The Daemonhold Curse,
by Teel James Glenn
E-Press-online Inc.
The world presented in Daemonhold Curse is told in vivid detail, within an
underlying scenario that blends the atmosphere of a Japanese samauri movie with Highland clan adventure. With thirty years
of experience as a stuntman, swordmaster and fight choreographer, Teel James Glenn weaves a story as full of movement as it
is cinematographic.
The curse hurled at the family Daemon strikes each daughter as they reach
their twenty-first birthday and priest-warrior Lord Erique Shoutte tries desperately to keep the last Daemon heiress, Fidelity,
from the curse after already failing her sister five years before. Three friends – Lord Erique, Arinna the swordswoman,
and her lover Yuzen – stand guard against the superstition of the curse as well as very real enemies through the deadly
night in the rambling family seat, Daemonhold.
Told from multiple character points of view, and sometimes switching bewilderingly
from one to another, the novel has a tone and structure very much like one of the movie scores the author has lived with so
long. His knowledge of swordfighting and setting up screen fights sometimes pokes a bit too enthusiastically out of the flow
of the plot. And indeed there are a great many fights as some force or person strives to prevent the heroes from fulfilling
their mission. If there is a fault in the writing it is that of striving to fill in every last detail – instructions
for the cast, when the reader should be allowed to exercise his or her own imagination.
Christopher Hoare - Muse Book Reviewer
*GOOD
