A Tale of Karg: The Viper and The King: A Robert E. Howard inspired action adventure story (Book 1) by Clay Francesco is reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian or the GOR series with humans battling humanoid lizards in a harsh desert world.
…testosterone fuelled, action filled helter skelter ride…
The plot is a fairly straight forward jailbreak with a tiny bit of magic thrown in. The main character is a fairly mono-dimensional muscle bound and battle scarred warrior with little personality and an enormous grudge. The other characters are slightly less dimensional. However, all of this I would be able to forgive. Nothing wrong with a front and centre, testosterone fuelled, action filled helter skelter ride of a barbarian slasher tale.
Unfortunately, for me the prose and narrative style ruined the experience. It managed both excessive lyriscism AND awkard clunkiness at the same time. Like a robotic flower with a short circuit, it stuttered and skipped from one tangled, vocabulary rich, phrase to the next. Along the way, it managed to drag the action into a kind of epilepsy too as it jumped back and forth between past and present events.
A painful 2 out of 5 stars for Clay Francisco. I did manage to finish the book, but the contrast between simplistic plot & characters and the filigreed twisting prose was simply to much for me to gain any enjoyment.
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