I just finished the first two books of the Demon Cycle : The Painted Man and The Desert Spear ... Soon I'll go on with the Daylight War.
I have a highly mitigated view on these books : they're efficient, the story is well built, but too major aspects prevent me from loving them totally, so let's go with the bad stuff first, and the good afterwards :
- the writing is not "seamless". You can actually see, sometimes, how carefully built the whole thing is, you can see the stitches, sometimes at the expense of some sentences and situations that don't feel natural, or way too convenient to make the reader forget about the "story skeleton".
- the peoples : the authors says, for example, that he created the Krasians thinking of Spartha and medieval Japan, and added a bit of midde eastern aspects to it. The thing is, what you see is only a huge orientalistic picture of the middle east or the "orient" in the general old sense (I'd almost say parody, I couldn't believe the tons of clichés piled up). The word "minaret" and "harem" repeated a bit everywhere don't exaclty help either in imagining an invented culture (let alone one from Ancient Greece or Japan !). So for people who know the Middle East a little bit will cringe reading this book, despite the commendable efforts of the author to create credible peoples. After all the same can be said of the Thesans, north-western-like people. Most fantasy readers won't care about those clichés, but in the current world we live in, I don't think we needed additionnal clichés about the middle east, most medias take care of it very well ... I love fantasy precisely because it's usually less stupid than most medias. But if "post 9/11 fantasy" was a subgenre, then that would be it.
Now the good sides :
- Despite the clichés, the author really tries to show good and bad sides to everyone, and that's good, not to the extent of the blurry mentalities and morals of Game of Thrones, but the intent is there, and that's good. The characters are most typical fantasy characters, no surprises there, but like old friends you appreciate finding them again, throughout the fantasy genre.
- Lots of ideas are very enjoyable : this warding system to protect oneself against the demons, the differents uses they have, according to where they are used, the old almost lost knowledge of a vanished world of science, the vision of beliefs each character have (from the unbeliever to the fanatic, with all the shades in between : the one who appreciate some verses of a religious books without being religious, etc)... In the end, I reckon it could make a great movie, lots of visuals to work on.
Anyway, I'll wait for the end to really assess if the clichés are just clichés serving an cliché end or if the author will surprise us with a more subtle and interesting ending that what we can expect (the clichés then being just a way to usefully confuse the reader).
