An Indie Review - The Path of Pain and Ruin - Joel Glover

 I’d like to thank Joel for generously sending me a copy of The Path of Pain and Ruin to read. He didn’t ask for a review in return, but I’d be remiss not to post my unbiased thoughts.


Firstly I want to talk about the premise and format of this book because it was the first thing to really catch me. Essentially the story follows a member of a religious super soldiers called The Blessed (They’re basically like a Jesus X Men) who are gifted supernatural abilities by angels they can call upon. The MC is subject to a couple of assassination attempts and sets out on a mission to establish why. Aside from the main narrative you have these chapter that read almost like diary entries, telling the tale of the MC up to this point. I really enjoyed it as a concept.

This book has once again surprised me and my unconscious predisposition to assume indie books won’t be as well written as a more traditionally published book. It isn’t as grim dark as I thought it would be (ending aside). But it’s extremely well written. The sentence structure throughout tends to be short and punchy, I don’t know if this was intentional by the author but it really helps set a frantic panicked tone befitting of the story.

The character work and world building is good for the length of story (about 75) pages but comes with the obvious limitations that a story of this length comes with. You don’t really get a feel for the size or expansiveness of the world, nor do you get too much of an insight into anyone apart from the MC but Glover does present some fantastic imagery of his world so you can put yourself into each setting.

My only real criticism of the book is that I really wish it was longer, the story and setting are so good that I would selfishly like more of it, detailed story’s of their military campaigns, Red’s time out of the army acting as a black market merchant, learning to use the angels etc. though I suppose if your criticism is that you want more, perhaps it isn’t a criticism.

I’ll definitely be reading book two.

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