Orconomics and Son of a Liche – J. Zachary Pike

I have that peculiar trait of reading things the wrong way. My go to example of this was from reading Harry Potter well into adulthood at the behest of a good friend, and in one of the middle books stopping in frustration to ask him: “how the fucking hell does this economy work anyway?” This was followed by a rather lengthy description of my thoughts about why J.K. Rowling’s world would be laughed out of Davos. I was told by my friend that I was reading wrong, and that I should stop being annoying.

I always once told a friend that the game Diablo would make much more sense to me if for every level deeper you go into the dungeon, someone’s house back in Tristam gets a little nicer. If nothing else, the potion makes alone should thank you for putting his kids through college. Really, fantasy settings are actually the tale of one-hero walking engines of economic prosperity.

No, I don’t get invited to too many parties. And sometimes I feel very lonely.

But perhaps I am not as alone as I would like to think.

J. Zachary Pike seemed to be asking many of the same questions, except he did something pretty competent with the questions. He turned it into a storytelling device for a series of novels. The first two of those novels are out now, Orconomics and it’s sequel, Son of a Liche. Basically, if you ever played a fantasy based game and wondered about the treasures a questing party encounters, this is kind of the book for you. One book or the other was a SPFBO (Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off) winner, or finalist, and I am reasonably sure that is how I first heard of it.

Orconomics

Focusing on the economics of the world is what makes this work unique. Were it framed otherwise, you would have what could otherwise be called a pretty standard fantasy story – dwarves, elves, gnomes, heroes, quests, orcs, goblins, monsters, etc. The frame puts it all together nicely. A plot synopsis would illustrate the point easily, but I won’t even bother with that much. Suffice it to say that the story has all those things you would expect in a fantasy novel that puts it firmly in that category, and a good dose of humor too.

But to be clear, this isn’t a bad story in a good frame. It’s a competent, enjoyable well-told story in a frame that does a lot of work. And the frame is a pretty important part of the plot. The two parts work really well in concert to make this something that I thought was worth reading.

Nor is the book too cliche. Early on in the book I was reasonably convinced the story was going to go in a few directions. I was wrong on every account, but without feeling cheated about what happened in the way some other books may have made something ransom happen for no discernible reason. The story went in a direction that made a whole lot of sense.

I do have to complain that when I got to the end of the book, it didn’t feel like an end as much as a ‘stay-tuned for the next episode’, which I always find disappointing in a novel. But this was otherwise really good, and that’s a small complaint.

Son of a Liche

Some overall thoughts

I don’t generally like a strong, detached, third person narrative voice in novels, but I think I recognize the need for it in some works. I think it works well for comedies like this. Here it really works well in the story’s favor, and did a lot to remind me of Terry Pratchett, a clear influence. I would hazard a guess that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is also a clear influence.

These book are comedies and a satires, and I guess I should talk about that a little bit as well. I find comedy to be the hardest thing for a writer to do, and few books actually ever get a laugh out of me. Terry Pratchett did repeatedly, as did Joseph Heller. The way I see it, there are two types of comedic books, the ones that make me laugh, and the ones that makes me smile and think “that’s clever”. How did J. Zachary Pike do?

I actually laughed out loud once. I cracked a lot of smiles. That’s high praise.

There were a lot of things that made me crack a smile in these books. The undead army has a marketing department. In charge of that department is a floating skull-

The head of marketing.

I feel like sharing the jokes that did make me laugh would be a disservice to the review, so I will leave that out and let anyone interested find it for themselves.

I do have to add a sad addendum to this review. While I was rather happy to have read it, part of me was a bit saddened. I have been accumulating for the past few years notes on a novel/set of stories that would cover the same ideas. Granted, the plot would have been different, but the conceit was largely the same. Yea, I know what Nabakov said about ‘good ideas being hogwash’, and that the actual writing of such a story would make it different in some respect, but a lot of the beats and punchlines of these works kinda took it out of me.

There is likely more of this coming. I look forward to reading the next editions.