John Golden and the Heroes of Mazaroth review

    This is the funniest thing I've read in ages.

    Seriously.

    I may be biased since I'm a World of Warcraft fan but this is hilarious. Most of the jokes are understandable to someone who hasn't played but those who have, man, they're (no pun intended) golden.

    The book contains references to: auction houses, dungeon raids, re-spawning, fantasy's somewhat questionable female attire, questgivers, and God knows how much else. I've read the story three or four terms and I'm still finding new in-jokes. This is a labor of love and I appreciate that.

    The premise of the John Golden series is fairies have invaded the internet. It's much easier for them to manifest in computer networks than in our world. This interferes with the performance of the systems and, occasionally, the fae steal the souls of their computer's users. As a result, a special class of fairy-hunters exist called Debuggers.

    Debuggers can physically enter the networks and kill the wayward fae inside. This doesn't actually harm the fae since "death" is only temporary for them, but it repairs the network. John Golden is the world's best debugger, in part due to the aid of his disembodied sister Sarah.

    Sarah lost her body in a fairy poker game (don't ask) and has been living in John's laptop ever since. Possessing all the powers of an A.I., Sarah provides John with badly-needed backup in the internet-influenced world of the fae.

    Here, John Golden has found a stereotypical fantasy Dark Lord living in a finance company's servers. John finds out this fae is a refugee from the obscenely popular Heroes of Mazaoth game. Unable to defeat the powerful internet daemon, John needs to figure out a way to get it to return to a life getting killed repeatedly by level-grinding gamers.

    Again, it's hilarious.

    I can't say much more about the story without spoiling it. After all, the book is only sixty-nine pages long. However, it gets funnier by the page. Buy this novella if you own an e-reader, love urban fantasy, and have the slightest familiarity with WOW.

10/10