Orcs – The Omnibus Edition, by Stan Nicholls
I bought this from a bookshop on a whim, purely on the strength of the cover, which includes praise from favourite author Tad Williams. I don’t usually buy books without doing my homework first, and once I started reading this I thought I was going to regret that lapse…
The rather gratuitous sexual barbarity of the baddie, Jennesta, only a few pages in to the book, seemed unnecessary and OTT. I’m not squeamish, but there are other ways that her baddie credentials could have been established that wouldn’t have ruled this book out of suitability for slightly younger readers, and which wouldn’t have got me thinking “Oh hell, what kind of tosh have I bought here?”
However, once I got over that reaction, and started getting in to it, I was pleasantly surprised. The writing is good but not great – the battle scenes tend to be quite repetitive, and it can fall in to some of the standard fantasy writing cliches. However the plot is imaginative, fast-paced and clever, and the unusual idea of orcs as the good guys is realised very effectively.
These books work pretty well combined in to a single volume – you won’t want to leave the cliff-hangers at the end of the first and second volumes, you will want to plough on, and only a small degree of back-story fill-in tells you you are reading separate books and not a one-piece fantasy epic.
The key characters are quite well drawn, and there are enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. If you are not expecting too much literary flair from your fantasy, and you can get past the OTT gore at the start of Book 1, then this is worth picking up as a bit of light reading.
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2 Comments on Orcs – The Omnibus Edition, by Stan Nicholls
That early passage you mention i read in the bookstore, and kept me from buying it..thinking there was a lot more of that stuff in the rest of the book. Are you saying that there isn’t? If not, I could try to look past it also and give the book a shot. But that early scene scared me off, honestly.
Jeff, to the best of my recollection that particular passage is the worst of it and the only bit that’s problematic. Although Jennesta doesn’t go away, I seem to remember her toning it down a bit after that!
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