
A Ritual of Bone
The Dead Sagas, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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RJ Bayley
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By:
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Lee C. Conley
About this listen
Only valor and steel can stand against the rising dead.
Arnar is a land of warriors, its people as stalwart as the stones themselves. In a land of dark forests and ancient hill forts, a forgotten evil is awoken by curious minds.
The great histories and the sagas say nothing of this evil, long passed from the memory of even the studious scholars of the college. For centuries, the scholars of Arnar have kept these records and preserved the knowledge and great deeds of a proud people. The story of these people is, forever, chronicled in the sagas of the great histories.
But now, the evil spreads, and the dead walk in its wake. Terrible creatures roam the night, and even the spirits are restless. The Dead Sagas could, perhaps, be the final chapters of these great records.
Many threads entwine to tell this saga, interweaving the tales of those who played their part in the search for answers and, ultimately, their fight for survival. Amid plague, invasion and terror, the inexorable rise of the dead sends a kingdom scrabbling to its knees.
This dark fantasy epic combines dark malign horror and gritty survival adventure as the dead sagas unfold in a world where honor and renown is all, where beasts and savages lurk in the wilderness, and where sword, axe, and shield are all that stand between the living and the grasping hands of the dead.
©2018 Lee C. Conley (P)2020 Lee C. ConleyWell written, edge of seat book
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Cracking Listen!
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Medieval horror zombie done right!
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. Great book
A Bone Cracking Tale
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The Bloody Dead
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There is a lot to like about this book. But almost more than anything, I would say the style of writing made me fall in love with it. Conley has an easy, graceful way about his work. This is especially delightful given the subject matter: plague, vomiting blood, undead eating the alive, cannibalism, and other such dark and violent shenanigans.
The main POV’s we follow are equally engaging (often hard to do, and as an author of multi POV, I really respect what Conley has achieved). The setting well sculpted, the dialogue crisp and real. The violence, although graphic, was not overplayed.
As an indie author, I’m a big supporter of our ‘slice of the pie’. There are a great many excellent indie books out there, that merit attention and respect. This is certainly one of them, and easily one of the best books I’ve read* this year.
*I listened to the audio version, narrated brilliantly by R.J. Bayley, it swept me up and was just so much fun.
Book 2, A Ritual Of Flesh is out tomorrow (10th October). I for one will be getting it! You should get on book 1 it’s incredible!
Dark and moody good grimdark fun
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I'm sorry but zombies are overrated. They groan and moan, shambling around mindlessly until they smell meat and then shuffle inadequately towards their intended prey...boring. Sure there have been attempts to make them more scary by making them fast or strong but, at the end of the day, a bullet to the brain always puts them down.
But what if you don't have bullets? What if you live in small villages in a time when medicine in poor meaning that death is a part of life and the dead greatly outnumber the living? What if the most powerful tool you have at your disposal is an axe and the enemy are not only fast but uncaring of the damage done to their bodies.
This is what A Ritual of Bone brings to us, basically Vikings vs the Undead.
Based in ancient Iceland and in a time where the inhabitants had forgotten the old-ways and stopped believing in legends and monsters, an experiment carried out by scholars sets off a chain of events resulting in hordes of unkillable monsters sweeping across the land.
Told from the perspective of various members and groups Arnar's people it follows the hordes as they pass over the Spine of the World into Arnar and Sidor and into the realm of man. Death is aplenty and I quickly learned to avoid growing attached to a any characters as they regularly died, mostly in a truly horrific manner.
This bring me to the gore aspect and I do need to state that if you are upset by blood, gore or child-death you may want to listen with care as this has it all. The sheer amount of severed limbs, decapitation, burnings and flesh-ripped corpses is above anything I've read before but the important thing is that it is all Fitting. There is no gore purely for the sake of making you upset here, every cut and blow is used to highlight the lack of hope mankind has against these creatures and each death is felt as a personal loss and made all the more poignant by the fabulous narration of Rob Bayley-Boyd. As a new Narrator for me I was unsure what to expect but his range and ability to add real personality to each character was astounding and he has a real knack for creating a sense of dread.
Add to this the slowly building sense of there being something otherworldly involved with horned beasts and shadows that appear to be guiding the hordes and I truly could not put this book down. Again Rob's narration has to be mentioned here as I've been reading horror for over 40 years and listening to Audiobooks for 20 and there was a scene towards the end that, for the first time in all those years, gave me real shivers of fear.
I going pretty much straight onto Book 2 to see what happens next and cannot recommend this enough to all fans of Zombies, VIkings and brilliantly narrated shocks!
An excellently violent tale brilliantly narrated.
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I listened to the audio edition of this book, and I really must say how excellent a narrator RJ Bayley is. His grim narrative tones drip with a brooding menace, and his character voices are perfect for the setting. Right from the offset, while listening to him deliver this tale I found him strongly reminiscent of one of my favourite voice actors, the great Matt Berry, and yet RJ Bayley is no cheap imitation; in fact, I would say that his delivery of A Ritual Of Bone has given me the most enjoyment I've had from an audiobook in a long while. Massive kudos to Mr Conley and Mr Bayley for breathing life and undeath into this story.
When the audio edition of the second book in the Dead Sagas is published, I would certainly like to listen to it, both to hear RJ Bayley's delivery again and to find out what lies in store for the surviving characters of this unfolding ttale. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys grimdark or any other form of gritty adult-oriented fantasy.
So much fun to listen to!
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Somehow, despite not being a particularly long read, A Ritual of Bone is also incredibly slow and repetitive. Not just repetitive in terms of story, but also within passages several ideas will be repeated over and over. It almost reads as though the author wrote down every variation of the sentence so they could decide which one they wanted later, but forgot to remove the other versions.
Characters aren't actually characters. I could not tell you anything about what any of them value, who they aspire to be, what their goals are beyond the incredibly basic.
The very, very, very few women characters revolve entirely around their existence as sex objects or how they matter to the men around them. Even the story of the one named female warrior (who speaks perhaps once throughout the whole book) revolves entirely around her backstory of a man trying to rape her, and one of the other warriors pursuing her as a sexual conquest.
More like an incredibly long prologue
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Didn’t engage me.
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