Category: Reviews

#REVIEW: Sisters of the Lizard, by Jackson Ford

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

One of the things I said about The Bone Raiders, the first book in Jackson Ford’s Rakada series, was that you could go ahead and judge it by its cover. The cover of that book was five badass women of color, draped in human bones and carrying weapons, plus a giant, fire-breathing lizard that is not technically a dragon but may as well be.

I am tempted to point out that this cover features two fire-breathing lizards, hit “Publish,” and retire for the night.

I fucking loved the first book, about a group of raiders in a heavily Mongolian-inspired steppe setting, who decided to try and tame the aforementioned fire-breathing lizards so that they could ride them into battle. By the time this book begins, they have mastered taming said fire-breathing lizards (which are called araatan, by the way) and all four of them have their own. Which means that the psychic crazy lady from the first book who thinks she’s immortal until she makes good on a deal she made with God now rides a dragon.

Its name is Sponge Bath. I’m not sure there are sponges in this world. I definitely don’t care. Ford can have that little anachronism for free. Two others are Tooth Monster and Princess. The fourth’s name is a plot point and I won’t reveal it.

And then the araatan start getting sick, and all four women have the same vision at the same time, featuring the words “You can save them,” and we’re off to the fucking races.

Jackson Ford is so good that it makes me sick. My jealousy is off the charts; this shit is simply not fair. I’m coming off several books in a row that didn’t hit the way I wanted them to and I needed my ass kicked, and I’m glad I saved this book for when I needed my ass kicked, because damn. Somehow a book about four women wearing bones and riding dragons also gets way deeper into everyone’s character than the first one did, and the ending is so crushing that I didn’t believe it at first, fully expecting a particular plot development to let one character hit the reset button on everything that had happened, and … nope. If you are a crier, in addition to kicking your ass, this book will make you cry, and you won’t see it coming. I am not a crier and it still almost got me.

Violence and humor and violence and world building and violence and lesbians and violence and rebellions and violence and family drama and violence and betrayal and violence and possession and gods. Because like hell we’re not going to up the stakes on this one.

Go get it.

#REVIEW: Taipei Story, by R.F. Kuang

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Goddammit.

I don’t like writing negative reviews of books by authors I like. I especially don’t like it when authors I like write two books in a row that I have to write negative reviews for. Kuang’s sixth book, Katabasis, wasn’t a bad book, and I didn’t dislike it, necessarily, but when you’re coming from an author whose books have nearly all ended up on my end-of-year best-of lists, a book not doing that is a downgrade. But I said in the review of that book that it might have fallen victim to my own expectations for it, and that I wanted to reread it at some point, and I still plan to do that.

Here’s the second-worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: it’s the first of Kuang’s books that I’m nearly certain I’m never going to revisit. Here’s the worst thing I can say about Taipei Story: if this was my first R.F. Kuang book and not my seventh, I would not be planning to pick up her next book.

And yet I’m still not willing to call it a bad book. If you are interested in character studies, and if the idea of spending just shy of 300 pages in the head of an American college sophomore who has moved to Taiwan for a ten-week intensive summer Chinese program sounds like something you might want to read, you will probably like this book! I am, unfortunately, not that reader. Character studies really aren’t my thing, and while I generally don’t need my books to be about people who are like me– I read about wizards and dragons and space aliens, for fuck’s sake– Lily is so closed off and so internal that I couldn’t find a way to care about her. And while I’ve studied enough languages to know that a ten-week residential Chinese course would be insanely difficult, it … doesn’t make for a good story, unfortunately. Lily doesn’t really do much over the course of the book. She doesn’t get along with her roommate, she has the most insanely awkward sex scene in the history of the written word, and that’s really about it.(*)

The meat of the story is supposed to be about when her grandfather dies, a grandfather who she barely knows because she lives in America and he’s still in China, and it leads to this mental crisis where Lily feels like she was learning Chinese to get to know her family and her history, and one of her few connections to China has just died, and her grandmother is sliding into dementia and barely remembers her most of the time. She has a few conversations with her mother where it becomes clear that she doesn’t really know much about her family’s history, partially because she never asked and partially because no one ever bothered to tell her anything, and she has a bit of a breakdown for a while, and I can imagine someone who finds this really fascinating, but it’s just not me.

