Wit'ch Fire

Wit'ch Fire, part one of The Banned and the Banished by James Clemens.Way, way too predictable, terribly written with a cast of unrealistic cardboard characters. These, of course are the standard fare found in bad fantasy. Where James Clemens sets himself apart from the crowd of bad fantasy authors and ends up on this list, however, is that he puts an annoying apostrophe on practically every other word in each sentence. Witch becomes Wit'ch, Elvin as el'vin, ogre as og're. He also takes it upon himself to write characters in bad colloquial speech as well.But where things really start to derail, and I started to get a creepy Lolita vibe from the author is when the main character starts falling in love with the prepubescent girl who's the main character, and eventually has relations with her. I don't know if the author is writing his own fantasies into the plot, but it didn't mesh with me.Clemens tries to give the whole setting a dark edge with some gruesome violence, dark monsters, brutality and sexuality (all contrasted with an innocent, virgin 13-year-old girl), but the whole thing just doesn't work. There's a hideous number of positive reviews for the series on Amazon and they all read pretty similarly; I'm suspicious that they may in fact be fake reviews.Stolen from an Amazon reviewer: "Pu'tting a'postrop'hes in str'ange pl'aces is n'o subs'titute fo'r cr'eatin'g a ne'w and uni'que worl'd!"