#was NOT invited back to write azalin's standalone origin story

[churchyardgrim]

TOWER OF DOOM by Mark Anthony

[intro post]

so i was actually warned away from this book, by ppl who'd read the series and who, at the time, did not know me terribly well

bc of course it went straight to the top of my to-read list

and now, having read it, hoooooo boy dear readers let me tell you, that tower sure can doom

we've got a classic hunchback of notre dame here folks; shitty baron in a shitty provincial town, with a disabled half-brother in a tower ringing bells, etc etc etc, and also some business with a lady doctor of genuinely supernatural goodness, and something about a werecat secret agent of Azalin Rex sniffing around bc the baron's plotting against the king and whathaveyou

now i need to take a moment, right here at the top, to talk about this werecat

Jadis is.... well she wouldn't be out of place in a C-grade James Bond novelization. she's The Sexiest Sexy Lady Who Ever Breasted Boobily Down The Stairs, and also she can turn into a giant fuckoff panther bc what's sexier than that. she's a strong independent career-minded woman, and oh yeah she fucks her boss

the boss who is a lich

yeah that boss

now it's not that i object to lichfucking in principal! far from it! anyone who knows me can attest that this is in fact my brand! 

what i do object to is the fact that it's written about as well as baby's first straightguy fanfiction! and also that IT'S IN CHAPTER TWO. THEY LEAD WITH THIS. RIGHT OUT THE GATE HERE.

it's just. it's so badly written guys. it's barely five paragraphs and i am scarred by how clumsy and amateurish the writing is.

like fuck, i can do better than this! i should do better than this! hold my beer, i'm going to take a hammer and FIX the canon

ahem. anyway.

so Jadis has her necro moment and we move on, thank god, and get the rest of what passes for plot moving

to summarize a lot of faffing about and establishing the tone as Needlessly Bleak, the local baron found a magic rock that absorbs souls and makes zombies, and he's running a transparently fake inquisition to find ""traitors"" to execute in order to charge this thing up like a battery

meanwhile our resident Tower Hunchback gets tricked by someone else into carting home a really really cursed bell for the belltower

a cursed bell that kills ppl! fantastic

it's… honestly really boring to talk about lmao. our friend Wort starts doing his "you want a monster? i'll show you a monster" revenge plot, killing off the baron's inner circle one by one and being all tortured about his station in life, and it's fine, i guess. 

there's also a fancy doctorlady whose name i've already forgotten here to see the goodness in all life or whatever, ministering to the poor idiot townspeople who don't know what deafness is (i wish i was kidding)

naturally there's some hamfisted romance between them, and naturally it made me gag more than the lichfucking did. these aren't people, they're caricatures from an author with no goddamn idea what he's doing, and i can feel the pain of his editor as if it were my own

it's trying to tell a story about social rejection, and relative monstrosity, and how being ostracized should drive ppl together against their oppressors but instead only builds divisions between them, as victims tend to be myopic and very attached to their own suffering, to the exclusion of solidarity with their peers

it's trying to tell that story, but it. is not succeeding. it's so hamfisted in its writing, and so full of awkward straight dude horniness, and it's just… so bad you guys.

anyway there's even more faffing, half the cast is dead of Bell Ghosts Disorder by now, and the most interesting thing that happens is Jadis starts to realize that uhhhhh maybe not using protection when getting with a powerful arcane undead is gonna have some longterm consequences my dude

altho i don't think condoms help with magical necrosis so uh. not really sure what she was meant to do differently here. not fuck the lich? not a chance

the good news is she's mostly spared those consequences by dying in a firetrap the baron left her in! so sad, rip catgirl. it's at this point the baron's Big Evil Scheme is revealed, and he's planning to… use the soulstone to animate a big fuckoff war tower, drive the thing directly to Castle Avernus, and i guess bash Azalin to death with it?

no idea why Azzy even needed to get Jadis involved in this, given she does practically nothing to stop it and it collapses anyway under the weight of its own stupidity. Wort's mad with power by now, there's zombies everywhere, this author clearly has a Thing for lovingly described corpses and decay and i don't even know what to do with that

the eventual resolution involves something about the inherent goodness of the human spirit breaking the bell's curse, and also a very disney villain death for the baron. it's very strange, given all the needless cruelty and lurid gore that lead up to it. Wort accidentally drives the walking tower off a cliff, the doctor lady survives to haunt the moors as a ghost? angel? angelghost? maimed and ugly now by her injuries but healing ppl in mysterious silence, something something morality tale

ultimately you can give this one a pass. the quality of the writing is just too bad to put up with, and the plot is largely unremarkable except for the bizarre decision to have a catgirl fuck a lich

now if you'll excuse me, i have some free, uncompensated rewriting to do.