- Title: The Bathroom Knight
- Author: Charles Dean
- No of Pages: 403
- Published: 20th June 2015
Hello my fellow wordsmiths and page turners,
Today we are going to be looking at The Bathroom Knight by Charles Dean. This is the second MMORPG (massively multiplayer online game) style novel that I have read, it had a lot of good points and a few downsides as well. Some of which I believe have now been corrected following a revision by the author.
“But what is The Bathroom Knight about?”
The story follows the exploits of an accountant named Darwin who somehow gets digitized to a game world wearing nothing but his bathrobe. The world itself is that of your typical RPG(Role Playing Game), it has a distinct virtual interface and various self aware NPCs(Non Player Characters). It is not long before you start getting some serious Sword Art Online vibes as Darwin quickly discovers he is trapped inside the game and cant Log Out. The story follows our hapless hero as he stumbles through the game in an attempt to find his way out.
“What’s good and what’s bad?”
I genuinely think that Charles put some real effort into the creation of his characters. He clearly took the time in making appropriate and varied backstories for each one, which led to a diverse cast of interesting characters. However, that being said, I do feel that a lot of the characters within the book were not needed and the story could have been condensed considerably without them, and it would not have affected the story overall..
Dean’s style of writing is where the real problem is the story is cut into several points of view with sections centered around a different characters, each of which are written from a third person narrative which was its only saving grace as a 1st person perspective would have been a nightmare. The reason it’s written in this way is so if you dislike a specific character you can skip that chapter and have it not lose that much of the story. The problem with this method is that it makes it very hard to know who the main character is and you start thinking the “side quest” is actually the main story line.
Among the style issues we also find a considerable amount of grammar and spelling mistakes. These are met with varying levels of critique by readers, as some let it slide and I believe we are all familiar with the term Grammar & Spelling Nazis who represent the opposite end of the scale. Most of the time they are only minor errors such as “adn” or “hwo” when it should be “and” & “how”, but as you can imagine it does impede the reading experience as you tend to pause on these mistakes.
These negatives aside, the overall story of The Bathrobe Knight is interesting, the story evolves as you read it, and the characters keep things interesting so you want to keep reading the series to see what will happen next. As I stated previously a revised version of the book has been released since I read it and I believe the spelling and grammatical errors along with some of the minor plot holes have been corrected.
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Until next time read more books!
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