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Paternus: Rise of Gods

by Dyrk Ashton

Series: Paternus (1)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
1236220,583 (3.44)2
Book 1 of the completed Paternus Trilogy Even myths have legends. Described as American Gods meets The Avengers and Supernatural meets The Lord of the Rings, Paternus combines myths from around the world in a modern story of action and intrigue that is urban fantasy on the surface, but so much more at its core! Terrific! Paternus is intelligent, intricate, suspenseful, and epic. -Nicholas Eames, Gemmell Award winning author of Kings of the Wyld and Bloody Rose Ashton's story is a crucible in which myths are melted and remade to thrilling effect. -M. R. (Mike) Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts and the Felix Castor series And not all legends are myth. When a local hospital is attacked by strange and frightening men, Fiona Patterson and Zeke Prisco save a catatonic old man named Peter-and find themselves running for their lives with creatures beyond imagination hounding their every step. With nowhere else to turn, they seek out Fi's enigmatic Uncle Edgar. But the more their questions are answered, the more they discover that nothing is what it seems-not Peter, not Edgar, perhaps not even themselves. The gods and monsters, heroes and villains of lore-they're real. And now they've come out of hiding to hunt their own. In order to survive, Fi and Zeke must join up with powerful allies against an ancient evil that's been known by many names and feared by all. The final battle of the world's oldest war has begun. ***** Genre: Contemporary Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / Mythic Fiction. Market: Adult to New Adult (as opposed to Teen or YA, though savvy 16 or 17 year olds might survive without permanent damage).… (more)
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Showing 1-5 of 6 (next | show all)
This has been a really difficult book to read & review for me. I think for huge starters, because like many people, I think Dyrk is a wonderful person even though I have never met him in person and he's very well respected among the indie fantasy community. That makes it a whole lot harder to write an unbiased review.

Placing that aside, I have been really, really busy in my personal life lately, doing stuff totally unrelated to my reading hobby, and that partially explains why it took me almost 2 months to finally complete it. I was even getting close to DNRing it in part because the really long time lapses combined with the insanely slow start made it hard for me to get into the book.

This book takes a *really* long time to set things in motion. It's one of those stories that has a very long cast of all mighty characters in 5 whopping initially separate storylines. They eventually sort of come together at the end, but if you are half as impatient as I am, the first 50% of the book is really hard to get into. Even more so when you only get the chance to read 5-10 pages in small dosages.

Fi is the female protagonist and she's living with her very proper and British uncle named Edgar in Toledo, Ohio her whole life. She suffered from seizures growing up for unexplained reasons and thought she had finally recovered from them until... she suffers one during a very bad date with the hunky guitarist/mythology aficionado good guy Zeke. Long story short, she runs back home, cries herself to sleep, and hopes she could never see the poor and very confused sap forever. But, well, he volunteers at the nursing home she intern in, so that plan will fail.

She takes cares of a guy named Peter who lost his entire memory and nobody really has any idea who he is, just that someone dumped him in the doorstep one day with an ID tag with the name "Peter" on it. She treats him very well, and it seems like he perks up over time.

Just that, things don't seem all that ordinary after all. Peter is not just some ordinary guy, he's very, very important, and a huge horde of the fabled gods of myth either want to kidnap him, or protect him, and Fi and Zeke seem to be in the middle of an upcoming war that might destroy the world.

I can't really say much else about the plot without spoiling anything, but I will say that Peter... uhh... um... I'd rather not say more about this aspect of the plot, and his breath smells like the person's favorite odor. I guess if I met him, I'd be aroused by a fresh car smell, haha.

I enjoy hearing the multiple world myths used in the story, as someone who grew up in a non-English speaking country, it does feel nice to see Aztec gods to be mentioned in the story. Quetzalcoatl is a bad guy/feathery serpent, and one key character is Coatlicue, a statue according the urban myths to have been considered so visually unappealing to the Spanish conquistadores, they preferred to bury it underground after Tenochtitlán fell and eventually unearthed in one of the first sections of Chapultepec parks and currently exhibited in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. I do think the book stretches the southern limits of Mesoamerica a little bit all the way to Peru. Its sort of accepted that Mesoamerica officially ends between northern El Salvador and Honduras, although I guess the book is correct in that given the Maya and Inca did trade with each other, that South America could be included.

