The Savage Caves [Mass Market Paperback]

However, T.H. Lain has got some real work to do if he ever wants to be a real author. The story is not written well at all. Some of the conversations between the characters are laughable - and not the ones that are supposed to be humorous. There are parts where I had to re-read paragraphs because his writing style just lost me. It's not really a writing style, more of a lack of writing skills.

If you want a fair quick read, go ahead and pick it up... otherwise there are tons of other great fantasy books to read that are much much better.

Essentially we have 4 neophytes trying to save a village from spiders. The spiders being disturbed by a hobgoblin who wishes to be king of the goblin tribes. The adventurers in this short novel obviously don't get fleshed out, which is ok since this is just supposed to be an entertaining dungeon crawl.

The party is quickly seperated and the novel begins to show severe weaknesses. The author moves back and forth from character to character too quickly in buzz-flash MTV type video edits for someone with absolutely no attention span. I am speaking of repeatedly moving from character to character after just a page or less quite often. The characters roam around the dungeons like beheaded chickens and of course prevail. Rather than being a short and sweet fun dungeon romp we have a short, but confused and stupid dungeon romp.

A very weak start to this series. The good points, what few there are, would be the ambigous morality of the goblins being neither good nor bad, just cowardly and selfish, the four primary characters, though unfleshed are pleasent enough excepting the halfling with her modern slang and foul mouth.

If you want something quick, and unchallenging you might want to give this a look, but there is better fluff reading out there.

In itself, the story had potential .... The problem lies in Lain's writing style . . . or more precisely, his lack there of. I would call his writing as an odd cross between an early-teen novelist and a confused adult supplemental writer. Sometimes it is way too simplistic, and other times you have to read the sentence five times before you can figure out what he's talking about.

Now, I expected the characters to be one-dimensional, and the plot to be straight forward. After all, it's D&D. This alone did not bother me. I didn't buy a book called "The Savage Caves" for an epic Tolkenesque saga. As I mentioned before, the tale had promise. Unfortunately, it was unfulfilled.

Lain's most common criticism is that some of his characters use dialog that sounds like it comes from the 90's. This can be bothersome. But what I found irritating was his constant use of the same word over and over. The words do not flow from the pages. Everything is choppy and lacks vivid meaning. His descriptions leave much to be desired. Often you'll read phrases like this, "The cave rounded and opened up into a larger cave in which the floor leveled off, making it easier to run through the cave." What is that?

Also, the editing is either atrocious or was never done in the first place. The are several typos throughout the piece, and sentence structure would make any self-respecting writing keel over and die of shock. Perhaps Lain has improved over time (he had written six or so of these books), but don't read this one thinking you're reading a literary masterpiece.