Review of Chapter 25-30 of SON OF THE BLACK SWORD

Larry Correia is a cunning devil. There is a plot twist in every one of these chapters.

I still have not read all the way to the end of this book, because it is so good, I don’t want to reach the end. But the middle chapters here are really, really good.

Note to would be writers: if you want to make a minor character memorable, notice how to raise the stakes on the poor slob and put more of his life in the kitty so that the next turn of the card saves or dooms him. Consider two ways of portraying the same character: a man who has lost his job vs. a man with an adoring wife and new baby who lost his job. Consider a man who has lost his job, lost his clan honor, and he will never be hired again, and is unfairly and falsely accused by the Inquisition of being a traitor WHO ALSO has an adoring wife and new baby. And he thinks of a plan to find the missing cursed swordblade of the superhuman traitor who he befriended, sort of, when he was a jail warden….

Do you see how it is done? Do you see how to make what could have been a cardboard disposable character into a realist three-dimensional man, warts and all, whom the readers can cheer for and sympathize with?

Maybe you cannot see how it is done. Many a writer does not.

Mr. Correia does.