I’m also frustrated because for the second book in a row I feel like forces external to the book have affected my opinion of it. In the case of Katabasis it was the pre-reading checklists and the idea that the book was super complicated and deep and you needed background knowledge to properly appreciate it that was circling around, and it just turned out to not be true. In the case of this book, Kuang’s grandfather literally died while she was in Taipei at an intensive residential language study. I would really like her next book to Not Be About Her. Do I get to tell her what to write? No, I don’t. Do I get to be disappointed by her choices anyway? I do. But the big difference between Kuang and Lily is that Lily is 19 and Kuang’s experience was in her late twenties, so she’s written Lily as less mature and able to process her feelings than she thinks she was, and again, it just didn’t work for me.

Again, the book’s not bad by any means, and I’m still in on day one for whatever she writes next. But this one just didn’t work for me.

(*) It was awful. I had to put the book down and walk away for a while. Like, the scene was supposed to be alienating and kind of creepy and weird, and it succeeded so much in that goal that it made me not want to read the book any more for a while. That’s sort of a compliment? But I’m still cringing from secondhand embarrassment right now, and I finished this book three days ago.

It is possible that you just read this piece and are surprised that I didn’t address The Controversy. That is because I find The Controversy to be so fucking stupid that I lose brain cells every time I think about it. If you are unaware of The Controversy, do yourself a favor and don’t look into it. If you are upset by The Controversy, go touch some fucking grass and find a real problem, you zygote.

#REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

This was one of the most purely fun movies I’ve seen in a while.

I had an epic Labor Day weekend, y’all. Got two projects done around the house that needed doing. Read two and a half entire books. Took naps. And, wonder of wonders, last night my wife and I watched a movie.

This movie has been out for a while, and I’m far from convinced that my opinion matters at this point, but I think if you’ve ever played D&D in your life you probably owe it to yourself to give this a watch. If you never played D&D or are otherwise unfamiliar with the fantasy genre in general, I’m not sure how well it will hit with you– the interesting thing to me is that the harder the movie leaned into the Forgotten Realms setting, the less I liked it. For some reason, references to Baldur’s Gate kept tossing me out of the movie, and Elminster himself makes an appearance that just felt weirdly inappropriate. It’s rare that I think something should have been more generic, but at least for me this movie could have been pulled out of the Realms and dropped into its own setting and I would have been fine with it.

That’s my only complaint, though. Everything else I have to say is positive. The cast is excellent across the board; I’ve never had any particular feelings about Chris Pine one way or another but he’s perfectly cast as a bard, and Michelle Rodriguez’s barbarian character is a lot of fun as well. Everyone is really pretty and I feel like the director had a goal with the cast to push back a little bit on the idea that fantasy fiction has to be white– there are a ton of racially-ambiguous brown people in this movie, and Pine’s Ed is in an interracial marriage, and their daughter Kira, played by Chloe Coleman, is freaking adorable. Hugh Grant is perfectly cast as a slimy con man, the villain is creepy as fuck, and in general the group dynamics make you feel like everyone had a lot of fun making this movie. The movie isn’t precisely a comedy but where it’s funny it’s funny, and the action sequences were genuinely awesome. There’s a bit at about the 1/3 mark where Rodriguez’ Holga character wins a fight with a paving stone she pries out of the road at her feet, and her fights are always full of improvised weaponry and creativity. They’re amazing, and there’s never any question about what’s going on. I wasn’t expecting action this well-shot from this movie, and it was great to see. Bigger action directors should learn from it, honestly.

Plus? Owlbears. Gelatinous Cubes. Freakin’ displacer beasts. A fat dragon. If they’d found a place to stuff a Hook Horror into the movie they’d have hit nearly all of my favorite D&D monsters. If you thought for even a minute that you might enjoy this, give it a watch while it’s on Netflix. Thumbs way up.

#REVIEW: Rise of the Ronin (PS5, 2024)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video gamesLeave a comment

Freakin’ finally.

Allow me to tell you a story about the game Rise of the Ronin. It came out in March of 2024, and was by the same people who make the Nioh games, easily my favorite game franchise of all time that doesn’t have the word Souls in the name. Maybe even then. I was excited about it. I bought it. I didn’t get to it immediately, because I was playing something else. But then I played it a little bit. Maybe the first ten percent or so.

And then Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree came out on June 21, and I was done with Rise of the Ronin. And it sat on my PS5 for literally two years, being ignored and making me feel guilty. I even deleted it and reinstalled it a couple of times, intending to get to it and never actually doing it. And finally, this summer, I had the combination of a wild hair up my ass and nothing new coming out and I finally deleted my old save file and started afresh.

70 hours later, I Platinumed the Goddamned thing, and then I deleted it from my PS5, never to be reinstalled again.

