nails on the chalkboard of the brain - book anti-rec
OTOH, even if you find it for a dollar, don't - repeat, DO NOT - buy Enemy Glory by Karen Michalson.
At least, not if unexplained kulturkludgeing drives you crazy - the sort of thing where you have a sort of generic late-Medieval/Early Renaissance Europe cognate, where the protagonist is someone named Llewellyn with a sister named Trenna and a male cousin named Cathe, who come from a culture where they worship, among other deities, a goddess called "Habundia" which we find out is merely an epithet of Ceres and whose Darkside avatar is Hecate (yes, Hecate of the moon and the three dogs, that oh-so-Magna Graecan Hecate), where one of the distant menacing enemies, in the Evil Warlord/Warlock/Potential Dark Lord way, is called Roguehan and a possible ally is entitled Walworth...
So, you might be thinking, well, this is just an AU/Future-Terra where instead of Christianity taking hold in the Roman Empire, things went humming along into the next millennium with all the old gods still holding sway around what was Our Sea and the former barbarian provinces, or the Olympian-and-local mashups that were just as prevalent, so where's the nomenclature problem (except okay, maybe "Roguehan")--?
Except then, we find out that to the Temple Initiates, Habundia Ceres is also gnostically known as "Habundia Christus"...
And no, it's not explained in the John Christopher "Sword of the Spirits" trilogy post-apocalyptic future culture mashup, at least not in this book - apparently there's more.
Now, with a tremendous effort of will one could ignore this kind of ST:TOS (The Planet of the Ancient Romans collides with MedievalWorld!) dissonance if the story was good and the writing good enough to balance out. Alas, not so. I find it interesting that the capsule review on the Amazon page invokes Gormenghast, because that was one of the first things that I thought of while reading it, "this is trying to be like the Titus books [ed. not a recommendation, from me], only she isn't Mervyn Peake by a long shot." Baroque and rococo are typical adjectives for such prose, but personally I prefer tortured (as well as turgid) in this case, particularly since this is supposed to be "dark fantasy" and so the author revels in (incoherent imo) descriptions of biological and metaphysical decay, often rendered in florid prose-poetry which only very rarely rises to actual poetic beauty, but not enough to make up for the rest of it, and the plot is...well, I realize that it's supposed to be hallucinatory and Poe-ishly unreliably-narrated, but when you can't tell by the end of the (first!) book who's real, who's a hallucination, and what anyone's real motivations are - I mean, the only reason I read to the end of the book was in hopes of finding at least some of this out, and then it stops without answering any of the questions! and yes, there is a sequel, or sequels, but I'm not interested enough to buy further volumes and find out, I'm afraid --
And then there's the fact that I can't tell, from the mere text, whether the author is a Rand-y Libertarian male-identified frustrated-former liberal arts student who had a very bad experience in grad school & is driven to satirize both academia and Christianity, not very intelligibly, or a conservative Christian male-identified frustrated-former liberal arts major who had a very bad experience in grad school, trying to write a depiction what conservative Christians believe selfish-hedonist atheists/agnostics and/or Neopagans believe...Again, not interested enough to go research and find out.
But the frustrated-former-liberal-arts student - and probably Philosophy Major - is not in doubt. "Kantish" people who speak a boring and obtuse language? Oh, please! That's even worse than calling your bad guy "Roguehan"--!
At least, not if unexplained kulturkludgeing drives you crazy - the sort of thing where you have a sort of generic late-Medieval/Early Renaissance Europe cognate, where the protagonist is someone named Llewellyn with a sister named Trenna and a male cousin named Cathe, who come from a culture where they worship, among other deities, a goddess called "Habundia" which we find out is merely an epithet of Ceres and whose Darkside avatar is Hecate (yes, Hecate of the moon and the three dogs, that oh-so-Magna Graecan Hecate), where one of the distant menacing enemies, in the Evil Warlord/Warlock/Potential Dark Lord way, is called Roguehan and a possible ally is entitled Walworth...
So, you might be thinking, well, this is just an AU/Future-Terra where instead of Christianity taking hold in the Roman Empire, things went humming along into the next millennium with all the old gods still holding sway around what was Our Sea and the former barbarian provinces, or the Olympian-and-local mashups that were just as prevalent, so where's the nomenclature problem (except okay, maybe "Roguehan")--?
Except then, we find out that to the Temple Initiates, Habundia Ceres is also gnostically known as "Habundia Christus"...
And no, it's not explained in the John Christopher "Sword of the Spirits" trilogy post-apocalyptic future culture mashup, at least not in this book - apparently there's more.
Now, with a tremendous effort of will one could ignore this kind of ST:TOS (The Planet of the Ancient Romans collides with MedievalWorld!) dissonance if the story was good and the writing good enough to balance out. Alas, not so. I find it interesting that the capsule review on the Amazon page invokes Gormenghast, because that was one of the first things that I thought of while reading it, "this is trying to be like the Titus books [ed. not a recommendation, from me], only she isn't Mervyn Peake by a long shot." Baroque and rococo are typical adjectives for such prose, but personally I prefer tortured (as well as turgid) in this case, particularly since this is supposed to be "dark fantasy" and so the author revels in (incoherent imo) descriptions of biological and metaphysical decay, often rendered in florid prose-poetry which only very rarely rises to actual poetic beauty, but not enough to make up for the rest of it, and the plot is...well, I realize that it's supposed to be hallucinatory and Poe-ishly unreliably-narrated, but when you can't tell by the end of the (first!) book who's real, who's a hallucination, and what anyone's real motivations are - I mean, the only reason I read to the end of the book was in hopes of finding at least some of this out, and then it stops without answering any of the questions! and yes, there is a sequel, or sequels, but I'm not interested enough to buy further volumes and find out, I'm afraid --
And then there's the fact that I can't tell, from the mere text, whether the author is a Rand-y Libertarian male-identified frustrated-former liberal arts student who had a very bad experience in grad school & is driven to satirize both academia and Christianity, not very intelligibly, or a conservative Christian male-identified frustrated-former liberal arts major who had a very bad experience in grad school, trying to write a depiction what conservative Christians believe selfish-hedonist atheists/agnostics and/or Neopagans believe...Again, not interested enough to go research and find out.
But the frustrated-former-liberal-arts student - and probably Philosophy Major - is not in doubt. "Kantish" people who speak a boring and obtuse language? Oh, please! That's even worse than calling your bad guy "Roguehan"--!