Beasts of the Walking City (Walking Cities Series) [Kindle Edition]

Del Law (Author)

Book Description

All author proceeds in May will be donated to Habitat for Humanity!  Get Beasts of the Walking City now for only $1.99, and support a great cause, too.

His parents were killed.  His people are hunted.  His world is at war.  

All of his life, Blackwell has been looking for a break, a place to call home--and now someone's come to take that away from him again.  Now he's on a one-way trip into the heart of danger, and as friends die around him he'll have to decide if he can stand up and fight back.

Beasts of the Walking City is an epic-fantasy thriller, full of steampunk cities that float and walk and fly, wild magic, time travel, and the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance.  With characters you'll be rooting for, and a plot that really surprises, you won't want to put this book down.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An Amazon #1 Free Bestseller in both Fantasy and Science Fiction!  An Amazon Top 30 Free Kindle Bestseller!

 

What Amazon readers are saying:

"Beasts of the Walking City was GREAT." -K Johnson

"Brilliant first novel" -MarkAU

"I hope he sells a lot of copies and writes another one." -HD-28

"I was hooked from the very begining, and didn't want to put this book down" -D.Peters

"If you're interested...in ancient cities full of strange beings...in city-sized ocean ships that float through air over invisible lines of power, in corpse roads, mage knives, ancient excavations, mysteries, novel cultures, and varied landscapes, I literally can't think of a book I can recommend as highly to you as Beasts of the Walking City."

-C Luc Reid

About the Author

Del Law is an award-winning writer with work in places like Glimmer Train Stories, the Sycamore Review, Passages North, and the Mississippi Review.  He's also received an Honorable Mention from the O. Henry Awards anthology. Del lives in California's rural Santa Cruz Mountains with his family, dogs, chickens, and bees.

Visit Del's blog at HouseOnBearMountain.com.

Product Details

• File Size: 489 KB
• Print Length: 344 pages
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Choroleos Books (August 3, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B008SHCBCW
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,760 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A good read, silly genre tropes nonwithstanding August 17, 2012

By HD-28

Format:Kindle Edition

First, Del Law is a good writer and I enjoyed this book. I'd recommend it to friends who enjoy genre fiction, especially those hunting for a deal. Now, on to the parsing.

Full disclosure: I'm reviewing this because I agreed to do so in exchange for a free copy. That was in response to an offer the author made to the general public on his blog, where he is writing about the experience of self-publishing.

Potential readers - especially those who normally avoid genre fiction - should know that this book is about an anthropomorphic cat wizard from another dimension who tries to steal a 300-year-old flying ship from the ruins of a crashed flying city. He's doing this on behalf of Al Capone, whom he contracted with after simultaneously traveling across both time and worlds. The book is filled with silly proper nouns - mostly the names of fictitious races, cities, etc. I like genre fiction, but all of this was a bit much at first.

Despite that, the book moves very fast, is internally consistent and is free of heavy-handed exposition. The writing is very good. Starting out, I was afraid it would be filled with overwrought hyperbole and excessive, adjective-strewn description. It's not. Law is economical with his language and manages to create believable and compelling characters, even if one is an inter-dimensional cat wizard and another a reluctant juvenile cult symbol - literally - who is wrestling with a slight bird-demon possession problem. The tone here is more terse urban fantasy than windy epic fantasy.

This is a self-published book and could use a good copy editor, but it isn't so error-filled that it takes you out of the narrative. There are typos. Some errors seem to imply that parts were written in third person and later changed to first person. But overall, it's impressive that the author could self-publish something this clean without extra eyes on it.

My favorite things here were the characters, the pacing and the world. By the end of the book, many of the plot elements I'd found ridiculous in the opening chapters no longer struck me as such.

On final review, I think this is as good as or better than many books coming from genre publishers. At minimum, it's original and the author creates characters you can care about.

I also think the author's idea to solicit reviews to build momentum, and to blog about the experience of self-publishing, is an interesting one that offers some insight into the state of modern publishing.

Based solely on the merits of the book, I hope he sells a lot of copies and writes another one.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Fun to Read! August 21, 2012

By Ruth Jobe

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Beasts of the Walking City was great fun to read. There are a few minor typos but enough to detract from the story. Blackwell makes for a delightful main character who ends up a hero in spite of himself. Different fantastical and magical species, tribes, and families people Blackwell's world. He starts out as a mercenary, becomes a "retriever" (which seems a fancy word for thief), and finds himself a pet for a time. This book has many facets, including magic and time travel. It's all put together in a new way that made it great fun to read. Plot and character development are excellent! I recommend it for fans of both science fiction and fantasy.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars The bones of good classic sci-fi September 15, 2012

By Nathaniel W. Miller

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

I recently purchased a kindle and have been exploring the wide world of e-books out there, this was one of my first.

I started with the sample chapters that you can get for free and I have to say that those were enigmatic, exciting, and well assembled and I gladly shelled out the (more than reasonable) $2.99 for the full book.

I love the compilation of magic and steam punk, but I think that this story tries to compile too many fantasy and science fiction elements all together at the same time. It makes the story unnecessarily complicated.

It was an interesting read, but it started strong and faded to a painful and grinding finish that did not carry the same well crafted atmosphere that it started with.

Finally, I think that the ability to self publish is an amazing new trend that will allow many authors to be distributed that would never be read otherwise, but this book is an excellent example of how important good editing is. There were numerous typos ranging from the minor to the glaring. Misspellings, spellcheck errors, shifting tenses mid-sentence, shifting from first person to third person and back again... these kinds of errors really took a decent story and moved it down the quality scale. Especially when you have a book that is full of author-invented nouns, it forces the reader to stop and try to figure out if something doesn't make sense because it was mis-written or mis-read.

More About the Author

Del Law's writing has appeared in a number of literary publications, including Glimmer Train Stories, the Sycamore Review, Passages North, repeatedly in the Mississippi Review, and has received an Honorable Mention from the O. Henry Awards anthology. He's won a Transatlantic Review Award in fiction, the Henfield Prize in short fiction, and a fellowship in fiction from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Del lives in California's rural Santa Cruz mountains, and his blog is online at http://www.HouseOnBearMountain.com.