I’m very tempted to say “the end.”

This is an open-world samurai game, clearly a test run for Nioh 3 and honestly not terribly far removed from Elden Ring or any of the other Soulslikes that are more or less all I play nowadays, so you’d think it would be right up my alley. And in a lot of ways, it was! Lots of different weapons, multiple stances for every weapon, customizable special moves, all the stuff I like.

Two fatal flaws: 1) it was way too easy, and 2) every single mission and I mean every single mission boiled down to “go here, and kill all the humans.” Human enemies came in two flavors: Little Guys and Big Guys. There were also dogs and pigs occasionally– and, bizarrely, sometimes you’d get sent to take out a local outlaw and the outlaw would be a pig with a name. One of the big side missions was pacifying unruly parts of the countryside, by– you guessed it– going there and killing everyone. Sometimes everyone there would be a dog or a pig. I have no explanation. It didn’t happen often, but I’m not making this up. Enemy variety was practically negligible, and even bosses were all more or less the same fight– sometimes literally so, because for some reason Team Ninja really resists actually killing people in boss fights, so they were forever escaping and threatening you with more of the same later.

Dude, we have fought five times and I have whipped your ass all five times. Next time run the fuck away.

I have a serious weakness for games with big overworld maps with lots of icons on them, I admit it. But there needs to be some fucking variety in what you’re doing, and everything in this game got to feeling very, very samey after a while, and “samey” combined with “easy” isn’t a great mix. I think the toughest boss in the game took me two tries? Maybe three. I almost never died, and when I did it was because I stopped paying attention and got sloppy. The customizable martial arts moves? I never used them, and even the stance-switching, which was supposed to have a sort of paper-rock-scissors thing going on with the stances your enemies used (helpfully indicated by an icon showing whether your stance was the effective one or not) was something I didn’t really bother learning until very, very late in the game. Button mashing would get you through 90% of the game so long as you paid a little bit of attention to your stamina.

So, yeah: sadly, the major achievement of having beaten Rise of the Ronin is that I don’t have to think about Rise of the Ronin anymore, and I suppose I should be grateful that Team Ninja learned some lessons from this game and applied them to Nioh 3, which was a vastly superior game.

And speaking of Nioh 3 and DLC, guess what dropped in the last couple of weeks? So I’m going to go do that for a while now.

#REVIEW: The Keeper, by Tana French

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I need someone to have a quiet word with Tana French. And maybe with her publishers. Hell, both.

The Keeper is the third and, supposedly, the final book in the Cal Hooper trilogy. I did a full review of the first book, The Searcher, and a reviewlet of the second, The Hunter. There is something great about this series, y’all, and I refuse to admit that it’s over in a fashion that rarely happens to me with series fiction. I absolutely insist on more books in this series, or at least that French starts a new series where she follows Trey as she moves on from Ardnakelty. It’s not like her Dublin Murder Squad series didn’t already establish a precedent for each book following a side character from the previous one. I love these characters and I love this setting, and God damn it, I’m not ready for or interested in this being over yet.

But let me back up, for the benefit of people who haven’t been reading this site since 2021 and don’t click on links: the Cal Hooper books follow, you guessed it, Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who moves to Ireland on a whim in the first book and buys a fixer-upper in the tiny and fictional town of Ardnakelty. He quickly finds himself more or less adopted by a feral thirteen-year-old girl named Trey, and … well, he’s an ex-cop. It’s a Tana French book. There are shenanigans afoot. By the start of the third book, Cal is engaged to a local woman named Lena, Trey is seventeen and effectively Cal’s foster daughter, and Cal no longer feels like an outsider to Ardnakelty. In fact, the idea of not becoming part of Ardnakelty is a major theme in this book; Lena feels like Cal is growing too comfortable with the more pathological aspects of living in such a small town, and Trey, who was all about escaping Ardnakelty at her earliest possible opportunity at first, is contemplating leaving school for a carpentry apprenticeship and is tentatively exploring a relationship with a girlfriend.

And then a local girl, right around Trey’s age, is found drowned in a river, and the autopsy reveals antifreeze in her stomach, and we’re off to the races again.

Perhaps “off to the races” is the wrong phrase. This book is many things; in a hurry is none of them, and while it’s every bit as compelling a read as the previous two volumes, this one is even more about the three main characters and the culture of Ardnakelty than the first books were, and the plot is really an excuse to dive into their personalities and their relationships. There’s an intentionality about Cal’s relationship with Trey in particular that I, as someone with a couple of pseudo-adoptive kids of my own*, can really recognize and relate to, and Lena comes forward quite a bit more in this book than she has in the past.

