Middlegame - Seanen McGuire
A young boy and girl on opposite sides of America discover that they have a strange telepathic connection, and seem to somehow complement each other's strengths and weaknesses.
It turns out they are the subject of a secret experiment by a cabal of alchemists, and the alchemists will go to great lengths to ensure the 'purity' of their experiment is maintained.
I really liked this one - I think it's probably McGuire's best work, and I have liked most of her books. The narrative structure is unusual, but really well done - the story seems disjointed, fragmented, at the start and as it progresses the plot seems to whirl around before gradualy coalescing into a coherent whole. It's quite unlike anything I've read in that respect. It'd be notable for that alone, but I also really liked the characters and story.
It seems to be standalone, rather than part of a series, but if there were a sequel I'd grab it immediately.
One Word Kill - Mark Lawrence
Young boy struggling with a cancer diagnosis begins to encounter bizarre correlations between his real life and the game of D&D he plays with his friends, unlikely coincidences begin piling up and then a strange bald man tells him an entirely unbelievable story about the future...
This is quite a change of pace for Lawrence, it's nothing like Prince of Thorns or Holy Sister, this is set in the 80s in the real world - it's a little bit like Lawrence does Stranger Things I guess. I liked it quite a bit and will read the rest of the series.
Demonspawn ( Damned and Cursed 1 ) - Glenn Bullion
Competently written urban fantasy about a guy who is part demon due to an accident with a demonic sacrifice at his birth.
I though this one was ok, although the romance subplot made me want to bang my head on a table. I may continue the series if my backlog starts running a bit low.
Incubus Inc - Randi Darren
This was a super weird book. The demon lord Samerixis gets summoned out of his banishment by a desperate college student wanting to pay off her student loans. They strike a pact that leads to him establishing a permanent presence on Earth, building his power, getting back at his old enemies etc.
So far so good, what was weird is that Samerixis basically wanders around trying ( and variously succeeding ) to have sex with every woman he meets, but while he superificially seems to be in charge of everything, he basically gets led around by his dick by every woman he sleeps with. This leads to, among other things, one of his harem members following her dream of forming a private military contracting company (!?) and some credibly strong action sequences.
I am not really sure what I'd shelve this one under, but I liked it overall despite the excessive sex.
The Wandering Inn - pirateaba
This is a web serial, although the earlier books are available as both audio and ebooks on amazon.
It's a story about various young people from Earth unexpectedly transported to a different world, some intentionally, others seemingly completely accidentally. The story is sort lit-rpg adjacent I guess - the alternate world and it's people are real, and follow real physics etc, but everyone in it is affected by a game-like level and class system. The inhabitants treat it in a semi-religous fashion, but generally just accept people gaining classes and skills as being the way the world works. There's some indication that the class system isn't a natural occurrence, perhaps tied to the suspiciously uniform certainty among the world's inhabitants that the Gods are dead.
The first few books are mainly about a woman, Erin Solstice, who takes shelter in an abandoned inn after escaping various dangers. She accidentally becomes an Innkeeper class after starting to clean up the inn. Other characters from Earth are gradually introduced in their own stories, which eventually begin to twine together with each other as the various forms of cultural contamination begin to disrupt the status quo of the world.
The different characters are *very* different in experiences, outlook and story style. Erin is a bit of an airhead and her story can be quite comical at times, in contrast the Clown's story is pretty fucking grim.
This is the main reason that my update is so short this time - after I got into the first volume of this, I loved it so much that I read all of it from start to finish, which is a rather enormous undertaking. This story is 100% my kind of thing and I'll probably keep reading it as long as the author keeps writing. Now my favorite web series ( I keep up with Mother of Learning, Ward and A Practical Guide to Evil as well ).
As a footnote, as far as self-publishing quirks go, everything up to the current volume is at a professional level of editing - I'm assuming the author had an editor go through them in preparation for publishing. The current volume has some degree of spelling/grammar issues, although not distractingly so ( e.g. discrete vs discreet etc ).
