Let’s be clear here, and not bury the lede on this review: You have read Ryan Cahill’s Of Blood and Fire before. No, really, I promise you have. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, or Dragonlance, or The Sword of Shannara, or the first book of The Wheel of Time, or John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen series, or especially if you’ve read– gag– Eragon, you’ve read Of Blood and Fire. The book’s biggest weakness is that in its nearly five hundred pages there is not a single original idea. It adheres to the dictates of classic fantasy with near-perfect fidelity, from the main characters hailing from a small town suddenly infringed upon by the evil of the outer world to suddenly dead parents to one of the three main characters being The Chosen One to parents and authority figures with a Secret Past to dragon riding to elves and dwarves and orcs, here called Uraks, to a distinct lack of female characters. Hell, all it needs is “A Noun” at the beginning of the title and even that feels ripped off.

There is a human king named Arthur and an elf named Ellisar, for God’s sake. I’m not going to bother to tell you what the book’s about. You already know. Again, you’ve read this book before.

And yet this is not going to be a negative review, because originality isn’t everything– hell, this book manages to rip off two or three books that were themselves massive ripoffs of earlier, better books– although I would neither blame you nor be particularly surprised if that first paragraph keeps you from picking it up. Somehow, despite being an utter pastiche of a ton of stuff that came before it, it’s a competent pastiche, and frankly it’s a pastiche of a genre of book that I have been a big fan of for my entire life. It’s a cheeseburger and fries. You know what a cheeseburger and fries is going to taste like before you pick it up, and you don’t necessarily need anyone trying to get super creative with a cheeseburger and fries, right? It can taste like three thousand other burgers so long as it does being a burger correctly, and, well, this does being a burger mostly pretty well.

(Why mostly? This is self-published, to boot, and there are signs of occasionally needing maybe one more editorial pass. The book begins with someone telling someone else they’re going to ask them Four Questions, and it’s said like that where you want to add capital letters, and then they ask them at least seven questions. Shit like that.)

I dunno. I four-starred this, and at least one of those stars was for the exceptional quality of the hardback– this book is an absolute pleasure to hold in the hand, with a pleasant heft and exceptionally smooth, creamy paper, and if you buy books for their qualities as physical objects you definitely want to own it– and I’m looking forward to reading the sequels, but it is absolutely McDonald’s fantasy fiction, to be even more specific with the “cheeseburger” metaphor. You’ve had this before, and sometimes you get a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that was just made perfectly, but it’s still a DQP with for all that. That’s what this is. I’m in for more, but maybe you don’t like fast food, and that’s okay.