Marc *Dark Reader with a Thousand Young! Iä!*'s Reviews > Rise of Gods

Here's the basic conceit: God, throughout existence, fucked anything that moved, and the resultant offspring were powerful beings called Firstborn that became the foundations of every world religion and mythology. Ganesha? God fucked an elephant. The minotaur? God fucked a bull. Quetzalcoatlus? God fucked a pterodactyl. This isn't a spoiler; it's clear from the first couple of chapters.

So what do all these epic beings do? Anything they want. They hide. They travel. They reproduce. They integrate into human societies. And sometimes, they war.

A lot of this book's reviews go on about how Ashton breaks the usual rules for writing and gets away with it. I found much of the same. He head-hops; I would rather he had not and I don't think it was strictly necessary in those scenes, but the story stayed on focus at those times and it was a forgivable sin. He includes several aberrantly long chapters, covering prolonged infiltration or fight sequences, but he manages to keep the energy up throughout. Apparently it's written in the present tense which I rarely think is a good choice, but I don't think I even noticed it.

"Worst" of all is that the book doesn't really have a story arc, as in a beginning, middle, and end. It has a beginning, then a middle, but then it's just more middle all the way through. It's more of a story ramp. I'm okay with saving story for sequels but I usually prefer a single book to contain some degree of self-contained story. Again, this didn't really bother me in this case, because the content we got was great. There was character progression (the one major character reveal being utterly predictable, but still fun), worldbuilding, progressive action, and most of all: fun. Fun, fun, fun, epic action and characters drawn on all the mythology, a human perspective, and heart. In this case, all of that was enough.

Question: If "Fi" is short for "Fiona," is it pronounced "Fee" or "Figh?"

I love this book's cover art. It's epic, tension-filled, and I can't say it's original with authority but I think it's frequently copied in concept (the little guy faced off against an enormous monster in this type of pose). For some reason, I always see the front figure's weapon as a mop, which would also have been epic.
so much better than its first iteration: