Lair creates some amazing moments and, NIC’s adopted personalities are a real treat, but it also suffers from a large number of well-known writing pitfalls that would have been easily avoided with even a small amount of study or a few beta readers who are writers giving feedback.
The most common problem is that the narrative is told in first person and the main character is constantly focusing on problems that aren’t the most important thing at the moment. This is bad for story flow because, as a reader, I was constantly thinking, “Why is he worried about an inventory when X is happening?” (with X being one of several threats that threaten the main character and/or humanity as a whole that I won’t specify in order to avoid spoilers). That kind of cognitive dissonance is not only uncomfortable for the reader, but once we have a thought like that, we’re no longer engaged with the narrative and can easily spiral off into different thoughts instead of listening to the narrator. I had to back-track and relisten to chapters in this book over and over because the entire narrative is a series of cognitive off-ramps. Obviously, in real life, with a difficult problem that will take days to overcome, characters will have to deal with things that aren’t emergencies, but those are the kinds of details I’d expect to be told about as details surrounding actions aimed at the larger problems. For example, a character might mention that they’d spent some facility points on turning on the cafeteria and collection bots which resulted in a delicious meal and a temporary stat bonus on their way to take out a terrible threat.
Most of this probably stems from a bad writer who incorrectly told this writer that tension must always be high. On the contrary, read popular fiction and this is obviously incorrect. Tension builds throughout the best narratives, but it also ebbs and flows. You get moments of emergency and then the emergencies are resolved, and you can then have periods of growth that aren’t on a timer and thus things like creating an inventory, learning to fly, and powering up a cafeteria can become really cool progression moments instead of weirdly pulling focus from ongoing unresolved emergencies.
Further, the book series title is a fun idea of being about henchman. This is a book about a former henchman in his baby steps toward becoming a super hero. The book’s content is still great and a story I’d want to read, so the marketing should reflect that. At the same time, the idea of reading about a henchman in a superhero or supervillain organization slowly growing up the ranks in a much lower-powered way is a great story idea and one that this title seems to promise and yet not deliver.
Having said all this, I still enjoyed myself somewhat. This author creates some amazing moments but doesn’t seem to know the basics – like a figure-skater who can pull off amazing jumps, but then doesn’t know how to put them into a cohesive routine. This writer is truly the Tonya Harding of litrpg. I’ll be looking for his future works and hoping he’s read some books on plotting and novel writing as he’s doing the difficult things and failing at the basics, so the room for improvement with little effort is dramatic.