Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding. Worldbuilding.
That erstwhile esoteric, pensive, and feverishly logical obligation of all creative writers and novelists tends to astound the unprepared as much as it does, on occasion, wound the overeager. In SKELETON KNIGHT. . .#5, the author pushes to integrate each character deeper and deeper into the lore of this odd yet dangerous fantasy realm. In the previous volume, Arc and his crew encountered beautiful forests and rolling fog and pitch-black caverns. In the current volume, the cast hits upon the open sea and makes its way to the southern continent, where craggy cliffs, a mysterious and uncharted forest, and vast, open plains lay in wait.
For readers eager to see Arc get back into action, SKELETON KNIGHT. . .#5 is a tedious ride. Sadly, nothing exciting occurs in the book's first 200 pages. Arc and his friends spend much of the novel mingling with sailors, wandering street markets in search of novel foods, and making-nice with regional clans of tiger-people. It isn't until Arc, Ariane, Chiyome, and Goemon cross blades with a several-meters-tall dark giant that things get serious.
The second half of the novel pits the heroes against an array of shifting foes and shadowy odds. Do they fight the dark giants? Do they fight the cloaked invaders? Do they, themselves, invade the local human city, where beast-people are surely kept as slaves? The trajectory of the story shifts and pivots not unlike the earliest books in this novel series, and the result is that familiar and exciting combination of accidental heroism and clever magic.
The quality of writing does take a dip with this volume. The author relies too heavily on various tropes and turns of phrase whose redundancy betrays a lack of originality in both scope and conscientiousness. Every female character has a large bosom (under which she invariably folds her arms in discontent), every male warrior character has bulging and rippling muscles, every sunset paints or bathes the horizon some variant of red or scarlet or crimson, and so on and so forth. The organic detail of the previous volume, it seems, has completely evaporated.
SKELETON KNIGHT. . .#5 is fun but lacks finesse. Even the final monster whom Arc battles in the novel's waning pages is so pitifully described that it's rather impossible to successfully visualize. Furthermore, the book's "surprise" character addition appears all for naught, since the character is an "undead" who just, sort of, dies. What a waste.