Alex Gilbert

This was somewhat of a disappointment. The characters became tackier and tackier, 2-dimensional, and clichéed as the series went on and in this book, the author completely gave up on the initial attempt at being not like other books and keep to realism.
He gave it up in favor of cheap one-liners, slapstick humor, and flashy spectacles, like every other second-rate fantasy or urban fantasy book out there.
The characters got shallower and less unique instead of the other way around and there is show more no character development whatsoever despite a time jump of decades.
This is especially sad because the book finally starts to do a lot of things the earlier volumes failed to, like having a more engaging plot and addressing a lot of worldbuilding details that were left vague for far too long.
Sadly the worldbuilding doesn't hold up to the initially promised standard either. A lot of it doesn't quite fit together and it reveals that it's far more spotty than initially promised.

And the most frustrating part is that after 3 books of backwater nonsense the book ends with the MC finally joining vampire society with all its political intrigue. But I am just not willing to spend another cent on this series after such an underwhelming third book.

I will never know if the teased vampire politics are really as interesting as I hoped. show less

Интересното е, че ако бях видял кой е авторът на тоя начеващ интернет-сериал най-вероятно нямаше да го захвана, защото основната му творба A Journey of Black and Red не ми хареса особено, въпреки че е много, много популярна в сайта Royal Road. (и да, тук в Goodreads авторът е с две авторски show more страници, защото не са обединени името му и артистичният му псевдоним).

The Calamitous Bob e забавно и лековато упражнение на автора в добре известният жанр на isekai RPG-литературата, дето главният герой е внезапно транспортиран от нашия в приказен свят дето хората вдигат нива като в рпг-игра.

Има екшън, има забава, има жена-протагонист, има магия, няма много излишни "прогресивни" плъгове, така характерни за модерното фентъзи, а и е интересно. Кво повече да иска човек? show less

Quite a few of my complaints about the first book were quickly addressed at the beginning of this one as if the author was already aware of those shortcomings himself.

I still hoped for a lot more vampire politics and intrigue. Instead, there just was a whole lot of fighting, and despite all that, I still didn't really feel like I had a good idea of her actual strength.

I also talked about the lack of any sort of goal in the first book which has been remedied in this one too. But to be honest show more the plot is so mediocre that I wouldn't really have missed it either. So I guess it's more about the lack of a good plot than the lack of any plot at all.

There were a few interesting underpinnings of different factions following various goals but the whole setup for the endless fighting for the last third of the book seemed flimsy at best.
I just never reached that point where I felt like I grasped the intentions and moral corruption of different factions. I never really felt like I could make any useful predictions or assumptions of what one faction or another might do in reaction to something else. I never had enough insight to speculate which made reading this a very passive experience.
Apropos endless battles. Those really started to drag towards the end. On one hand, I appreciated how the MC kind of just didn't give a fuck about killing but on the other, this created a horrible dissonance with her compassion and willingness to help and support her own people.
A truly ruthless person helps others only for their own benefit and that is clearly not how the MC thinks.
To the bitter end, I never could connect to any kind of consistent personality trait of the MC.

In some aspects, I enjoyed reading this more than the first book but in others, I enjoyed it less so it kind of stayed the same overall.
I could write in a lot more detail about this book too but one huge essay is probably enough. show less

The author put a lot of effort into the opening of the story.
So I'll put some effort into writing a way too long review. Kidding, it just turned out that long, sorry.
I spoil quite a few details. I want to say "but nothing major" but there is nothing major I could spoil in the first place. Does this mean that more minor spoilers are now major spoilers??
Anyway, you have been warned.

It successfully hooked me very quickly with its clear commitment to show and don't tell.
There are a few show more strangely clunky sentences and word choices very early on but I didn't notice any more of that for quite some time.
He is going for a realistic take, pointing out to the reader how skills have to be learned and how for example pain can not just be overcome by determination as many other books so commonly do.
I very much love this kind of commitment to gritty realism but because it makes it much harder to write a planned story it might have ultimately ended up hindering the author more than it helped.
The author keeps to this premise for quite some time but he eventually falls prey to many typical clichées that fall out of exhausted and lazy writing.
The book becomes increasingly self-indulgent, and dare I say lazy in the kind of eccentric storytelling it does.
This led to some frustration as this kind of decline in quality typically does.

The book takes pains to rarely tell, and if it does, only in a natural way. But it doesn't manage to convey all the necessary information to be fully immersed in the story all the time.
I sometimes felt a bit lost because descriptions of environments, characters, as well as general and social aspects of normal and vampire society were vague or nonexistent.

There were a lot of weird dream sequences that weren't bad precisely but they felt like they didn't serve a purpose.
I think they were intended to show the subconscious of the MC without awkward inner monologue and in theory, this would've been a very good tool to do so.
But said subconscious never became relevant at all.

