“A murder or suicide. I don’t have all the details. The Bishop will tell you about it.”
“Not if I tell you to go fuck a pig, he won’t,” Heden said.
“There is that,” Gwiddon conceded.
Start reading Priest on your Kindle or Kindle App!
Priest is my first novel, and the first in a series. It’s a fantasy novel.
I wanted to write a sort of hard-boiled fantasy novel. Short, brisk, with some tough guy dialog and a little humor. I wanted something that showed characters behaving in what I considered a more human fashion, and I wanted something short, more like the books I came up with in the 1980s. 350 pages and out. No map, no wildly shifting points of view. Just tough guys and fantasy action and the human heart in conflict with itself. And a little humor here and there
If you read it, even if you give up on it, I want to know what you think! Leave feedback! The parts you liked, the parts you didn’t like, and why.
No tags
Scott · July 6, 2010 at 10:24 pm
I read the whole book. Took me two days. I loved it. I enjoyed every aspect of it.. the plot, the vocabulary, the theme, the inclusion of various elements from fantasy-genre. I liked the character development, and the tragedy. There were about 20 or so spelling or grammatical errors, ironically… only the most basic things like.. Domnal vs Domnall and several instances of words being repeated “had to had to” or that sort of thing. Nothing substantive. I would have noted each of them and then sent them to you if the pdf had allowed for editing.
All in all, I felt that for you to have been able to write this sort of story, you simply connect well with my type of person. Not just the tragic part… but also the insight into the position of an Arrogate, and of our cultural awareness of common distain for organized religion, and yet a strong understanding of ‘the good’… aswell as all the truth about the world being such a miserable place much of the time.
Are you working even now on the sequel?
Admin comment by Matthew Colville · July 6, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Scott you’re my new favorite person.
I’m glad you liked the book, and doubly glad you took the time to comment. I’d love someday for comments on the work to be passé, but we’re not yet at that point.
Right now, they’re precious.
I started working on the sequel before I’d even finished the first book! I think I’ll have the first 5 or 6 chapters in an early draft form soon and though it will be exceedingly rough–far rougher than the admittedly non-final Priest–I feel it’s safe to send it out to readers who made it all the way through the first book and liked it enough to want more. So stay tuned! You’ll be among the first to read the new chapters. Possibly a dubious distinction depending on their quality!
Until I commission some art to help promote the piece, the only way people will find the book is by word of mouth. If you are so inclined, I encourage you to tell your friends, talk about the work on the internets, let people know you liked it. Thus are networks born!
If you don’t mind my asking: how did you discover the book? What or who linked you here?
Thanks again for the positive comments and encouragement!
Harry · July 8, 2010 at 5:17 am
Just finished reading it, unlike Scott I think it took me a whole three days! Very readable, I really enjoyed it and I look forward to reading future installments in the series. Surely finding a publisher won’t be terribly hard; certainly this is of a much higher standard than the majority of works published in this genre. In the meantime I’ll be sure and pass on the link to other potential readers. Thanks for an enjoyable read, keep up the good work.
Admin comment by Matthew Colville · July 8, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Wow, two replies in two days! Must be something going around.
Harry I’m glad you liked it! Hopefully you’ll enjoy the rest of the series.
Alrenous · September 7, 2010 at 12:11 am
(Possible small spoiler at the bottom.)
I lost internet for a month or so and one of the things I did was finally finish reading Priest, which I’d already downloaded.
Way to write a book specifically for me.
Apparently having my own own personal author is pretty nice.
I had a unique experience with Priest. I didn’t fully understand what was going on. I loved it. I hear a lot about books that ‘reward re-reading.’ No, Priest is a book that rewards re-reading.
I’m still not quite sure why the knights couldn’t be explicit. I haven’t actually performed my re-reading yet, so I don’t know if this is my mistake or yours, but I thought you might appreciate being informed. (I just sort of sense there’s a good reason, but can’t put a finger on it.)
Matthew · September 7, 2010 at 1:38 am
Glad you liked it! Seems like the folks who like it feel like it spoke to them in an unusually personal manner and this may mean I have not made the work mainstream enough.
But I’m sticking to my guns.
Tell your friends! Promotion like that is the only promotion I got!
Crusher Bob · January 3, 2011 at 8:23 am
Used Calibre to convert the pdf to epub so I could read it on my ebook reader. Had several conversion problems but nothing that stopped me from reading the book.
Thing I liked: the fact that we are dropped into Heden’s life sorta in the middle; he has all the relationships and issues out of that past that people mention and obviously shape his character, but aren’t explained to the reader. This never devolves into “the noodle incident”, and all of the things out of the past seem to be human interaction things that we don’t expect to be different, even in a fantasy world.
Next, one of the things I didn’t like so much. Your ability to express danger to Heden didn’t seem to work so well. For example, when the minstrel threatens him with the sword at his neck, it it physically a threat against his life, or not? I thought is was an actual threat, but not a real one because the minstrel wouldn’t actually kill Heden. But then, later when he goes to rescue the girl, we find out that an assassin stabbing him in the kidneys with a poisoned blade is a pretty good fight opener against him, but not a fight ender. So the fact that the minstrels blade was at his neck probably wasn’t an actual threat after all. And when they fight the elven siege engine, he seems to be threatened by it’s attacks, but then seems to get knocked off a flying carpet that’s maybe a hundred feet in the air and going maybe 30 miles an hour, and he just walks away from it. I didn’t get the particular impression that the saint had to preform some extraordinary miracle to save his life. So if he was tough enough to walk away from that, why wasn’t he tough enough to stand up to some punishment from the siege engine? I mean, if ratcatchers can really be that tough, then we can get into things like literally stabbing someone just to get their attention. It’s not like stabbing them would be an actual threat or anything.
