Archangel Down by C Gockel

Rating: WARTY!

"First in a series" Of course it is - but anything like this, with 'down' built into the title is a guaranteed bad choice. "On a distant planet in the 25th century," Um, every planet is distant, dipshit. "...military officer Noa Sato has been imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit." Let me guess, some white dude is going to rescue her? "Her only hope of clearing her name lies in the hands of James Sinclair, a scholar from Earth" Yup! Because god forbid any woman should be left to her own devices and not have some guy to control and validate her. Barf.

I Bring the Fire by C Gockel

Title: I Bring the Fire
Author: Gockel
Publisher: Amazon
Rating: WORTHY!

Erratum:
p106 "…dark and black at the point." I think the latter automatically implies the former!

This is an odd little novel, but it was short (only 136 pages). I can much more easily read a short bad novel all the way through than ever I can force myself to read four hundred pages of bad, but this actually was not bad at all. It was really good, although it was odd in a way, in that it was formatted unusually. There was no cover, and pretty much all of your typical front pages (title page, acknowledgements, dedication, contents, etc) were mashed together onto one page. I wondered if this was caused somehow by the transition from a word processor document to a PDF format which didn’t propagate too well? Or maybe the author hates wasting paper as much as I do?!

This is part one of what promises to be quite a series, each volume of which is now available:

• Monsters: I Bring the Fire Part II
• Chaos: I Bring the Fire Part III
• In the Balance: I Bring the Fire Part 3.5
• Fates: I Bring the Fire Part IV
• The Slip: An I Bring the Fire Short Story (mostly) from Sleipnir's Point of Smell
• Warriors: I Bring the Fire Part V

Love those titles!

I know that some professionals whine about how a book has to be laid out in a certain way - Library of Congress rules and all that bullshit - but you know what? Screw them. This isn’t the age of lead characters painstakingly laid out in a metal tray. It’s not the age of primly formatted, hard-bound, printed books. This is the age of e, and Congress and Big Publishing™ no longer get to dictate to writers what we can and cannot do, what we can write, how we format it, and what gets published. Those days are long gone and good riddance to them, so kudos to C Gockel for flouting tradition.

I warmed-up to this novel quickly. It begins in a delightfully unusual way, and I started to like the main character, Amy Lewis, at once. Amy is in vet school and is on break, driving from Stillwater, Oklahoma to Chicago where she stays with her grandmother, and finds work to help pay her way through college. Unfortunately, she runs her car off the road nearly falling asleep from the long day, and the first person to arrive on the scene is a serial killer.

Fortunately, the second person to arrive on the scene is Loki, and this is a different Loki from the one you think you know. He turns out to be the good guy (after a fashion!), and rescues Amy, thus beginning their acquaintanceship; but just like there's more to Loki than you expect, there is more to Amy, too.

There were some parts of the book that I took to skipping. Periodically we’re treated to a flashback in italics, of Loki's childhood. I read the first of these and found it uninteresting, so I jumped over all of the italicized portions after that. The rest of the novel, however, was well-written and really entertaining. There was a really nice line of humor threaded through it, and it sported plausible characters with natural behaviors, and interesting events. The story kept flowing easily, and it readily and easily pulled me along with it, so no complaints at all there.

The concept of a domesticated Loki was hilarious. I was starting to love this author by the end of the novel/novella/novelette, whatever this was (I don't know the actual word count)! I recommend it.