The Weight of Blood (The Half-Orcs, Book 1) [Kindle Edition]

Storyline: The Weight of Blood in this dark fantasy by David Dalglish would be enough to run the Red Cross for at least a month. I have to admit that this was my first dark fantasy. I have read much of fantasy prior to, but this was a new experience and I must say I was impressed. The story follows the squalid lifestyle of two outcasts, Harruq and Qurrah Tun who happen to be half Orc and half Elf by blood (speaking of blood). They are basically unwanted and unloved by any save each other and the stronger one looks after the younger while he cultivates his dark powers. They are recruited by an evil entity bent upon bringing a new kingdom of terror and evil upon the land. Although they are not human, they have some very human traits though only one of them seems to have any semblance of a conscience and soon they have a slight disagreement when one of them falls in love with an Elf.

Grammar/Spelling: Spelling and grammar are very well edited with very few mistakes noticeable throughout the book. Nothing detracts from the storyline and though the story is quite bleak and disturbing, I kept putting it down and then finding myself drawn back to it out of sheer morbid curiosity.

Character Development: Mr. Dalglish wove a dark spell over me with his story of these two emotionally disturbed brothers. I found myself actually rooting for one of them and feeling sorry for the other even though they are quite evil in general. The characters are extremely well developed and described, their feelings are exposed and their pain palpable. I like the Elves and sympathize with their plight. Men, it would seem, are completely irrelevant and expendable in this dark tale.

Writing Style: The writing style is fast-paced and action-filled. Very little time passes between one terrifying development and the next. Mr. Dalglish's expert descriptions leave little to the imagination and the reader can almost smell the burning flesh, hear the screams of anquish and taste the blood in the air. The really, really bad guys get their just deserts.

Continuity: Time line is spot on. Orcs stay dirty and Elves stay clean. Ha!

Overall Rating: A solid 5 for the genre, but get ready to rumble if you want to read it. It's quite gory in some parts and plumb awful in others.

Extreme violence, sexual content, disturbing imagery.

.. but not great either.

I found this book an enjoyable, easy read if a bit shallow.

On the plus side the book romps along at a good pace & doesn't let you get bored, there is plenty of action which is well written & interesting.

However, I did find the book a bit shallow & predictable in places. I thought the characters lacked depth & I never really made a connection with them. I found the love story was unbelievable, bordering on silly.

I would definitely read other books by this author though as I think he has the potential to write a truly excellent book - but this one just misses the mark for me.....

The Weight of Blood is very much a character-driven tale based around the mixed race of the protagonists, their fraternal bond and the effects of nurture. The half-orcs, Harruq and Qurrah Tun, were separated as children, neither faring particularly well, but Qurrah having darker developmental experiences under his "Master". Harruq always seems on the verge of developing a conscience whereas Qurrah often acts as a tempter, driven by the will-to-power and placing himself under the control of an unsavoury necromancer called Velixar.

This foundational dynamic is the burning core of the story, utterly engaging to the degree that the weaker elements of the book are forgivable. There are a number of typos, awkward sentence constructions, archaisms and "fantasy speak", word repetitions and sometimes laboured use of speech identifiers. Occasionally there are jarring inconsistencies in the language with characters moving from "fantasy speak" constructions like "his very soul" to modern slang. All these issues could be swiftly resolved by a decent editor.

The only other weakness, for me, was in the setting. It seemed that arbitrary names were given to towns and countries and I never had any sense of place, politics, powers. Mostly, this wasn't a big problem as many of the scenes engaged me through characterisation and my mind simply filled in the blanks. It's a fine line between over-doing description and having too little. I felt Dalglish erred on the latter side, but only just.

Point of view chopped and changed rather a lot too. Dalglish has opted for the omniscient narrator style, which is fine, but occasionally we get deeply into Harruq's head only to find ourselves flit into Qurrah's then Velixar's and then the narrator's. Full POV or full omniscience would have been less distracting.

The characterisation is so strong that it eclipses these stylistic and technical problems. David Dalglish is such a natural story-teller that I found myself totally present in a number of action scenes. I cared about Harruq, Qurrah and Aurelia (actually I cared about Velixar too!). They even invaded my dreams on a couple of occasions, clear evidence that the story-teller has succeeded in his most important task: engage the reader.

Velixar struck me as rather clichéd at first, but that was essential for the uncluttered telling of the story and the development of the other principle characters. By the end of the book I loved the old maggoty-faced blackguard.

I liked Dalglish's willingness to embrace the darker side of his characters. He doesn't shy from a series of unpleasant acts which shape his protagonists into anti-heroes. It's a risky business that could alienate the reader - most of us don't want to identify with these kinds of characters, but Dalglish manages to pull us into the world of the Tun brothers through the barest spark of Harruq's conscience coupled with the desperate dependency of his brother. Readers would do well to bear in mind also that this is part of a series which clearly has strong themes of redemption. The brothers have to start in the gutter if they are ever to climb out of it. Moorcock's Elric wasn't exactly a nice guy, and some of Gemmell's heroes have done very bad things. I felt Dalglish's use of atrocity never descended to the gratuity sometimes found in Joe Abercrombie. It is always about nature, nurture, and the effects of an accumulation of actions upon the will. Bad acts beget yet more bad acts, progressively pushing back the boundaries of what is acceptable to the perpetrator. It's an analogue for the way sin operates, or if you prefer the language of psychology, it's about desensitisation through exposure. The Tun brothers are embroiled to such a degree that there seems no hope of redemption. If it exists for them, it may come in the shape of an elf called Aurelia.

The pacing was excellent. Whilst I usually prefer a slower pace with a gradual build of tension, I felt Dalglish pitched his book at exactly the right pace for his readership. It's a fairly short book, part of a series, and it was a delight to speed through the chapters without any long drawn-out exposition.

This is a special book by a gifted new writer. With a few editorial tweaks it could easily go from being a good genre novel to a great one.