If there are things that make this book a bit hard to read (I quickly got used to the odd choice of the book being in present tense), it’s the fact that it spends too much of the start of the story presenting the different warring factions, and most of the characters are from more obscure mythology. The book would have been a whole lot more fun to get into if it included an appendix of the main story and physical drawings of each god. It tends to take away from the immersion factor when every 20 pages you have to look up on wikipedia what a specific slavic and hindu god is. Lots of the deities in the story come from Irish myth which is something I am not familiar with.

All in all, if the book had included a character appendix (trying real hard to avoid spoilers, just explain the original myths from lore), the book would have been close to fabulous. I have a hard time pinpointing between choosing 3 1/2 and 4 stars, so just use your imagination and assume assigning an exact score for this book was real hard for me and go somewhere between those two numbers. Maybe 3.75 to round things up.

The last 20% is the best portion of the book and it made me sufficient curious to read the sequel sometime. ( )
  chirikosan | Jul 24, 2023 |
So I finished Paternus Rise of Gods by Dyrk Ashton...

Let me just start with that I did enjoy it, and will continue with the series.

However, I can only give it a strong 6 out of 10 (bloody Goodreads and its deficient 5 star system) Back when I actually did do reviews many moons ago, 10 was a score I almost never gave, it's reserved for the perfect book. :-D

I loved the use of mythology and how Dyrk tied his characters into existing myths/etc.

You expect power from the characters and they do not disappoint!

I never got comfortable with the narrative style of "present tense omniscient".

Things move so fast and in most books I don't mind "fast", but here, due to the large cast of characters and the narrative style, I didn't find myself getting to know any character enough to particularly care about them.

I think my biggest issue was the dialogue. I don't mind crude, rude, vulgar and do forth, but I fear the author simply tried too damn hard to do, well, I'm not sure what his goal was with so much of the early dialogue, but it resulted in the world famous "grab 'em by the pussy" sounding Shakespearean. I guess some of the dialogue was intended to be funny, unfortunately it often seemed forced and unnatural.

Now I have to say Ashton does seem to improve on dialog, both a characters internal and external dialog in the last 1/4 of the book, and I hope it keeps that trajectory for book 2.

Anyways, if you like urban'esque with beings who aren't exactly gods though punny mortals believe they are, and who can pop your skull like a zit, then jump on in. It's fast past, packed with myth and things that go BOOM!

I look forward to book 2! ( )
  WDBooks | Nov 13, 2020 |
Fascinating

The old gods are back, some of whom want to rule the world or at least did the world of humanity living deities ( )
  Saraishelafs | Nov 4, 2020 |
Take every myth ever, put them in a high speed blender, pick up where their eon spanning war most recently left off and drop it all on top of two unsuspecting college kids volunteering at a nursing home in Ohio and you have a general gist of Paternus: Rise of Gods, the first in the Paternus trilogy by Dyrk Ashton. Be warned that while this story ends up so fast paced that I could not put it down, it has a very slow start with a YA feel where it seemed like the author was trying to find the voice of the story. Trust me, it's worth pushing through.

Fiona Patterson is an average girl living an ordinary life in Ohio. Fi lives with her eccentric uncle Edgar, goes to school and volunteers at a local nursing home where she's the primary care giver for a patient named Peter. She's still trying to figure out her relationship with fellow volunteer, Zeke Prisco, after a horribly awkward date that leaves Fi thinking Zeke doesn't like her very much. Just another day in the average college student's life. Right up until the moment the hospital is attacked by a group of definitely not-human creatures that appear to be intent on capturing Fi's patient.

The story is told from several points of view, humans, gods and monsters alike. Written in the third person present tense, POV's change rapidly, sometimes multiple times in the same chapter. It's an interesting stylistic choice and one that I think worked quite well to enhance the frantic pace of the second half of the book. It was good getting to know Fi, Zeke, Peter and a whole host of side characters. Especially impressive were how Fi and Zeke ended up reacting and dealing with all of the crazy thrown their way throughout the course of the day. Their perspectives kept the story grounded and at a very human level where it could have easily gone off the rails. They also help inject moments of levity in the extreme action and violence of the war between gods.

