War Golem
By J.A. Giunta
J.A Giunta was born in November of 1969 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up on Long Island but has spent more than 25 years in Arizona, graduating from Arizona State University with a BA in English, which makes him yet another writer connected to this heat-soaked, blast furnace of a desert. His first novel “ The Last Incarnation” was released in 2005 and he has published numerous novels and short stories since. War Golem was published in 2019 by Brick Cave Media and in the interest of full disclosure, not only does Brick Cave Media donate to my patron but I got this book for free. That said, what is going to follow are my honest thoughts but I want to be upfront with everyone. (Hanging with writers is a terrible habit. I recommend finding a better company. {But you’re a published writer}Wow you went there dude I thought we were friends)
War Golem is the story of a young man named Eric and how he only really grew up after he was kidnapped and murdered in his sleep by goblins. Eric is, or perhaps was would fit better, a 21st-century American teenager. He was a type of gamer called a griefer, which is a type of player who intentionally harasses and provokes other players of a game for amusement. Eric by his own admission was something of a newbie hunter, which means he hunted down people who were just learning the game for his tricks. Since Eric mostly talks about playing fantasy MMOs, I assume he did this by hunting down new players, killing their characters, taking their stuff, and trash-talking them over the game chat the whole time. In short, he was honestly the worst part of the gaming experience and community.
However, when Eric wakes up in the massive iron body of a war golem while staring at his dead human body things begin to change. (My first thought would be whoops, which afterlife version did I fail to do the rituals for? Oops, my bad. {You mean as your first thought in waking up in a golem or as the shaman?} Golem, assuming I perceived I was dying before ending up in that state.) The goblins in question are honestly pretty surprised by this as the ritual used for this wasn’t supposed to leave Eric self-aware. The Goblins out of self-preservation quickly swear loyalty to him because they have nothing that can even mildly dent him and well, he’s understandably upset over being magically kidnapped and murdered in his sleep. I think we all would be a touch cranky in Eric’s place, although he quickly establishes with his actions and behavior in the book that he’s not a very likable fellow. It’s here that his character arc takes off and it’s the best part of the book.
Because, the spell the goblins used was meant to find the nastiest, bloodthirstiest psychopath they could safely grab, someone with a massive body count according to the goblins. This would provide the golem with a certain… killer instinct while the spells putting his consciousness to rest would ensure that the golem just followed orders. Eric protests that everything he did was done in a video game and therefore not real and in his defense, he’s never actually killed or injured anybody.
That said, I’ve heard real-life trolls and griefers use that excuse before, nothing is real so nothing matters. It’s an excuse that rings hollow to me as I’ve seen how far online bullying and harassment can go and how much pain they can inflict. While I’m not saying you should never play an evil bastard online, I do think we should remember that online actions can have real-life consequences. That said, I don’t think the harm Eric was doing justifies being murdered and stuffed into a large war machine either so clearly the goblins have screwed up here.
This brings us to our second protagonist of the book, Grizzletongue the goblin shaman. Grizzletongue is something of a mentor/prime minion to Eric as he patiently does his best to guide Eric and tries to achieve the Goblin’s original goals. Gris, to use his nickname, is honestly pretty good at convincing Eric to further the Goblin's goals and agenda, whether it be by attacking a castle full of undead so the Goblins can take it over or focusing on acquiring metals and gems for their homeworld. This is one of the more interesting bits of worldbuilding, Goblins don’t appear to be native to the world the story is taking place in but come from yet another world and these goblins have been sent here to gather resources. So Eric is basically talked into working for an alien invasion and the Goblins are alien indeed.
To start with the Goblins are well, basically sapient constructs. They are not born, they don’t have a childhood. They are created full-grown and fully aware. (So mentally at prime capacity, but lacking the experiences coming with maturation? Is that reflected? {We never deal directly with any “newborns” although it is mentioned that there is an education period}) They are also sorted into a caste system because depending on the materials used to make them, they’ll have different grades of intelligence and capabilities. They are of course conveniently color-coded so everyone can see what your likely abilities and strengths are at a glance. (Does the sort of natural bigotry that would flow from this sort of society get depicted? {To a certain extent, however, keep in mind we’re dealing with a small group of goblins in hostile territory and seeing everything through Eric’s eyes so we’re missing a lot}) The darkest part of this is to create goblins you have to kill something as part of the ritual. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a person as we see that animal sacrifice can create fully aware and intelligent Goblins but given Gris admits to Goblin society regularly kidnapping and murdering people like they did to Eric their claims of moral superiority over humans is less than convincing to me. (Yeah likewise.)
