Reviewed:
I only recently discovered James Girvan. Girvan has only written five stories, but they’ve all received very good marks. After reading, and enjoying, In Defence of the Keep (see separate review), I decided to read The Arbiter, his current, on-going story and the fourth in a series entitled The Axeman Universe. (Spoiler Alert: I didn’t read to the end of the story - currently at Chapter 36.) The Axeman Universe appears to be a grouping of individual stories rather than serial stories that build on each other.
The Arbiter is the story of a young man who stumbles upon portals to another world while working out with a group of people conducting medieval weapons training. The concept is similar to that of the Damsels in Distress Universe, but is tagged as a GameLit story and works like a computer game, complete with an updated rating/ranking of the hero on multiple characteristics after each trip through the portal.
The plotting is straightforward, with our hero moving between the real world and the game world, where he battles foes and gains both monetary rewards, which he takes back to the real world, and rating upgrades, which provide personal benefits and additional opportunities in the game world.
The unfolding of the story leaves gaps that sometimes left me wondering how it got from here to there. Perhaps the gaps could have been uncovered in previous stories, but there was no reference to them and there is no indication in their blurbs that they even covered the same game. I found the characters in The Arbiter to be two-dimensional, and the game activities each took place over only a few paragraphs.
I am a stickler for proper grammar, as I find reading bad grammar, missing words, misspellings and typos disrupts the flow of the story. This story was replete with errors that could easily have been corrected by a rereading of the text. I find this strange, because on his home page, Girvan states that he is currently writing a new story, and thanks his editor. The Arbiter shows no evidence of having been edited.
I gave up reading after 10 chapters, what I consider to be long enough to either capture or lose me. This story didn’t capture me, but maybe I didn’t give it enough time. The ratings for Girvan’s stories indicate to me that they probably draw a large following of gamers, to whom the genre is most important and who enjoy reading such stories regardless of their shortcomings. I’ve seen this in other stories in narrow, specific genres that gain large followings and high ratings. If you love GameLit stories, James Girvan’s Axeman Universe may be very appealing.