Mindripper

Half a God, Book 1

By: Baron Blackwell

Narrated by: Rikki Arundel

Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins

Publisher's summary

For centuries, the Lord-Inquisitors of the Church of the Holy Ark have hunted Mindrippers with a single-mindedness that bordered on obsession. In the age of musket and cannon, the hunt leads them to the ancient city of Dilgan where women are being butchered by an unknown killer. Here, Enk Gueye, the young scion of a noble house, wakes from a nightmare to discover he can read - and control - other people’s minds. He thinks he’s a god, but the Lord-Inquisitors have another name for what he has become: Mindripper.

©2019 Baron Blackwell (P)2020 Baron Blackwell

So Much Wasted Potential

This book has a really good premise, delivering to us a main character who has strong and defined opinions about the world, with clear personal flaws and weaknesses, who then gains a power that could turn him into the thing he hates the most while being the only reasonable way to achieve his goals. The book takes a good look at morality and the ethics of actions from the unique perspective of someone who can make absolute orders and understand absolute truth. There is a lot of sexual aspects to this book, but they are handled surprisingly well, considering how the rest of the book was. I was really looking forward to how it turned out.

Unfortunately, the author did not deliver. First off, the writing of the book is meandering and lacking of any supporting details to connect between actions, stuffed full of metaphors and abstract descriptions. It reads like the character is on crack or meth or something. This works really well for the parts of the book where the character IS on some sort of magical meth or when the main character uses his ethereal powers of psychic mind control, as it gives us a good impression of what the mental state of someone experiencing those things would look like, but that method of writing falls totally flat in the rest of the book, where people are supposed to be, you known, sane.

Half the time you aren't even sure what really happened until 30 min later, and only then by using context clues. For example, there was a carriage on the way to school, and I think the MC sat down in it? Maybe? Maybe he teleported? There also must have been a school, since there was a training grounds and some teachers, but I couldn't swear to it.

Secondly, about a third of the way through the book, the story takes a sharp 180 turn. At first this book was the tale of a young man slowly loosing the things he loves while being forced to comprehend a new, twisted way of viewing the world. One where everyone can be his slave with only a thought. and he is the absolute authority on everything and anything. And all throughout he is desperately trying to find a morality that will let him maintain his humanity. Fun, interesting, and a good plot if done well.

Then, without any warning, it dumps all of the characters and philosophical revelations it was doing to introduce a entirely new cast of barely related people, and the new characters proceed to have a typical-ish fantasy adventure without any of the philosophical nonsense that comes with begin literally able to read everyone's mind and then control them absolutely to do ANYTHING you want. To make it worse, the main character barely even uses his newfound godlike ability for anything at all in the middle third of the book, despite the fact that it would have been very helpful on several occasions.

At this point I just put the book down (~6 hours in). It had a really unique thing going on with the mind-control thing, but it refused to explore it in any depth. While the reluctance of the author to give any supporting details to situations DOES get better as the book progresses, we get precious little actual internal dialog or analysis of any kind from the main character. I got more than halfway through the book before writing this and I wouldn't be able to tell you how the main character would react to any given situation. Hell, this guy up and kisses a girl he just recently met despite the fact that literal minutes ago he hated her guts for being a soulless killer. No idea why, and nothing changed from my perspective. I have no idea what the author was trying to do with this book, and I'm really disappointed that the interesting philosophies and unique worldviews was set aside for a standard fantasy adventure with zero depth.