Description

The city of Malamus is steeped in absolutes. It is defined by them. A man owns everything, or he owns only the dirt beneath his feet. A man enduring an incomprehensible tragedy finds artistry in his work, where many think there is none. Another man struggles to find purpose in a world defined by excess. Overshadowing all of this are the machinations of the Interior Ministry, rumors pervade the city of unspeakable acts being carried out in the name of progress. Malamus is a city of absolutes, absolute malice and not much else.

Community Reviews(2)

AwakenedMuseRoyal Road

★★★★★ 4.5

Overall
It is hard to really give a review with only a little to go off yet, but I am enjoying what the author has put forward so far. It needs some polish and a few extra lines or words cut to make it easier to digest. However, it promises to be a unique story, set in a colorful world and told by non-typical characters. I look forward to reading more and watching this writer grow!
Style
Others have mentioned the prologue. It is clunky. However, what the writer tried to do is beautiful, using poetry and language usually used to describe bodies to hint at the body preservation process. Execution of a story means nothing if you don't have the big-pitcure thinking to tell a new story in new ways. The whole feel of the world so far is interesting to me. It's very gray and sounds like a horrible place to live, yet I know there's a gem of a story waiting to be read.
Grammar
The author can improve in this area. Brevity is a developing skill; many sentences are just shy of run-on, and the paragraphs are traditionally sized. I myself had to change my paragraph formatting for posting online. I expect with some feedback, this author will hit a good stride with this and produce chapters more palatable to the internet audience.
Story
I'm intrigued by what I've seen so far. This writer has vision, and a clear idea of the setting and how to share it with the reader. Again, not much of the story is presented yet, so it is hard to assess this. The lore of the world is deep so far, and I expect the building blocks in the first few chapters are leading to a great story.
Character
The perspective character is not who I expected. This is not a bad thing. I'm finding the introduction to the world and customs through Bevyn's eyes very interesting. I look forward to Iona being introduced more fully, but this is likely stylistic so far, since we are experiencing the story through the eyes of a somewhat self-centered character.

MShadowlawnRoyal Road

★★ 2.0

BLUF: Absolute scrap heap in the prologue, with syntax that feels like pulling teeth to read, starts to get a little better following that. There's some cool prose if you're willing to dig around the body for it(Yeah, that's an intentional pun).
Okay, first thing, prose. I'm not mincing words, the prose/syntax is pretty bad, and I'm going to bring up examples to make sure I'm not going insane. The shortest of it is that it feels incredibly disorienting and painful to read; the author has apparently never heard of a semicolon and has a lot of problems figuring out where to use a comma or a period, or neither(presumably in a near-irrational fear of 'run-on sentences'). Adding on top of that, the "camera-work" of the text is really jarringly bad, I actually found examples of that.
"The work would have to wait however. As the salts within the horned mask were beginning to wear down." See? I'M NOT CRAZY. That period feels like watching someone slam the brakes preemptively in a drag race.
"So many tales contained in such a small palette; stretched bare in one moment. It is time for the delicate part." Wait, why wasn't that first sentence in the last paragraph instead of this one, where he starts doing his work to the body?
Prose also frequently fails to physically orient the POV's physical location in a way that doesn't require me to backtrack and act like a 1920's noir detective, taking me completely out of the story. I strongly think this is connected to the writer's general lack of understanding and confidence in their ability to string multiple, closely related thoughts together into a single sentence, but I also don't believe that's the whole story on the topic of physical disorientation. One more example, to illustrate things:
"Rats gnawed away at the carefully laid stitching. The innards from the bloated corpse flowing out across the stone sluggishly in chunks of vivid color. The jaw of the gored taxidermist was hanging slack, with an accusatory glance contained in

The Undertaker's Daughter

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Chapters(9 total)

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Community Reviews(2)