Marco praised, Stanek slapped (again)

Just thought I'd draw your attention to a couple of articles by some of my fellow bloggers.

Firstly, just a quick reminder that the EPIC GIVEAWAY will be closing tonight at midnight, GMT. So this is your last chance to enter if you haven't already.

Now, links.

John Marco is an author I greatly admire, and whose name deserves to be mentioned a lot more than it is (as I've said before, his Tyrants and Kings trilogy is excellent). Subsequently I was pleased to stumble across this article, which basically echoes my own thoughts:

"I was first introduced to John Marco a number of years ago by a good friend of mine through the first book in his Tyrants and Kings Trilogy, The Jackal of Nar. After that I was hooked. To this day, years later, I can vividly see the cathedral of Nar being frescoed, hear the din of each battle, but most of all I can still feel every bit of pathos written into his books.


And that’s what draws me back to John Marco; his characters are so real you can practically reach out and touch them. They could be any one of us and their struggles are monumental. Marco takes you to highs and brings you down low with a manageable amount of characters with whom you grow unbelievably attached. Their motivations are understandable and their suffering can be heart-wrenching at times, not to mention their exhilarating triumphs."

Couldn't agree more.

Moving on, I was tweeting recently about how I was feeling an alarming urge to test my book-blogger mettle by reading and reviewing Terry Goodkind's craptacular Wizard's First Rule. Larry, however, has taken on one of the most hardcore reading challenges to be found in the genre: he's read and reviewed Robert Stanek's infamous Keeper Martin's Tale (a self-published book so bad that one unfortunate reader - in one of the best-titled forums threads I've ever seen - said after reading it, and I quote, "Robert Stanek shat directly into my soul."

Unsurprisingly, Larry rips the book a new one:

"By cynically manipulating the social media (knowing perhaps all along that his ham-fisted attempts at self-promotion would backfire), he has created a reading dissonance that allows the most cynical and distrusting readers to get a sort of schadenfreude joy out of beholding almost pure, unadulterated crap. If this is actually the case and that Stanek is not actually serious about believing that this story is worth reading as a straight-up text, then perhaps Stanek did succeed brilliantly in creating a work that perhaps could serve as an early 21st century spiritual successor to Jim Theis' Eye of Argon. However, it is much more likely that he is just self-delusional about his talents as a writer and that this work is just shit on a level that makes elephant turds shrink to a scale of that of squirrel turds."

No doubt Larry will soon receive an email from a hotmail address, pertaining to be from a NYC lawyer and demanding the immediate removal of the review.