Next, it’s never entirely clear what Heden can and can’t do. Of course, through most of the book, his problems are largely social ones, so exactly how many orcs he can brawl down at once is not really relevant. But later in the book, he gets in fights, and the number of orcs he can brawl at once does become relevant; but we’re still not sure what he can do.
So, considering all that, I think the book might actually be improved if the fight scenes were given even less pages. Because they become so central later on, we are actually interested in how many orcs Heden can brawl down at once. Before we got the on screen fights, we knew that he couldn’t take on an army of orcs, and that was all we really needed to know about his abilities in a fight. All his other problems couldn’t be solved by fighting, so it didn’t mater.
Of course, when we have the shared world of an RPG, and everyone is familiar with the rules, then everyone has a reasonable idea of what’s threatening and what isn’t. But since the reader doesn’t know what set of rules you are using.
Robert · February 12, 2011 at 1:58 pm
Hi! I just wanted to say that I read Priest a few weeks ago and I really liked it
. It felt a bit rough still in a few places but I’d still gladly have paid money for a print version.
Michael · February 15, 2011 at 6:12 pm
I loved this book. I couldn’t get anything done the whole time I was reading it. I can’t wait for the next one. The next one is coming, right?
Anyways, the only thing that I thought was bad was at the beginning. In the jail scene, everyone seems to say “fuck” too much. I’m not saying that the word shouldn’t be used, I’m just saying that it’s OVERused. This got much better in later chapters. I think that maybe a few of the “fuck”s should be either removed, or even just replaced with another word. Like when the guards call the cultists “fuckers”. It could be easily replaced with the word “bastards” or some other swear word. It just seems that they use the word “fuck” more often than is realistic.
Once again, I can’t wait for the story to be continued, and I hope that you finish it soon (and that you’re still working on it).
Admin comment by Matthew Colville · February 15, 2011 at 6:27 pm
Yay! Glad you liked it. Tell your friends! Post on the internets! I crave readers!
Lots of people complain about the language in the first chapter, but I’m sticking to my guns.
My Significant Other works in a real, actual jail and hers was the first opinion I sought. From her point of view, it’s ridiculously tame. From many readers’ point of view, it’s distractingly profane. From my point of view, it’s just right!
The second book is well on its way! I post excerpts of it on the book’s Facebook page every once in a while.
Travis · February 25, 2011 at 6:38 pm
I found this by way of an rpg.net thread on hardboiled fantasy cops.
I liked the story well enough to go buy it, but I don’t buy kindle books. The background on the Celestials and Elementals is something that I’d like more of since I am particularly taken by neat worldbuilding. I agree with the above comment about the lack of a clear idea of what was actually a threat to Heden. Starfall was interesting and I did like that he had no real idea of it was really capable of doing. I’d like maps and prefer having them with a setting; even if just for wondering about all of the places that never make it into a story.
Jeff Hewitt · March 31, 2011 at 1:05 am
Hey Matt!
Decided to add the the flood of praise here rather than where I commented before. Keep it nice and tidy, you know?
Well, I gave you 4 stars on Amazon and you can read my review there, but I thought I’d give you more insight here, writer to writer, as it were.
I only gave it 4 stars, by the way, because of the editing. Had I only caught a few, maybe five or less errors, I wouldn’t have noticed or cared. I think a careful read-through or two would clear up the vast majority of them.
That said, what a read! Wow! I loved it! It’s a real page turner, and I think your build up at the end showed a real mastery of pacing. Everything builds and builds and then the fight is a crescendo worth waiting for. Very nice!
I think your characters are well-developed. Even Sir Nudd, who doesn’t (really) speak a line, felt like a flesh and blood person. I recently read a non-fictional book about homicide detectives, and every character felt as real as the people from real life I read about. Truly excellent job, here. The dialog was spot-on as well. I love good dialog. There’s real music to the way people speak to each other that writers can catch if they’re talented, and you have that talent.
As I said on Amazon, my highest compliment to you, sir: please write more so I can read it!
Admin comment by Matthew Colville · March 31, 2011 at 1:42 am
Jeff, I am *very* glad you liked it. Thank you for the review! Obviously I need to go through and get serious about editing it.
It’s feedback like this sir, that keeps me writing.
Tell you friends! Word of mouth is the only promotion I got!
I know I’ll have arrived when someone (besides me) starts a thread about the book on RPGnet.
Though I think that may take a second book
Book two is about 30% done! But the outline is almost finished at which point the other 70% will just take a few weeks. Stay tuned!
Matthew · July 3, 2011 at 4:09 am
Excellent story, that was amazing.
I think it’s really impressive how you manage to write such complex emotional dialogue, how you create characters affected by various emotional states, and how Heden is trying to read the emotional state of each of the green knights and the esuing confusion trying to figure it out. Writing complex dialogue is hard enough, like your example of Heden and the thief, but writing complex dialogue with this high level of confused emotions, rage, hate,shame, fear, hurt, regret, …
Great job, don’t know how you do it.