I’ve been picking up a lot of old pulp fantasy novels recently, among them were the first five books of Wolfgang Hohlbein’s ENWOR series. I’ll be reviewing the first four books- I haven’t finished book 5 yet.
To summarize the series overall, they are about a man named Skar and his many adventures in the perilous world of ENWOR. Skar himself belongs to a class of people known as the Satai, which are warrior?/gladiator?/mercenary?-dudes with a very specific code of honour.
(Review under the cut, since it’ll most likely be a long post)
At first I thought the series was going to be just about him and his student/companion Del, venturing from one area of the world to the next, but that would prove itself not to be the case.
As the series progresses, Skar gets teamed up with other people along the way, all of them of varying degrees of likeability (or dis-likeability, sometimes).
While the first book is its own standalone thing, the next three books are a trilogy (or, to be more precise, they comprise the first important story arc)
Book 1: The wandering Forest (Der wandernde Wald): Skar and Del flee from evil Lizardmen into the Desert. After long gruelling days of traversing the hot wasteland, they end up, miraculously, discovering a forest. In the middle of the desert. Obviously supernatural things happen.
Book 2: The burning City (Die brennende Stadt): Skar gets blackmailed by a magical priestess to go to an abandoned, perpetually burning city in the mountains to retrieve a magic stone. There, he is teamed up with a bunch of nobodies- except for three characters: Gowenna, a constantly bitter warrior lady who is the priestess’ second-in-command, Tantor, a guy with dwarfism who acts suspicious (well, this is a generic pulp fantasy alright), and a trio of hiveminded people who act as one known as the swampmen who serve as Gowenna’s bodyguards . SPOILER ALERT: Skar and Gowenna get screwed over by the priestess and are forced to flee into yet another wasteland.
Book 3: The dead Land (das tote Land): Skar, Gowenna and two of the remaining swampmen traverse the wasteland known as Tuan. Eventually they catch up with the priestess, but it is a fruitless effort SPOILER ALERT: Del is now the priestess’ bodyguard because he has fallen in LOOOOVE with her (obviously it’s just a one-sided thing). After a lot of back and forth cat and mouse gaming, the priestess eventually flees, alongside her new army of undead warriors. Somewhere along the way, Del temporarily dies. Skar vows to follow the priestess. Meanwhile, a dark power in the shape of a stone wolf follows him.
Book 4: The stone Wolf (der steinerne Wolf): Skar decides to travel alone (without Gowenna or the others) from a coastal town to the mountainous region of Elay in order to reach the forbidden city of the priestesses, where Vela (the evil priestess) has decided to form her hideout. Skar meets up with a rebellion made up of priestesses and the evil Lizardmen (mentioned in the first book), who have forged a temporary alliance in order to defeat Vela. SPOILER ALERT: Skar defeats Vela through some mindgames by goading her into overusing the power of the magic stone she had in her posession. Skar makes peace with the stone wolf who has haunted him throughout the book, and decides to reunite with Gowenna and a resurrected Del.
Overall opinion:
The first book really gripped me, had a lot of good character interactions and a unique twist at the end, which is why I didn’t give it the spoiler alert treatment. I highly recommend this book.
Unlike the next three books which, in my opinion, immediately dropped in quality. Not in the quality of writing, mind you, but certainly in the quality of storytelling.
The second book retained the first one’s fast pace, but the character interactions fell kind of flat. It seemed to me they were always stuck in one place and never truly progressed, they were always on one mode: fighting and nagging. There’s the occasional change, but again, get overshadowed with all the repetitive “I MISTRUST YOU” “I HATE U, U IS A MAN” dialogues.
The third book is the worst, the fast pace is gone, replaced with long drawn out scenes of being stuck in a wasteland; I get it, the author wanted to convey the misery of this place, but it got to a point where I just wanted these people to finally get to point B in the plot. Not a good sign. Also the character interactions pretty much remained the same with only minor changes. The only one’s that didn’t suck were the ones between Skar and the swampman. Too bad they were few and far between, the author was more interested in the repetitive shit-slinging between Skar and Gowenna.
And OH BOY, book 4 is quite something. Hey kids, do you like random characters established at the beginning only to be dropped entirely towards almost 2/3 of the book? No? TOO BAD, because that’s what you’ll get! Oh and remember those established characters from the last few books? BARELY MENTIONED UNTIL THE END WHERE THEY HAVE THEIR REUNION.
I conclusion, I give the first four books a strong 6/10. I’m not exactly what you could call a good ratings type of person, but my gut feeling just says strong 6/10 for the overall four books.
Let’s see how book 5 will be, maybe it’ll pick up the pace, who knows....