Once Eric commits to leading the Goblins and honestly fulfilling their original goals anyway, the plot takes off at a neck-breaking pace. There’s a lot I like here and a lot I dislike. First Eric doesn’t always do the right thing and even when he does there are negative consequences for his actions. Second his growth into something like maturity occurs in fits and starts. His initial step into maturity is when he realizes that the Goblins and various other creatures he’s been dismissive of are actual people, with their own feelings, thoughts, and desires that need to be considered. He’s not always successful in considering those feelings but the realization is a key moment for him and when he decides that killing people is something he wants to avoid, I started feeling a lot more sympathetic to him.
One thing I did dislike though is just how much plot the book is trying to cram into 250 pages. Frankly, this story would have been better off being split into two books I think. For example, we have Eric starting a conflict with a group of beings that the Goblins call Demons, whether they are real Demons (by which I mean evil spirits who are part of the afterlife) or not is never really addressed. Neither really is the conflict or the fact that the Demons kind of have a legitimate complaint against Eric. While it makes the climax of the story an amazing 20-car pile-up, I was honestly left asking if this even needed to be part of the story.
We also have Eric becoming aware of a 2nd alien invasion of this world by a group of beings called the Fey. I wasn’t entirely thrilled by his treatment of the Fey either. This is gonna be a “your mileage may vary” but I tend to be a bit of a snob in how I want my Fey/Demons/etc to reflect the stories and traditions that have grown around them in the real world. Mr. Giunta’s Fey felt more like a video game fantasy version of the Predator alien to me, which I didn’t care for. Ironically I would probably love them if they weren’t called Fey. A lot of you, my glorious readers, might not have that problem. That said, this element wasn’t really explored or did much at all and I was left asking again if it really even needed to be part of the story. There’s even a briefly introduced troll character who tantalizingly suggests all manner of interesting things about Trolls having a society and civilization in this world but nothing is done with this. So I was left asking, did this Troll character, as interesting as she was, really need to be in this story?
These things distracted from the main conflict of Eric with the local Human lord, named Sebran, whose grandfather and father lived in the Castle that the undead were inhabiting and Eric took over. I was more interested in this conflict than the Demons or the Fey because… Sebran was given the space and development that I understood his motives and his goals and that made him a character in his own right. I honestly was interested in his story and the story of his family.
This also took time away from the issues Eric has navigating his own growth and development while trying to keep control over the Goblins. Like I said Eric’s growth comes in fits and starts and there are setbacks and mistakes made. This made the story more compelling and believable to me. Because I think if we’re all honest, our own journeys to adulthood were full of mistakes, setbacks, and screw-ups that we should have known better about. (Hooray for depictions of fallibility, I love that.) Eric having these issues but getting up, dusting himself off despite his misgivings, and deciding he would do better next time made me root for him even harder. Because while he might have started this story as frankly an insufferable little shit, watching him fight and crawl his way to at least partial adulthood was incredibly gratifying to watch. That was more compelling to me than him powering up his golem body.
Meanwhile the Demons and Fey are just kind of plot devices to make the action scene at the end of the book really climactic with huge monsters barreling into each other and armies slamming into each other by accident and mass confusion. Add in the main villain as I will call him, who honestly I wasn’t even sure was needed given how little time was spent on developing him. And you get a story that honestly feels overly crowded and moving too fast. This is unfortunate because if these plots had time and space to develop I really think Mr. Giunta could have created something I would have really enjoyed reading.
All that said, I still enjoyed reading this book. My enjoyment hinges completely on Eric’s struggling to grow as a person and if that doesn’t sound interesting to you, you might not enjoy it. On the flip side, if you want violence and action, there is plenty of it in this book and Mr. Giunta does a great job of writing hard-hitting action scenes. It’s good enough I feel like I should take a look at one of Mr. Giunta’s other works and see what it’s like when he’s not rushing the plot so hard. That said while this book was better than average, I have to grade War Golem by J.A. Guinta a C+. Although I think many of you might like it more than I did.
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