Review: Vengeance (Namaste predule)
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 22, 2014
Having read the hype, I feel a little let down by the Realm and Sands novella VENGEANCE.  I was expecting something extraordinarily violent considering, in one episode of the Self Publishing Podcast Sean Platt mentioned his wife asked him to stop reading the story to her because of the violence.  Yet I read it last night and, yeah it’s got lots of fighting and torture and death, but I wouldn’t say it was THAT violent.  Then again, I’ve spent the past decade+ copyediting Ed Lee novels for Necro Publications, so maybe I’m just desensitized.  Still, if THIS is what passes for ultra violence in the Realm and Sands world, I wouldn’t have a problem with my 14-year-old daughter making her way through their catalog.VENGEANCE serves as the prelude to the bigger story, NAMASTE, and tells the story of Amit the shadow monk as he makes his way from one link to another in the chain of people responsible for the death of his beloved, Nisha.  Nisha hasn’t just been killed, she’s been murdered by a gang of five men, and Amit wants to know why, and who is responsible so he can make them very sorry.Because the shadow monks aren’t your regular kind of monks; these guys spend every minute of their lives training their bodies to become the perfect weapons, all in the name of peace.  And when Amit finds Nisha, all the love he felt for her--he was prepared to leave the order so he could marry her--is channeled into rage and that perfect weapon his body has become is put to good use in, well in getting vengeance.Since the violence wasn’t everything I’d expected it to be, I guess the most interesting thing about this story is the way it’s told.  VENGEANCE is presented in reverse, showing first the aftermath of Amit’s latest kill, then going back to show that scene, then going back to how he wound up at that address, then going back to how he wound up in the situation that led to his getting that address, before ending on a scene in the present, several hours after that first scene.It sounds more complicated than it really is but Platt and Truant manage the transitions very well.  In fact, the backwards storytelling method is probably the thing that saved this story.  Having a main character who is a monk out for bloody vengeance just isn’t enough for me and maybe I’m jaded, but it just isn’t.  I need an interesting story, too, and VENGEANCE provides just enough “interesting” in the way the story is presented to satisfy that requirement.I am curious to see how Amit’s story plays out, what Nisha’s secret was and why she was killed, but I think I enjoyed the backwards method here too much and am afraid to get into the rest of the story, which I assume will almost have to be told in chronological order, for fear of being disappointed.  I mean how do you follow that up with anything that’s told in order and make it as satisfying?  I guess I’ll just have to find out.