When I say "every myth ever", I mean it! Ashton has really done his homework. He touches on just about every myth and legend from around the world. Greek, Hindu, Judaeo-Christian, Japanese, Egyptian, Chinese, Akkadian, Celtic, Norse, etc. etc. You name it, it's probably in this book somewhere. This is easily my favorite aspect of the story as I was constantly wanting to google many of the less familiar to me myths so I can see just how well Ashton has tied them all together.

I listened to the audio book narrated by Nik Magill. His style of narration is very slow and deliberate, with the delivery of exposition in a monotone. Which was weird because his character voices were amazing. After the first hour I had debated returning the book to Audible and downloading a Kindle copy. Instead I increased the speed and magically the narration started to work for me. I even tested it once by slowing the narration back down and it started to bother me again. So if you're having trouble with Nik Magill's narration, try speeding it up.

By the end, I found myself fully invested in Fi, Zeke and Peter's story. I can't wait to find out what happens next. ( )
  Narilka | Nov 24, 2019 |
I picked this up on the Kindle when it was on sale for 99¢. It's an urban fantasy novel that uses the fairly-overused premise of "What if all the ancients gods, demons, and monsters were real and were secretly living among us." It'd about two young people, Fiona and Zeke, who work at a senior care facility where one of the patients is secretly the father of all the gods, monsters, and demons. His more wicked children decide to stage a rebellion and the humans get caught up in it.

Despite the premise not being terribly original, it's actually a pretty good book. I enjoyed the characters (except Fiona who was bit too whiny). The pacing and dialogue were pretty good, and there was a good bit of action (though it was a bit on the gory side). The only real complaint I have is that I didn't realize it was part one of a trilogy, which confused me when I got to the ending and had no real conclusion to the story. Still, this is one where I'll be keeping my eyes out for books 2 & 3. ( )
  yoyogod | Mar 5, 2017 |
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Book 1 of the completed Paternus Trilogy Even myths have legends. Described as American Gods meets The Avengers and Supernatural meets The Lord of the Rings, Paternus combines myths from around the world in a modern story of action and intrigue that is urban fantasy on the surface, but so much more at its core! Terrific! Paternus is intelligent, intricate, suspenseful, and epic. -Nicholas Eames, Gemmell Award winning author of Kings of the Wyld and Bloody Rose Ashton's story is a crucible in which myths are melted and remade to thrilling effect. -M. R. (Mike) Carey, author of The Girl with All the Gifts and the Felix Castor series And not all legends are myth. When a local hospital is attacked by strange and frightening men, Fiona Patterson and Zeke Prisco save a catatonic old man named Peter-and find themselves running for their lives with creatures beyond imagination hounding their every step. With nowhere else to turn, they seek out Fi's enigmatic Uncle Edgar. But the more their questions are answered, the more they discover that nothing is what it seems-not Peter, not Edgar, perhaps not even themselves. The gods and monsters, heroes and villains of lore-they're real. And now they've come out of hiding to hunt their own. In order to survive, Fi and Zeke must join up with powerful allies against an ancient evil that's been known by many names and feared by all. The final battle of the world's oldest war has begun. ***** Genre: Contemporary Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / Mythic Fiction. Market: Adult to New Adult (as opposed to Teen or YA, though savvy 16 or 17 year olds might survive without permanent damage).

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The gods and monsters of myth have returned. In a breathtaking story that takes place in a single day, Fi and Zeke are caught up in the final battle of a war that's been waged since the dawn of time.

***

Gods, monsters, angels, devils. Call them what you like. They exist. The epic battles between titans, giants, and gods, heaven and hell, the forces of light and darkness. They happened. And the war isn't over.

17 year old Fi Patterson lives with her stuffy English uncle and has an internship at a local hospital for the aged. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life, misses her dead mother, wonders about the father she never knew. One bright spot is caring for Peter, a dementia-ridden old man whose faraway smile can make her whole day. And there's her conflicted attraction to Zeke -- awkward, brilliant, talented -- who plays guitar for the old folks. Then a group of very strange and frightening men show up for a "visit"...

Fi and Zeke's worlds are shattered as their typical everyday concerns are suddenly replaced by the immediate need to stay alive -- and they try to come to grips with the unimaginable reality of the Firstborn.
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