The Shop of Souls is a rather unconventional series. The description gives the impression it’s about a morally ambiguous shopkeeper who grants wishes in exchange for a personal price from the petitioner. That is not the case as the price can in fact be paid by anyone so long as they are ‘willing’, for certain definitions of the term. Which is to say the series is actually about an unambiguously evil protagonist who brutally tortures and wholesale slaughters entire worlds to enrich himself and those he’s fond of for one reason or another.
And yet… it’s also a comedy. A pitch black comedy to be sure, but the comedic elements are certainly there. So, yeah, it’s odd and I’m not really sure whether the comedic aspects are enough to outweigh the central ‘torturing innocents to death’ theme and strangely frequent usage of junior/senior in conversation (as if this were translated from Japanese with their sempai/kouhai concepts).
A completely different kind of book, I picked up Erik Schubach‘s first Techromancy Scrolls novel (subtitle: Magic & Technology Collide) way back after having to drop his Worldship Files series over page-count concerns; it took me so long to get around to reading it mostly because it’s something I grabbed more out of a sense of obligation than any real interest.
That said, it turned out pretty solid. There are some issues with the setup (why would her mother not warn her about her ancestry if commoners with magic are jailed and shipped away?) and romance (fairly abrupt, though not as bad as Worldship‘s), but the character interactions are all entertaining and the plot developments are interesting. As for the post-apocalyptic setting, which is set in the rebuilding phase, well, it could go either way at this point.
