Procure The Menocht Loop (The Menocht Loop, #1) Produced By Lorne Ryburn Rendered As Print
Dunai has been trapped in a nightmarish loop filled with contagion, captives, and decemancy for the past three or four years, In that time, he's become a master of decemancy with the ability to control dead matter, whether dried leaves, yellowed skeletons, or hulking corpses,
Little does he know, he's just been stuck on layer one,
Book: ChaptersRefreshingly unusual
The way this book begins, not at the beginning of the story, but well into it already, is a fascinating device that could have seemed forced, but instead seems natural.
In fact, I am glad to have missed most of that!
Honestly, I don't really understand how the author can build such an extensive, complicated magical world without making it boring or pedantic.
Also this story in a way is a collection of related stories almost, which makes it even more interesting and engrossing, No spoilers here, but I really like the idea behind it!
Appropriate for all ages, Great start to a series
Fast read that keeps your attention, Good character development and plot for the begennings of an epic storyline, Can't wait for part. This story was originally published as a web serial, so a little overly wordy in places and not significantly edited, but unlike many works in that genre without any distracting spelling or grammatical errors.
I have read dozens of traditionallypublished Fantasy novels that seemed more amateurish,
A progression Fantasy story that begins with a time loop, and expands into a characterfocused romp broken up by occasional creative magical fights, This isn't an action heavy story, and there's as much focus on problemsolving and avoiding conflict as on simply whacking things until they aren't a problem anymore,
The setting is a Fantasy/SciFi world that feels very expansive though never comprehensively revealed, The worldbuilding is mostly light and the magic systems are a little fuzzy, but they remain directly in service to advancing the character development, so overall I think they work well.
If there is one thing I wanted from this story, and wasn't getting, it was lighter moments with more humor, The sliceoflife scenes worked really well for me, and the characters are compelling enough that I want to get more of them just interacting with one another,
Overall, I was very happy I spent my time reading this book and I am sure I will stick with the series to the end, DNF
MC was whiny and annoying, bleh,
He also starts out a master mage, boring! I dont care if your are OP, Its how you become OP thats fun to read,
Also, the story starts after he has already run the time loop innumerable times, Isnt reading a story about a time loop sorta the whole point Why would I want to skip that I do love a good progression fantasy time loop story.
Mother of Learning is the one I'll compare every other time loop story to, for good or for ill, since that one is a masterpiece flawed, but mostly flawed in ways that the newest editing for trad pub process is polishing to a shiny finish.
Menocht Loop has it's own flaws, Some are similar to MoL a stilted writing style that does not work very well in English e, g. referring to ones mother as "Mother" rather than "my Mother" when appropriate stands out the most but most are different,
Firstly, the world feels a lot more shallow, We get to explore some of it depending on the loop layer, but mostly in one layer we stay in one place, Ian, the main character, awakens his Death Affinity, which allows him to become a decemancer a practitioner who can control bones, corpses, dead energy, etc, The story starts with him incredibly powerful already backstory filled in a bit later, however as this is the only affinity he awakens he's pretty much stuck to traveling around by yanking his own bones around or building a bone construct that can fly.
Neither which really allow for vast travel around the known world the way we saw in MoL,
Ian feels more shallow than the characters in other progression fantasy as well, He never wants to learn for the sake of learning, He never wants to explore the world, engage with people around him, or even dive into his own soul, He feels like a puppet pulled through the loops, doing the barest minimum to get through, It's a bit disappointing as a character, since one of my favorite parts of MoL was how Zorian loved to learn and teach himself and level up and get stronger for the sake of knowledge and potentially saving the world.
There's never much threat to Ian since he is so powerful from the beginning of the story,
However, I did really enjoy the fast pace of the book, the plots of the different layers and how he solved the mysteries, and the overall story of why he is in the loop as well.
It's a very fast read if you're not putting the story on pause artificially, and I went immediately to the sequel to see where the story goes next, Flew through this.
This was a very entertaining read, Loop stories can be really hit or miss and this one nailed it, Its very different than a normal loop story and that adds a lot to it, makes it feel very refreshing and new,
Ryburn does a wonderful job of showing off the world they created through the loop and introducing us quite organically to the different types of powers Arts that its made up of.
Our MC, Ignatius Black, is very enjoyable and comes off as very realistic but I think some of the side characters could use some work seems like they were given only one personality trait or reason for being around Ian.
Plot was great and progressed at a perfect rate that really grabs your attention, Will be reading the next chapters online as I need it now,
/This is not a LITRPG or Cultivation book, If you are looking for that type of book, this is not it, That said, if you enjoy that type of book you may enjoy this book, While there is a type of magic in this world, it is not overly used in the book, This is a mystery story, I like that this one does a couple of things differently from the 'progression fantasy time loop' formula we know and love, For one, it starts with the protagonist already having attained pretty much their maximum power from having been through the loop a bunch of times I like seeing people levelling up, but it was interesting to start at a different point and for another, the loop is a little more complex than most.
A few things stood out as a little off to me, mainly things around pacing, A lot of these webserialsturnednovels experience something similar, to be fair, The way the loop turns out to work is interesting but I think perhaps not used to its full potential, such that we only get a short time with most characters before moving on, and the antagonist who ends up being at the climax of this published volume is enormously underwhelming.
More detail:
I'll proooobably keep reading further volumes just because it's right up my street genrewise right now, and I'll be interested to see how things continue to play out.
The end of this volume felt as if things could potentially begin to draw to some sort of close, but that's clearly not the case as there are four or five more volumes already.
loopy
Truly different, This doesnt start at the very beginning yay!, but skips straight to a meaningful event,
The necromancy is more about bones, and tends to be merely an expression of power,
A very well constructed and considered concept,
I think its a oneampdone, as the novel ends at a significant event, This is a book that is very plot driven, In some ways, thats a good thing because the plot is really interesting and was enough to keep me reading right through the end of this story, This concept is really strong and I like this new twist on a time loop, It was equally intriguing and disturbing at the same time, and more than enough to power the mystery thats driving this plot,
However, on the other hand, this overly strong focus on the plot has come at the expense of some of the other vital elements of telling a good story, the most important of which for me is character development.
The characters in this book, the protagonist included, didnt ever get any deeper than surface level at best, They were there purely there as tools of the plot to allow the story to play out through them, and any character development that happened to them seemed to this reader to be purely coincidental.
In the early parts of this book maybe even for the first two thirds of the novel this was a major problem because without that character work, I felt like I was reading a descriptive list of events, rather than feeling like I was part of a story.
A good example of this is time that the main character spends with his college friends and a potential girlfriend, The conversations that happen here are no more than a couple of sentences long and not at all enough to portray any kind of relationship between these characters, In fact, at one point the main character goes on a first date with someone after making it clear that the author is the shy type and this would be a big first for him in his life, but the author literally skips the date entirely, saying that it happened and no more.
Its hard to care about the fate of these characters when the author doesnt take the time to set up why we should care,
The trouble is that they clearly werent important to the plot, and therefore the author doesnt spend any time in making them important to the reader, Therefore, there are no stakes in this part of the book and I started zoning out hard at this point,
This only changes near the end of the book when the main character meets up with family, Its still not nearly enough to really get me hooked, but it was enough that when the book finally came to a close, I wanted to see what would happen next.
Ultimately, this was a relatively short story with an interesting premise, a strong enough plot and mystery to keep the pages turning, but was sorely lacking in almost everything else.
It did just enough right at the end to hook my interest, but it needs to work a lot harder in the next one to develop more than just the plot or I will quickly lose interest and part ways with this series.
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