Sanctuary Reviews

Serpent Game by SeanScruffy

Serpent Game

By SeanScruffy

This review will include spoilers.

A sci-fi adventure that's a mixture of The Dark Tower series, Cowboy Bebop, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Serpent Game is a sweeping epoch that isn't afraid to be bold and creative. This story is very faithful to the science fiction genre with its advanced tech, alien creatures, galactic wars, and magic. It is very reminiscent of Cowboy Bebop as it follows a bounty hunter's journey through a fractured post-apocalyptic Earth ruled by mafias that resemble the syndicates that Spike was caught between as a vagabond.

What makes the premise especially unique is its opening. Gyrone Irensho starts out...dead. Killed in a previous job. Because he contains a power called "The Silent Death," he is brought back to life to defeat an unspeakable evil by using this magic that he barely understands himself. My favorite part of the plot (and his character) is that instead of doing what he was brought back to do, he falls in love with Eve, a princess with a firecracker personality who tries to be a badass but oftentimes ends up being the "damsel in distress." He embarks on quite a different adventure while a growing darkness continues to threaten pretty much all of existence. At the end of the story, Gyrone suffers from his negligence and is captured by the enemy, having failed his mission to stave the growing antagonistic force.

I really love it when characters suffer because of the bad decisions they make. It's always frustrating when a character seems to get away with everything (which is the very definition of a Mary Sue). The fact that Gyrone's selfish pursuits get him in trouble at the end of the story was incredibly satisfying for me as a reader. But I really like the conflict of this too because the reader doesn't want Gyrone to be a pawn in another man's game and at times, wants him to run away with his lover and leave all of this for the factions to deal with. Gyrone didn't ask to be brought back to life to fix other people's problems, so why should he? It was also fun to draw more similarities between Gyrone and Spike here because Eve is a lot like Julia. The theme of Serpent Game for me was "love is more important than duty. Even though pursuing love can result in terrible consequences, it's still worth fighting for." For such an intense story featuring hardened warriors and extreme violence, I thought that its overall message was quite sweet.

As much as this draft has to offer its audience in its current state, it isn't ready for publication yet. It isn't ready for publication on a self-publishing platform and it's certainly not ready to query. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means that I found this project to be largely unfinished...and quite frankly, a giant mess. Oftentimes as authors, our early drafts are messy and they are supposed to be that way. There seems to be a necessary phase in the writing process where an author must tell themselves the story before rewriting it in a way that can be communicated to a reader, and Serpent Game is very much in that early phase. Sometimes it doesn't matter if a draft is in its first or twentieth rewrite, if it's a rough draft, then it's...still a rough draft. That doesn't mean it will be later, it just means that it could use a few more rewrites before it's re-released on KDP or anywhere for that matter. This is the frustrating game that we must play as authors and you aren't alone in this.

This is the part of the essay where I have to prove why I think that Serpent Game is a mess and could use another draft or two. This is also the part of the review where I may very well ruin what's been a great friendship for two years or so. I could sugarcoat it and tell you that I enjoyed reading Serpent Game or I can be honest about how I felt about it, and I don't think the first will be too helpful. So I guess all this to say...it's been really really nice knowing you and I'll expect to see you standing outside my window burning my book in a dumpster fire to claim your (rightfully earned) revenge.