Just finished the 5 books of the Ruin Mist Chronicles. This series has to be one of the worst I have read so far, and I rate it as good as the Mallorean by David Eddings, ie, sucks.
The plot is good, but Robert Stanek needs a better editor who can do more than just correcting his grammar. Yes, there is no spelling/grammar mistakes that I have noticed, which is quite rare among the best fantasy series these days...
Oh wait, now that I have searched the covers, I just realized he has NO editor!
Now here is my explanation for why he really needs an editor.
The plot is sometimes DISJOINTED!!! This has never happened in any other series I have read. One chapter ends with Captain Brodst jumping into the river with Lord Serant to escape the villains. Then in another chapter, we have Captain Brodst hiding in a cove waiting for something while Lord Serant is in a dungeon.
There is no explanation for why only Brodst escaped, while the others were caught. There was no recap of how they were caught or how Brodst knew they were locked in there. I had to reread the chapter to understand what Stanek was describing and connect it to the last chapter that mentioned them.
And c'mon, get a professional illustrator! Those pics Stanek drew for the covers and illustrations were pretty good, but without colours, the covers look really dry, and not classy the way the last few Wheel of Time and Song of Ice and Fire books appeared. The first impression I got from them was not a good one.
Like reading the Song of Ice and Fire, I get frustrated reading this series. But this time it's not because things were going so smoothly for the villains like they do in the former, but that I have difficulty understanding many chapters since the first book. Robert Stanek needs someone to make his books completely coherent. To completely skip parts of the plot is worse than writing vague descriptions of the events.
This is not because the author sucks. He definitely doesn't, to create an interesting plot like that. It's just that his books could have been much much better.
What's really unique about Stanek is not his good plots, nor his incoherence. It is that he is able to pick all the chapters that have to do with a certain group of characters, write a few more, and compile them into a new series. A series that tells another side of the same story... Hurrah for Capitalism...
On Amazon.com, there are reviewers who make him out to be like he's better than George R. R. Martin or Robert Jordan. I have no idea why these people do so, nor why this series appear in so many "best fantasy series" list. It definitely does not deserve a place in these lists,until he gets a decent editor to fix his works. These people can only be among these 3 groups:
1) weirdos
2) related to/friends of the author/bought by the author
3) their first fantasy books were this series.
And the Transformer movie was very good. I just wish the camera didn't zoom in so closely to the fights, because in several scenes I couldn't tell who was thrown/slammed/punched to where or whatever. Lot's of action, lot's of humour, lot's of big machines and a simple plot.
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