The Big Intro Bit
Hello hello! Hiu here, and welcome to The Fantasy Inn for another year of SPFBO reading and book-throwing.
It’s a brand new year! Well. Maybe not quite so new. See, it turns out that this year’s SPFBO started way back in May. And it’s now… September. Yikes. So before we get started, I wanna throw in a quick apology for the radio silence between now and then, because that’s on me! I’m the guy responsible for getting all the stuff that our team has written on to the actual site. For various reasons — some life-y things that you guys don’t care about, and others which will soon become apparent — I just… haven’t done that until now. Sorry!
Our Team & Structure
This year, our team features all of the same members as last year, but with some new additions! Belle and Calvin — both members of the Fantasy Hive’s team from last year — have joined myself, Adam, Devin Madson, Jared, and Kop in diving in to our 30-book allocation.
In terms of structure, however, we’ve done things a little differently this year. We’ve still split our allocation up among our 7 judges, but this time around we aren’t going the one-semi-finalist-per-judge route. Instead, I (in my infinite wisdom) decided that we would go for a more flexible approach. Which I thought would be fairer to our authors (yes) and lessen the workload on our readers (absolutely fucking not).
The thing with the one-semi-per-judge approach is that it falls on its arse a bit if one of a group’s judges ends up with more than one really good book. Without any flexibility in the form of internal safety-net swaps (which is what we’ve done previously), only one of those books gets a spotlight.
To counter-act this, what I thought we’d do is remove that structure completely. If a judge thought a book was semi-worthy, they’d just say so. Even if that meant putting forward more than one book from their batch, or none at all. If that meant we ended up with, say, 8 semi-finalist candidates. We’d just get the initial readers to attach internal scores to them. And the top 3 or 4 from there would be our semi-finalists.
Sounds good, right? Right? …Right?
Wrong.
I didn’t account for what would happen in the event of any draws. Well… I thought I did. Just have some extra readers volunteer as tie-breakers, right? But what I didn’t account for was the tie-breakers also ending in a draw.
Long story short. From our quite-large team — and I should mention that I specifically tempted these guys into participating this year through promises of a burnout-friendly reduced workload — we ended up with 8 potential semi-finalists. That means over a quarter of our allocation was in with a very real chance of going through to Phase 2. And that’s after some tournament favourites got swapped out of our batch in the early stages of the competition. We’ve got some good books here, folks. You want to talk about a group of death? It’s right here.
In continually throwing more readers at those 8 books to try and cut them down to 4… well, let’s just say that I am very happy with how fair we’ve been this year. But I can have no complaints if any of my co-judges try to murder me in my sleep.
In short, while you may not have heard much from us just yet, we’ve got a lot of reading done. We still have a tiny bit more to do in order to decide our actual finalist, but it’s well past time we started letting you guys in on what’s going on. And on that note…
It’s time to cut some books
Unfortunately, no matter how many perspectives we gather, we’re still only allowed the one finalist. Which means we’ve a lot of cutting to do over this next month. I appreciate that the long, silent wait can’t have been easy for our authors — particularly for it to end in a cut, and I apologise again for that — but it’s time for the reaper to do their thing.
We are cutting all of the following books from the competition. Goodreads links (where available) will be included in the title for each book, and we encourage you to check them out — just because they aren’t for us doesn’t mean they won’t be for you.
The Last Dragonkeeper by Drew Montgomery
Reader: Adam
The Last Dragonkeeper is a story told mostly in flashback, as the captive protagonist relays his tale to various others. This narrative device spices up what is otherwise a fairly straightforward farm boy to dragon-rider origin story.
The protagonist is a bit of a cipher to begin with – the present version mostly being notable for having a dragon in a world where there are no longer any others left. The prose, story and characters are competently written, although I couldn’t really find any element that caught hold of me.
Unfortunately, at a certain point in the present story, the protagonist has sex with a mute mutilated slave – and then the text seems to imply that he’s a good guy because he is nice to her afterwards. It’s a bit icky, and that combined with my waning interest led me to DNF the book.
Beckoning of the Gate by Benjamin J. Ryan
Reader: Calvin
I really enjoy epic fantasy, and so I was happy to have this one land in my pile. Santha, our protagonist, fits the role of a young person from a small village who is about to encounter life-altering events as the story begins. While that’s a bit of a trope, there were enough small things that were different (no farm boys, for instance) that I was intrigued.
However, Santha has a secret and the reader is kept in the dark about that secret early on by Santha simply not thinking about it, sometimes in rather contrived ways. The bigger issue, for me, was that while the slight twists on tropes were intriguing, the plot and characters never really caught my attention. When I picked up the book I could read a chapter easily enough, but nothing particularly compelled me to pick up the book.
Blessed with a Curse by Katie Cherry
Reader: Jared
An alternate present, in which Zeus (the actual Zeus) has imposed his will on humanity, and outlawed all magic use. Paige is an illegal magic user, which is something she’s successfully kept on the DL until she accidentally wakes an imprisoned demigod. Nikandros is naive, but on the side of humanity. Also, hot. Blessed with a Curse is a quick read, as Paige and Nikandros run about, gather some magical Stuff, train up Paige, and, ultimately, go to battle for the fate of humanity. It is a lot for a little book: the plot relies a lot of coincidence, convenience, and dumb bad guys. But it is pacey, tidy, and even a bit sweet.
