.
  Doing God's Work takes a less comedic - although that doesn't make it much less funny - route, wherein the various gods at work in Providence aren't as resigned to their fate as serial comedy might have them.  Because make no mistake, although this has comedic elements it is not a comedy.  In fact, it is downright grimdark in places.
  I'll be spoiler free here, but there are some very difficult moments in this fiction.  It will pull on your heartstrings and hard, even though you are following the very cynical and jaded Loki on his day to day mundane work.
  Of course, mundane in this context involves answering prayers to God, so mundane might not really be the right word.
  Either way, this is a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows as you move from drudgery to horror to humour and back again.
  All of the characters, for the most part, are taken from the various gods throughout human history, only slightly updated for their new corporate life.  As a result, they all have interesting characters and relationships almost by default so long as the author is capable, and make no mistake Csuite is very capable.
  You can almost feel the centuries of weight each of these gods is lugging around with them.  The pure exhaustion mixed with the bombastic personalities from their myths.
  It is, without a doubt, a fantastic story that I recomend anyone and everyone read.
• MVVRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 4.5

  I was expecting a parody of office life from a novel perspective, but found so much more.
  This is about family. A rebelious son holding milenium long grudges to avenge his brother, a widowed father with the open wounds of missing children, a woman protecting her sisters by essentially killing them... each character has depths and driving.
  This is very much not the comedy I was expecting but the drama I would't have ever picked. And I am loving every bit of it.
• MrHrulginRoyal Road

  ★★★★★ 4.5

  I loved this story, but I eventually lost track of what was going on and who all was involved. I'm not sure if it was the pacing of publication or the number of characters or the different side-plots, but I just found myself losing interest. It's a pity, because I really liked the beginning.
• Waffle(est)Royal Road

  ★★★★ 4.0

  A very entertaining read, with minor plot contrivances. A dystopian story of the modern patheon.
  The characters are elaborately fleshed out and borrow heavily from various religions and folklore. They behave consistnely withing the story, but intentionally deviate from tradition in places as a plot device. Many of the gods are wacky, but this fits well with the story, some mortal characters come across as contrived but this is relatively easily explained with some deity or other acting behind the scenes.
  The plot has an overarching goal that he MC strives for, but along the way there his hand is constantly being forced. This is where the plot starts to crack. There are certain plot twists that constantly keep getting reused and and as you read on it becomes rather obvious.
  Spoiler: Spoiler
  A lot of time is spent keeping secrets only for it to be revealed that the person from secrets were being kept knew all along and uses this as blackmail material. and this happens at least 3 times in almost identical manner in a short while, probably more instances away as i read on.
  Also, the structure of some irresistible force driving the main characters interactions (otherwise game-over) is the underlying driver of plot development far too often.
  A constant issue is that plot arcs are often not concluded, in stead more and more new plot points are raised and unfinished issues are simply neglected.
  I am very sceptical when ever a main character needs to fight against gods (or in general 100x more powerful entities). I find if often leads to forced and contrived plot to the point of making the plot unviable. In this case although there are minor issues (possibly due to MC also being a god) the plot is still quite sane. This is probably the first story I know of that is getting away with fighting against actual gods and still being interesting.
• BadGenuisRoyal Road

  ★★★★ 4.0

  Doing gods work is a novel that have the word work  literally means "work". The gods is in genuine office environment working in a slave driving company. I don't know if something will change later on.
  Content, intent and stye of wrting is great.
  The concept is novel.
  But misunderstood the fantasy tag cuz' this semi-realistic setting with no clear plot progression is not upto my taste.
  The novel is good though. Just my personal preference. More strength Author-san.