Ardnakelty itself is much more of a character in this book than it has been in the past, too, and the way the book uses Rachel Holohan’s death to investigate themes of inheritance and change and destiny is really awesome. I’m not quite ready to call this French’s best book, something I also said about The Searcher, but it’s a tremendous piece of work and it really makes me want to reread the series from the start. If you’ve read the previous books you no doubt already have your eye on this one, but if you haven’t, at this point there’s no reason to wait.

(*) I don’t talk about them often, but I have two former students who call me Dad and mean it, and a handful who have tossed the word around a couple of times.

#REVIEW: The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran, by Andrew Scott Cooper

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

WordPress just inserted an apostrophe into “Pahlavis,” and did it again right there, and it makes me want to fight someone.

I finished this tonight, and I got home from work intending to finish it quickly, but got sidetracked by some– ahem– electrical work in the shell of our old closet, so when I say “I finished this tonight,” a more accurate statement would be “I finished this ten minutes ago,” and given that it’s already almost 9:00 I maybe should have found something else to post about, because this book probably deserves more careful consideration than I’m about to give it. So take that into account; I’m kind of rushing here.

The short review: this was an excellent read, and right on the edge of being detailed enough that I constantly felt like I was learning things without burying me in details and Farsi words and names– although the fact that the two Shah Reza Pahlavis and the Crown Prince Reza have nearly identical names definitely caused some trouble at times– but I am not convinced that Andrew Scott Cooper is as unbiased as perhaps a historian might strive to be. Entertainingly, this has managed to slip into the official Goodreads description of the book:

The book’s page on Amazon has “immersive, gripping” before “account,” and otherwise is identical, so someone is playing shenanigans here, but the fact is that Cooper really seems to like the Shah, and tries really hard to make everything that happened in Iran seem like it wasn’t his fault. (To be clear: every time in this post I say “the Shah,” I’m referring to the middle Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the son of the first Shah Pahlavi and the father of the Crown Prince. He occupies most of the book’s attention.)

Iranian history, even fairly recent Iranian history, is fantastically complicated, and I think particularly for Americans, who maybe like things to be able to be boiled down to “who is the good guy?” and “who is the bad guy?” too much, it’s already difficult enough to sort out motivations and moral culpability in Iran in the twentieth century without an author putting his thumb on the scale. Every novel I’ve ever read about Iran during this time period has more or less treated the Ayatollah Khomeini as an irredeemable evil, which I don’t have a problem with, and have cast Mohammad Mossadegh as a sort of savior figure who almost saved Iran from the Shah. Pahlavi managed to be perhaps the best example history has of the “enlightened despot,” someone who genuinely wanted to liberalize and modernize his country, educating his people, raising the standard of living, and ensuring rights for women and religious minorities … except he did it by forbidding dissent and trampling all over most people who disagreed with him … except when he didn’t, and The Fall of Heaven is really quick to assert that the Shah was almost pacifistic in his refusal to shed Iranian blood in the pursuit of his goals.

I think a lot of the Iranian novelists whose books I have read– not that there are a ton, but there have been several– would disagree with that, but then the biggest counterpoint is that he let Khomeini live, which … God damn, having that fucker shot in the sixties would have saved Iran, Pahlavi and the entire world a whole lot of trouble. And there was a weird overlap between leftist critics of Pahlavi, who tended to like the liberalization stuff except they didn’t really believe he meant it, and wanted democracy, and the religious lunatics who thought he was too liberal and wanted Iran to be the theocratic hellhole that it eventually became under the Ayatollahs. It’s messy as fuck, is what I’m saying, and when you throw in things like leftist women walking around in chador to demonstrate that they were against the regime, and the fact that somehow the CIA thought that Khomeini would lead a moderate, secular government … God, nobody knows anything about this place.

One way or another: this was a worthy read, despite having some issues. I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Iran that you start with some fiction– I’d recommend anything by Marjan Kamali— and maybe then move on to this. But it’s well worth the time you’ll invest in it.

#REVIEW: Innamorata, by Ava Reid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Warning, maybe: reading this will make you reread Gormenghast.

