Myth of the Maker

The Strange, Book 1

By: Bruce Cordell

Narrated by: James Jordan

Carter Morrison didn't want to kill his friends or himself, but he had a good reason. It was them or the end of all life on the planet. Their sacrifice saved the world. Not that anyone knew it. Until Katherine Manners stumbled over a melting man in a computer room clutching a message of doom from another world.

Follow Carter Morrison; Catherine Manners; Elandine, the Queen of Hazurrium; and Jason Cole - also known as the Betrayer - as they try to understand, survive, save, and, in Jason's case, break free of the fictional worlds that insulate Earth from the dangers of the Strange, where world-eating monstrosities called planetovores lurk.

©2017 Bruce Cordell (P)2018 Audible, Ltd

Lovecraft

It's Cthulhu, without reference or focusing on horror. Awesome story I'll be adding to my Threshold collection.

Story was OK, narration was terrible.

So, the story wasn't perfect, but what story is? It was interesting, though from a programmer's perspective most of the computer code stuff was very hand-wavy if not simply silly, but I've seen worse depictions.

The story was interesting enough to make me want to know what happened, if perhaps amateurish. Every author starts somewhere.

The narration is bad enough that I find myself uncertain if I judged the book too harshly because of it, or if I went too far the other way to compensate.

The narrator sounded like he never knew where a sentence was going, and was often surprised that it hadn't ended already and uncertain where the current words might fit in. It was rife with superfluous pauses, and sentences that seemed to end in weird places, only to have another word or three tacked on like a nonsensical sentence fragment.

I'm sure the guy could narrate if he put in a bit more effort—like reading ahead so he'd know what to stress and where to pause, but the fact remains that he did not.

pretty good

This was a pretty good story. I did struggle with the change in characters, some of them sounded too similar to me.

Decent

The author writes pretty well.. good story, with an actual beginning, middle, and end. The suspense is suspenseful, the emotions are believeable, and this take on litrpg is much better "hard science fiction" than most in the genre.
My biggest negative on the story is that the big character flaw is... singular. Whenever you find a tragedy or mistake or evil machination it's because of the same character flaw. Granted, that flaw is well written and portrayed with just the right sort of realism, but a little variety would be nice.

As for the narration, it's good but unskilled. The narrator is just that--he tells the story well. But he doesn't have much range for voices and character inflections, so story immersion isn't as deep as it would be in the kind of audiobook that typically gains a lot of popularity very fast.

All told, solid work, worth a listen. Enjoyed it, and it made me think.

Fantastic journey across overlapping existences.

I truly loved this story, start to finish, though it did take a little time to build momentum and to fully invest into the multitude of characters and perspectives as the story unraveled. A clever balance between reality as we know it, the fantasy of the 'buffer' world, and sci-fi horror and mystery of the Strange.
I have no qualms over the story, however, the performer was heavily lacking. It felt empty, and lazy. Drunk and sleepy, words would slur, and often mispronounced. Uncalled for pauses, or holds on words riddled the narration. Compared to many other audibles, I felt very little invested in the different characters and in making them come to life in their own unique ways.

I digress. The story is worthy of your time, take it in and owner through, or read the printed or kindle form, and you'll see a world of difference!

don't wast your time

skip this one it just so bla bla bla no feeling in the words just pass it

Disjointed

The book is well written and has great narration, but it is very disjointed. I wasn't able to get past chapter 5, the first few chapters are pretty disjointed and try to skip ahead 3 years and then fill it in with context clues. it ends up being confusing and leaving a lot of unanswered questions that just would have made more sense if they had given a summary of those three years.

Could be me …

I struggle to follow the story line. Really never understood what was happening. There was too much jumping around.

Confused at first.

I found the beginning very confusing and had a hard time following the characters and plot. It wasn’t until the last 5 chapters that everything started clicking into place. Maybe if I listen again I would give it a 4 out of 5 because the story is quite good.

A fusion of litRPG, Science fiction and Fantasy

Hard to describe... interesting story and characters. Unusual combination of many concepts enjoyed it