Into Twilight is a brand new LitRPG book from Cale Plamann published by Mountain Dale Press. To my knowledge, it’s his first book, and he comes out swinging. It features a blend of science fiction and fantasy themes, conspiracies and glaring critiques, and doesn’t pull its punches.
We set the stage with honest to goodness elves landing upon Earth with the intent to conquer our mundane world. Unfortunately, elves have never heard of Mr Colt and his friends, and are quickly put down as soldiers open fire and cut down the overambitious invaders. Enter Dan Thrush, a technician in the Army with a master’s in electrical engineering. He’s smart, but honestly a bit a of a pushover. Through an action of immense foolhardiness, he becomes the only Terran to acquire magical powers. I won’t spell out what happens from there, because Spoilers, but let’s just say he followed the white rabbit.
In a lot of ways, this is the story of Dan overcoming codependence and the scars of emotional abuse from the women in his life. This was a really touching tale for me, because I understand where he’s been, and what it took to leave there. The thing about codependence is that you rarely realize you’re going there. It’s a long slow circling the drain, and by the time we meet Dan, he’s literally been circling it all his life. This isn’t the tale of “how to become codependent” but “how Dan escapes it”. Especially “How does Dan stop being codependent on the women in his life.”
Now to be fair here: codepedence is gender neutral. Dan struggles with codependence with women, but it really doesn’t care about gender at all. Dan grows in power and, through literally fighting for his life, learns that he can’t let this pattern continue. Even when he realizes it, codependence follows him out into the wastes. It’s slimy tentacles don’t care you’ve hit rock bottem, they still want to latch onto you like ticks and suck you dry. He chooses between returning and death, and chooses death. Honestly, having experienced codependence, I can’t say I blame him.
But fortune favors him and he’s given an opportunity to break that grip and grow as a person. As often is the case, he replaces one vice for another, and has to break that grip as well. Our journey ends with his recognition of these flaws and hardening his will to overcome them.
Honestly, I really enjoyed the ride. This wasn’t the book I was expecting, but it was a worthy journey. You might find Dan pitiable, and you’d be right to feel that way. He absolutely is. But this is litrpg, the saturday morning cartoons for adults. Hapless losers becoming powerhouses is our bread and butter. It’s a classic underdog tale with some serious undertones that I rarely see addressed, never for men. It was a sympathetic tale with a lot of great points.
The book was intriguing in its approach to fantasy, rather genre savvy, and incredibly hopeful for something on the System Apocalypse side of genre. Dan being an electrical engineer, I found him highly relatable since (as most of you know) that’s my day job. Occasionally this lead to awkward scenes, like where Dan has to have air being an insulator to him, where the author clearly lacked the knowledge of what an electrical engineer should know. Don’t worry, those not of my profession probably won’t catch any of these things, but those of you who know what a member of my profession should know will notice with a chuckle.
I enjoyed it, both in its pulp and its character and world development. Mountain Dale continues its ability to select authors who will bring me people instead of charicatures, as Dale and the other characters presented are fully realized individuals instead of placeholders for characters. It is a journey that I enjoyed taking: it has solid fights, triumphs and failures, explainations, and swords. (I’m still waiting for more good fights with spears as the main feature, so who knows, Cale, drop me some good hafted fighting)
If I had a suggestion for a potential reader, I’d say “This is not your typical Sword and Sorcery, don’t cling to your preconceptions.” Cale has done a good job of taking genre tropes in new directions, and some of them he stretched out to an almost different form. That’s a compliment, before you get it twisted, he did a great job of covering all the litrpg bases while also taking them in novel, almost redefining directions.
What are you still doing here? Go get Into Twilight and join Dan!
Enjoy yourselves
-Wo’ah the Wise