Read Time: 2 Minutes
This was a slog to get through, and so many times I just thought about giving up. Getting to the end, I should have given up a lot sooner. I like puns, and this book is filled with them though even that doesn’t help revive what is generally a story that doesn’t really go anywhere and just seems to try to be chaotic for the sake of plot.
Adam is a necromancer who wants to improve the world and pet his cat, Schrodinger. Junith, a paladin wants him dead, and just as she nears making this happen, Adam activates an artifact which trades his powers to save the life of his cat and sends him away to a new dimension to prove himself a hero for a long-forgotten god.
He awakes as a “Nekomancer” as some kind of cosmic joke by his god. After burning off eight of his nine lives almost instantly in the new world as he faces some proving trials for the god, the catboy finally makes it through and gets a ticket into “The Abyssal Tower” – according to the blurb “an endless dungeon where the chosen earn their gods’ favor.“
I thought at this point maybe the story was going to improve and turn into a tower climb, but not. Even “endless” is a bit of stretch, since Adam leaves between levels for weeks at a time to recuperate. This eventually turns into a simulation of earth where a zombie outbreak has killed everyone, and Adam needs to survive for a few weeks in a modern environment rather than the typical old fantasy style world.
At this point I gave up caring about Adam or any of the characters he was surrounded by. I do like that he’s not the typical gung-ho hero that can do everything and instead does a lot of running away and cheating to survive, but that’s not enough to save what is an awfully poorly thought-out story.
I think a lot of what I disliked about this though was on the narrator. For whatever reason, the author has gone with a narrator who sounds like a frantic old guy when Adam is barely a teenager at best. The rest of the voices do little better. Overall, the production quality was okay apart from a short, repeated section but the narrator was terrible choice.
Looking at Amazon I see a second book, but I won’t be listening any further. From unlikable main characters to a plot that seemed inconsistent at best, there’s just nothing I’m interested in hearing more of.