The Sorcerer Within by Will Rice
Reader: Calvin
The Sorcerer Within does some things that aren’t common, at least in my experience. We have a sort of coven of sorcerers who essentially work out of a tech company as a cover. That premise definitely has potential. Unfortunately, nothing beyond that ended up gripping me. The narrative jumps back and forth between the present and events two years before. That might work to create some dramatic tension, but I never felt that here. Instead it ended up making things feel a little disjointed to me. For fans of urban fantasy looking for something a little different, this one might work. But it didn’t for me.
Weapons of Disharmony by Chad Retterath
Reader: Hiu
I really wanted to like this one more than I did, but unfortunately it was a DNF for me at the 20% mark. Weapons of Disharmony looks to detail a war between the two countries of Brunta and Ta-Veer, with promises of titans and magical weapons and deadly swordsmen. I did get to see a little of that last part before I put the book down, and there is definitely something to be said for a character that can cut through a slew of attackers in the space of a paragraph. Unfortunately, the delivery wasn’t there for me. There are some hints of real personality in the dialogue, but it all just felt a little too bare-bones.
His Ragged Company by Rance D Denton
Reader: Jared
There’s a lot going on in this Weird Western. Elias Faust is a small-town Marshal. There’s local political corruption, scheming, land magnates, bad guys – your typical Western tropes. (Plus pit-fighting and seedy bars and, well, you name it.) There’s also a lot of the Weird. When the strangeness lands, it does so with both feet. There are monsters and demons and curses and otherworldly-thingers and magic and more monsters. Kind of a kitchen-sink book, with everything thrown in (and then some). It doesn’t all cohere, but it ain’t boring.
No Gods, Only Monsters by Steve McHugh
Reader: Calvin
Mythological retellings, in my experience, either really work or don’t work at all–there isn’t much middle ground. No Gods, Only Monsters is a bit of an exception to that rule. It grabbed and kept my attention enough that I finished it. My favorite part of the novel was probably the main character. Diana — yes, that Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt — really wants to be left alone. But events conspire to pull her back into the thick of things. I enjoyed McHugh’s characterization, and there was plenty of action in the book. So why is this one getting cut? The other books in my batch engaged me more–that’s a good problem for me, but my condolences to McHugh.
Chosen by Heather N Russell
Reader: Jared
Chosen is a classically-structured portal fantasy novel: with much more focus on the latter than the former – the ‘portal’ elements end quickly. Seline is – and the title is a spoiler here – very much the Chosen One. It is a pretty straightforward formula for a straightforward book Complete with a whole buffet of classic critters, from unicorns and merfolk to dragons and ‘vampyr’. Despite Chosen being about Seline, I didn’t really connect with her. I suspect the heavy use of ‘telling’ made her seem a more passive character, as well as making this book ‘read’ quite young.
SpiritBridge by Chris Fritschi
Reader: Belle
Okay, so while Belle was the judge who read this one, other commitments have popped up. So instead, Hiu is going to do his best to convey Belle’s enthusiasm for the book second-hand, whilst apparently talking about himself in the third person.
SpiritBridge was a book that, to my understanding, was very, very close to being a semi-finalist — which is why I want to give it even this small spotlight in a mini-review. It’s an epic fantasy / sci-fi mix that sounded like a whole lot of fun to read, with an engaging narrative about a guy (and his bounty hunter maybe-friend) searching for his long-missing parents in a world full of magic and dangerous rogue technology. The main thing that hampered this book’s semi-finalist chances was just a lack of polish compared to our other options, with a number of easily-fixed errors that hampered the reading experience.
Kop volunteered to read this book as a second-opinion to judge if it should be put forward as a semi, but unfortunately felt that it lost a fair bit of steam approaching the 70% mark. So it does sound like your mileage may vary with this one, but given Belle’s enthusiasm for it earlier in the competition, I’d encourage any readers to at least give it a glance, see if it’s your kind of thing!
Additional Cuts
The books listed below will also be cut from our allocation. Not every reader will enjoy every book, and unfortunately these were among those that didn’t hold our attention enough in comparison to the other books in our batch. Again, Goodreads links are included for readers to check out these for themselves:
- The Gates of Anak’anor by Topher Metcalf and Walt Allen
- Oath Broken by Jarryd Smith
- Homefall by Dwayne Leroy
- Flowers and Bones by Mae Jordon and ZKS Ravenwolf
- Delphinium, or A Necromancer’s Home by V.M. Jaskiernia
What’s Next?
So that makes 14 books gone, with 16 still in the running. And only just over a month to go…
Well. We’ve got some writing to do. The intention is for all of our remaining books to get dedicated reviews, in order for each of them to get a bit of spotlight. Of the remaining 16 books, half of those were highlighted as potential semi-finalists. Those 8 books were all read by multiple judges, scored internally, had an average calculated… all that fun stuff.
We will probably drop those reviews last, so you can expect a gradual cutting process as we get closer to announcing our finalist. Our top four scoring books will get the distinction of being our “semi-finalists”, although I’m toying with the idea of making our internal scores public for all eight candidates, just so show how fine the margins are here.
With all of that being said… We’ll see you again soon!
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