Despite the first-person POV I never got a handle on the core personality of the MC. I think the author himself wasn't very clear on that. Sometimes it's her old self struggling with her new vampire self, battling for control.
But her human personality is very inconsistent.
This is the reason why the entire dream subconscious thing never really worked. There wasn't any kind of consistent moral conflict that made any sense so how she felt about her situation subconsciously lost any and all impact and ended up just being a trippy waste of time.
Sometimes she seems like she was 13 before she was turned with no clue whatsoever how the world works and at other times she displays maturity and cunning that I would expect from someone well versed in political intrigue.
Her understanding of social dynamics wildly swings from utter incompetence to genius far beyond her years. I think the author excused this to himself as being inherited competence from her vampire side but he just didn't manage to convincingly keep the two personalities straight and didn't properly communicate which competence came from where and why.
Too many times magic understanding is suddenly available if necessary because muh vampire half. Especially later on the author can't resist overusing this cheap plot device.

Let me give a few somewhat concrete examples of how the writing quality deteriorated over time.
In chapter 20 she tells a story about her being cursed to explain her vampiric traits to someone she travels with. In itself that is fine but the way she does this is just completely absurd.
It's a mixture of the most melodramatic and cheesiest soap opera combined with a very unnatural kind of on-the-spot storytelling. She is basically talking in a narrator's voice which stands completely at odds with the situation.
Nobody spontaneously talks like others write carefully crafted prose. This particularly broke my immersion because this is not a general problem the book has and it came completely out of left field.
It read more like a failed attempt at an impromptu comedy section.

In chapter 25 we have a classical completely unbelievable riling and motivational speech to lead freed prisoners into battle against their jailors. It's so clichéed, it's laughable. It's like he auto-completed the scene with a clichée generator.
Again, it almost appears like borderline satire but I don't think that is intended.

Now let me get to the plot and the worldbuilding. Or rather, the lack thereof.
The vast majority of the book has only one plot which is: stay hidden and survive. That is literally the only goal after the initial story opening. And I don't mean stay hidden within a city or something. She just travels around at the end of the world and encounters people.
It's interesting but it all feels a bit empty because there is no established structure. Initially, it seems like she will be entangled deeply in vampire politics and intrigue, being stretched and squished between intricate and shifting alliances, and that is somewhat true early on but is completely forgotten about beyond a certain point, for the majority of the book.
I felt a bit left in the dark not having any tangible background of how these different vampire factions act. We only ever get to know one horrible faction but we never even learn if they are all the same way or if there are better ones. We don't learn if vampires are generally just evil with a few exceptions or if the entire situation is more ambiguous.
This also makes it hard to empathize with the crisis she has with her subconscious because we don't even know if it is justified.

Another thing that bothers me was the absence of money. They kind of just have money. They take some here and there but that is certainly not enough to travel for months. They don't offer a service or sell a product. Nothing. They are just given as much luxury as is available wherever they go. It's really weird.
There is just too much left open. Too many details missing.

Then they constantly run into these situations that seem intentionally laid out as learning and training opportunities for the MC which just seemed way too convenient. There is some vague foreshadowing where the characters themselves recognize this and they talk about some sort of fate guiding power. If you commit a writing sin, pointing it out to your audience doesn't make it better. It makes it even worse!
If your story is just the MC traveling and getting entangled in interesting situations on the way then just run with it and write actually well-crafted situations and settings for those that feel like real places with real people. Not this half-assed thing that is basically just a protracted replacement for a training montage. Yes, training montages are lazy and cheap, and actually showing how the MC acquires those skills is much more satisfying. But this combines the worst of both worlds. We have multiple months-long training skips AND low effort, drawn-out development via unbelievably convenient side-quests.
The book completely fails to communicate the actual strength of the MC and neither does it manage to convey the improvements beyond telling us that she has improved. By how much and in which area? What is she actually capable of? That essentially still seems arbitrary depending on what the author needs to create tension which makes the entire journey to become stronger feel even more pointless!

And then the book just ends. There is no climax, no nothing. It's not a cliffhanger but it's not in any way closed either.
It honestly makes it kind of hard to justify buying the next one because I would do so entirely on faith after the book basically just strung me along for 400 pages and never actually delivered anything beyond the fantastic opening.
So I know the author can write. But I also know that he doesn't necessarily hold himself to the high standard he started out with and has a tendency to fall back into tired clichées that contradict and weaken the premise of a more realistic and believable approach to story telling.

I liked the opening a lot and I didn't mind even the traveling which many might get bored by. But there are just so many weaknesses that became increasingly apparent over time. So so much vague dissonance between plot and worldbuilding elements. It all just doesn't quite fit together properly. show less