Innamorata, and in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t know why the title is misspelled, is the fourth of Ava Reid’s books I’ve read. I actually own five of them; the fifth is the sequel to one of the other ones, bought at roughly the same time, and I think I read the first one and didn’t like it very much so I never got around to reading Book Two. Typically, once I own five of an author’s books, I’ve graduated to big fan of that author, or at least fan, and Reid, frustratingly, still hasn’t quite written a book that completely hit for me. And to be honest, I only bought this one because there was a ton of stupid BookTok drama and backlash against it that I’m not going to get into, and it pissed me off so I bought the book, striking back with my hard-earned money against the opinions of people I will never meet who similarly do not know I exist or that I bought this book to spite them and their unreasonable ideas.

Anyway.

Have you read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books? If you have, knowing that Ava Reid begins this book with a quote from Gormenghast and that the castle that the main character lives in at the start of the book is called Castle Peake is probably enough to get you to pick this up. If you have not read any of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books, you should go read them, then come back to this post.

The book begins with a funeral, the funeral for an old woman known as the Mistress of Teeth, and her funeral is attended by representatives for the Master of Blood, the Master of Eyes, the Master of Lungs, the Master of Bones, and the Master of Flesh, and the first several Masters take their parts from the corpse before the Master of Flesh stomps the flaccid, shredded sack of meat that remains into the mud, thus ensuring that the Mistress cannot rise from the dead. The former Mistress of Teeth’s teeth are made into a necklace for the new Mistress of Teeth, and I’m given to understand that the necklace contains teeth from several previous holders of that title. The book ends– this is technically a spoiler, but I think I can get away with it– with something “stirring” in a murdered woman’s womb, a murdered woman who was very much not pregnant when she was killed.

This is Gothic body horror, a lot of it, and it is deeply fucked up, and here I allude to the controversy in that you should completely ignore the marketing text that tries real hard to pretend this is a romantasy, because it is very much not a fucking romantasy, although I will admit it has some elements of same, including some, well, fucking. If you read books for atmosphere and mood and language, and the notion of reading something that is very much like a modern take on Peake appeals to you, jump at it. If you read books for other reasons … maybe not. The book is 532 pages long; I put it down, somewhat unwillingly, with about 80 pages left last night, having read all of the rest of it during my road trip. I got home from work today and read those last 80 pages, and I kind of feel like at some point the actual plot collapsed under its own weight. There is some interesting character development throughout, but that character development is going to involve someone completely abandoning every personality trait and motivation and goal that she had at the beginning of the book, and some of that stuff sounded pretty interesting! Lady Agnes wanted to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps– that’s grandma getting stomped into the mud in the first few pages– and restore necromancy to the creepy-ass island she lives on. That’s automatically cool!

She decides not to, basically because she gets distracted, and you’re going to have to be okay with that if you’re going to have a good time with this. And that was hellishly disappointing, even if a lot of the other stuff that happens was, again, cool and atmospheric and creepy and another part of the controversy was about trigger warnings, and I’m just going to tell you a lot of fucked up shit happens and has already happened, and there is so, so, so much blood in this book, and some spectacularly poor parenting, and I eventually turned that into four stars, but the sequel is going to get read right after it comes out, even if I’m kind of hoping it digs itself out of a bit of a hole.

Let’s call that a cautious and conditional recommendation for Innamorata, and you should definitely read Mervyn Peake.

Let’s talk about DAGGERMOUTH

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

It’s possible that you haven’t heard about this book yet, so let me set the stage here: H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is a dystopian romance that blew up as an indie title before getting a seven-figure traditional publishing deal, and it was just recently released in a pretty new physical hardcover. It has also been publicly accused of being written by AI.

(A quick side note: If you aren’t an Atlantic subscriber, you won’t be able to read the article at that link. Ironically, perhaps, there is at least one other website that has taken the entire article, stripped the author’s name off of it, and reposted it, with only an “originally published at the Atlantic” link at the bottom to indicate that they didn’t produce it. I’m not going to link to that article. You are welcome to find it, if you want.)

Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t think I’d have picked this book up in the first place. I’ve read my share of romance novels/romantasies in the last couple of years but I’m growing tired of it as a genre, and what the kids call “spice” is starting to slowly slide toward being a reason not to pick up a book. But a good friend who has become The Person I Talk About Books To told me she’d read it and recommended it, and then told me about the AI controversy, which at the time I hadn’t heard about. She thought the accusation was ridiculous, having read the book, and pointed out that of course the author everyone was tossing accusations at was a young Black woman.(*)

For what it’s worth, Wolfe’s publisher, who gave her a whole lot of money, is standing behind her on this, and since AI-written text can’t be copyrighted, you’d think they’d have a significant interest in making sure she actually wrote the damn thing.

