Review: Dead God Review
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 4, 2011
I give A Dead God's Wrath a good, solid B. And just to clarify that, a B means it's better than average. I'm not a big fan of average, and I wouldn't tell you to spend your money, even a buck, on something that's just average.Wrath, though, at a dollar, is a good buy. Even if it is short. That just means you can sit down and enjoy it all in one sitting. If you happen to like westerns, I'd say it's a must buy item.My first impression of Wrath is that it's kind of Jonah Hex (not the movie) meets Neil Gaiman. It just had that Gaiman kind of feel to it. The everything seems normal except that something's just kind of "off." It can be hard to tell, at first, with Gaiman, exactly what that is, and I had that same sense with Rusty's work.Rusty paints a clear picture of the environment without getting too detailed about it. There's just enough there to put the image in your mind, and, really, that's all that's needed. The dialogue is good. The pacing is great. The hero, Thomas, is realistic. He's a man up against odds that he can't beat, and Rusty never resorts to pulling some unbelievable super human feat  out of his hero's nether regions to please the audience. The hero's heroism is that he faces up against a situation that he knows he has no way of overcoming, but he does it anyway. The act of a true hero. "I know I'm going to die, but I have to do this." Thomas is the guy we aspire to be, but most of us aren't.However, the story does break down a little bit for me at the end. The first thing is that I expect that the title will make sense (in any story) by the time I get to the end. When I finished Wrath, though, I had no clearer understanding of what the title means than I did when I started it. It's a great title, though; I just don't know how it relates. It's clear that there is more to the world than what's in this one story, so, maybe, if I knew more, it would make sense. As it is, though, it leaves me feeling like I missed something, and, maybe, I did, although I don't think so.