Maniaque

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

In the boutique called Maniaque awaits the mysterious Sethian Skin, a sly deal-maker who can offer you a custom dress on one hand and the keys to a monstrous darkness on the other. One night a stranger from a far-off land comes looking for magic only to run afoul of Sethian Skin's clientele and die on the boutique floor. Call it a chance meeting, but this stranger carried secrets that can determine the fate of nations, and now those secrets belong to Sethian Skin. Thus begins a series of bloody nights full of monsters, spies, and maddening magic. With Sethian Skin at the center of it all, the real question is: What's in it for him?

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2023
Author: Jack-o-Shadows

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.0/ 5.0
Followers: 4
Views: 11,837

Chapters(60 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(1)

CidolphusRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
This is a kind of a weird one. I think the story has potential to be really interesting, and the overall lore of the world is actually pretty cool, but the overall structure and word choices is what sets this back a bit.
Style wise, the passages feel very choppy and even obtrusive sometimes. The dialogue is mostly fine and it does feel like two actual people talking, but the narration of their movements and the world around them is a bit dry.
It's a bit hard to explain without showing the passage itself, so here's the very first paragraph you see in chapter 1.
( Amo hit the floor like a human-shaped hammer, but their body lost to the tile. They left a bloody mark where the dancer spun away from them. The room had been red from the beginning, all sanguine satin and purple cloth hiding the stone walls as though ashamed. Now Amo watched, paralyzed, as this gentle brown tile turned red around them. Amo blubbered. They got their fingers to twitch, to strain, shaking with tension. Teeth aching, tongue limp, Amo stammered, “What? What?”)
No warning, no context, you're just thrown into some random situation without a chance to orient yourself. These types of sequences can work, but there has to be some kind of detail. Here there's suddenly someone slamming into the floor (you don't know why), a dancer from out of nowhere, a room that was "red from the very beginning".
Then you have a threefold combination of "Amo watched, Amo blubbered, Amo stammered" all in a row which feels repetitive.
The author does try to put in a lot of detail throughout the story, but it suffers from this sort of dryness when the story itself is very flamboyant with its characters and world.
( Orange firelight. Black shoes stepping carefully around blood. Dark figure crouching, like a silhouette in front of the cloth-draped walls, in front of all the racks of brightly colored gowns, coats, robes. Not a silhouette, just a dark figure. Just dressed like that. )
Here's another paragraph in the same chap