The book is on Kindle Unlimited, as it turns out. So I didn’t even have to pay for it. Fuck it, I thought, and downloaded it.

If this book was written by AI, we are all in really fucking big trouble, folks. Human-generated culture is dead if AI wrote this book.

That sounds like a strong recommendation. It’s not. Not quite. Daggermouth has a problem that for some reason seems very common to the indie-book-to-tradpub-success pipeline: Wolfe constantly either uses words that are just slightly not the right word or describes situations that sound good at first and don’t make sense upon second looks. The type of thing that sounds like nitpicking if you only provide one example, and I don’t plan to eviscerate the book at the moment, so let me nitpick: there is a bit early on where a character is drinking from a glass, and his many rings “clink” against the glass.

The glass in question is a wine glass– stemware, in other words– and if you’re holding stemware in such a fashion that your rings are clinking on it, you’re holding it wrong. At one point– hell, this might be the same conversation, I don’t remember– a character is sitting behind an executive-style desk having a conversation with a second character. He stands up and “in four long strides” (Wolfe is terribly fond of counting her characters’ strides) he walks to the other character to get all up in his space.

The problem is that this description both 1) forgets that he was sitting behind a desk and 2) puts the other character really far away from that desk. Seriously, take four “long strides” right now. Is that normal conversational distance?

The writing, in other words, in a mechanical and a craft sense, is mediocre. I’ve read a lot worse, mind you. But it’s definitely not good. And again, this is a weird indie-to-tradpub problem; I had the exact same issue with Ryan Cahill’s books, and I can think of three or four other authors I’ve had the same complaints about who I’m not going to bother to call out by name right now.(**)

The story hits its stride at about the 100-page mark and is off to the fucking races after that, and never lets up or slows down for the last 80% of the book. This is a good story, poorly written. And there’s enough genuinely good stuff in there– particularly the ending, which caught both me and my friend completely by surprise. There are bits that are ridiculous, too; the worst offense was a bit where the fated lovers of the piece surprise eight soldiers in his apartment, kill all eight of them, and then decide to stay the night in the apartment rather than, say, realize their cover is completely blown and go literally anywhere else. They don’t even clear the bodies out until the next morning.

I didn’t have any damn idea how to rate this, and had I not spent the first 100 pages debating every third word choice and mapping out locations in my head, this might have been a five-star read, because it needed to get good enough that I stopped paying attention to the flaws in the writing. The book managed to shut down the persnickety editor part of my brain, and usually, once that guy is unleashed on your book, you’re done. But I got caught up enough in the story that I finished the book basically overnight, and after that first 20% I was genuinely expecting to have to DNF or force myself through the rest of it. I put it at four and a half on Storygraph (follow me!) and four on Goodreads.

I would not have thought for a single second that this text was AI-generated had I not been told that it was controversial. And, to return to the article for a moment, I’m not convinced of their methodology, at least based on what the article tells me– there are, for example, two entire sentences that appear word-for-word in other books that they looked at, but they leave out the kind of important detail of which book came out first. Maybe the fucking AI ate the sentences for this book and spit them out for the other one? Plus, I’m sorry, if you’re comparing this book to a book from someone who “wrote” 400 books last year, and the sequel to this one isn’t coming out for another year, guess what? I know which author I think is writing AI. Hell, I know which author I’m pretty sure doesn’t even exist. If this book comes out as a higher percentage chance of being AI than one of the other person’s 400 books, your methodology is crap and you should redo your study.

Is it possible? Sure. I’m not going to claim that my internal AI detector is top-tier or anything like that; in 8th grade the easiest way to see if a student cheated and had AI write a paper is to ask them to read it out loud, and as soon as they hit a word they can’t read, ask them what it means. It works every single fucking time. I generally don’t have to think about it a whole lot harder than that. But if it is? If a fucking genAI slop program wrote this book? It doesn’t have to be fucking Dostoyevsky for that to be a major fucking concern.

So, yeah. I’m pretty sure H.M. Wolfe’s Daggermouth is not written by AI. It has issues but ultimately I enjoyed reading it. I’m in for the sequel. And I am absolutely terrified about what is going to happen to human culture if I’m wrong.

(*) I Googled “H.M. Wolfe age,” and the fucking AI assistant told me she was born on October 28, 2025, and then helpfully added “Age: 0” afterwards.

(**) In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the only indie-to-tradpub author who I haven’t had this problem with is Matt Dinniman, including his non-Dungeon Crawler Carl books.