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    The Infernal City: An Elder Scrolls Novel
    The Infernal City: An Elder Scrolls Novel
    The Infernal City: An Elder Scrolls Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Infernal City: An Elder Scrolls Novel

    Written by Greg Keyes

    Narrated by Michael Page

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Four decades after the Oblivion Crisis, Tamriel is threatened anew by an ancient and all-consuming evil. It is Umbriel, a floating city that casts a terrifying shadow-for wherever it falls, people die and rise again.And it is in Umbriel's shadow that a great adventure begins and a group of unlikely heroes meet. A legendary prince with a secret. A spy on the trail of a vast conspiracy. A mage obsessed with his desire for revenge. And Annaig, a young girl in whose hands the fate of Tamriel may rest....
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 9, 2012
    ISBN9781452678696
    The Infernal City: An Elder Scrolls Novel
    Author

    Greg Keyes

    Born in Meridian, Mississippi, Greg Keyes has published more than thirty books, including The Basilisk Throne, The Age of Unreason, and The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, also writing books for Babylon 5, Star Wars, Planet of the Apes, The Avengers, and Pacific Rim, and novelizing Interstellar and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. He lives, writes, fences and cooks in Savannah, Georgia. He is found on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/greg.keyes1.

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    Reviews for The Infernal City

    3.5/5

    75 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I really wanted to like this book. It wasn't badly written, but I think Keyes relied to much on the content of the video games. The book offered nothing really new to the world, so I have to say it sort of failed. Nevertheless, I am a huge Elder Scrolls fan, so I will read the sequel.
    • 4/5
      i was pleasantly surprised by just how much i enjoyed this one. my expectations for videa game based novels are certaintly not high, but I genuinely thought this was pretty good. i adored the characters, i was hooked from the prologue, it was an all-in-all solid entertaining read.

      that being said, this novel does play around with some of the weirder aspects of TES lore so i would say you have to plays the games first to really have any idea of what is going on.
    • 1/5
      I can’t believe how boring this was. When I finally tapped that “I’m finished” button on my goodreads app and looked at the two dates, I realized it had taken me one day short of an entire year to read this book. And it’s 280 pages long. And I read epic fantasy a lot.

      And maybe that’s the problem, because this was like baby’s first epic fantasy. Unfortunately I’m not a baby, and this was far from my first epic fantasy. Maybe if it was I would have enjoyed it a little bit. Unfortunately, as someone who has read his fair share of epic fantasy (did I mention that?), I found it cliché, adequately written at best, and boring beyond all measure. And it’s short for an epic fantasy. I’m used to books that are several hundred pages longer than this, and yet it took me forever to slog through this thing.

      My first issue is that the author obviously doesn’t understand what makes an Elder Scrolls game special, or at least me and him have a disagreement in that area. There’s a reason the main quest of Oblivion is everyone’s least favorite quest line in the game—it’s a cliché fantasy story about saving the world from a massive evil from another demesne. Just like this book. Do you see my issue yet? He picked the worst part of an Elder Scrolls game to base his plot on.

      If you want to write a great Elder Scrolls story, why not write about the Dark Brotherhood? That was the best quest line in Oblivion, after all. Why not write about literally anything besides a world-destroying evil whose origin isn’t even hinted at for almost the entire book? Are you trying to be a boring cliché? Not only that, but hey, let’s set it far into the future from Oblivion and spend lots of time in Black Marsh where no Elder Scrolls game has been set, just so that fans of the series have even less common ground to grasp onto.

      -Sigh-. All that being said, I’m probably going to read the sequel, Lord of Souls, because:

      A: I bought it when I bought this

      B: The end of this book, and I mean like, the very end, offers some actual promise. We get to finally find out something about Umbriel, the floating city. We go to Morrowind. We get to briefly see different planes of Oblivion. The second book, as much as it pains me to say it, might be something worth reading for an Elder Scrolls fan like me. Too bad I had to get through this one first.
    • 2/5
      OK, I have to admit that I'm not a video game player, and I'm not at all familiar with the Elder Scrolls game, so I'm not the target audience for this book. It was actually better than I might have expected for a video game tie-in, however, I couldn't avoid having very high hopes due to the 4 Keyes books I previously read - the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone epic - which are all fully 5-star novels!
      I just couldn't really get into this, though. Although it had some good writing (nice turns of phrase and original imagery), for such a short book, it had too many different characters in different places, without enough development. A lot of the plot episodes seemed very abrupt. The female lead being stuck in the kitchens was just a little too goofy. And of course, it ends with an obvious sequel set-up.
      I'm still planning on reading more Keyes - but I think I'll skip the tie-ins.
    • 3/5
      I liked this book, but I have two big caveats about it:1) It assumes that the reader knows the world of Tamriel and, further, has played or at least knows the plots of both Morrowind and Oblivion. The references to events and characters in those games, not to mention to places, races, and general terms unique to the setting go completely unexplained. This is fine for a fan like me, but I suspect anyone new to Elder Scrolls fandom would be lost. Personally, I think it's a mistake; this was a chance for them to attract new fans and they blew it by not including an appendix or two.2.) This is is book 1 of 2. Unfortunately, it does not have a real ending; it just kind of stops in the middle. I don't quite get why - it's certainly short enough that it could have kept going. As it is, the ending is frustrating. I'd recommend anyone considering getting the book wait until the second book is out, too, and get them both at the same time.That said, the writing is pretty good, particularly for a book based on a video game franchise (that said, however, the Elder Scrolls isn't exactly the typical franchise for this kind of thing). The author seems to have a good grasp of the setting and I particularly liked the characterization of Black Marsh and the Argonians - it reminded me very much of a certain series of books found in Morrowind. It would have been nice if it were a bit longer, though; it's fairly short for the number of PoV characters it has and their development suffers a little for it.
    • 4/5
      I'm a big TES fan. So of course I rush out to buy this puppy the moment Hasting's opened and read it the same day. If you're not a TES fan, some of the details might elude you, but the overall story will be pretty easy to grasp. If you're the type of person who likes having all the background explained to you, you might want to read it in front of a computer with your browser open to The Imperial Library (a google search should turn it up as the first hit).The Infernal City was a fun, quick read. I enjoyed it. There's one part in particular that pretty much screamed TES, and that made the whole thing worth reading in and of itself. TES fans will find that Tamriel has changed slightly in some places, more drastically in others. That also makes the book required reading for TES fans. The main plot, however, isn't so strong. Without the TES background, it would be relegated to "nothing special." I think that's really what hurts the book the most. I can understand wanting to leave the truly epic TES plots for the games, but that left the book with a rather "meh" plot. My biggest gripe with the The Infernal City is the ending. The book's not terribly short, but it ends rather abruptly for one set of characters, and I'm still not sure if a page or two went missing or what. It also screams "The next book will be a sequel," leaving me with what feels suspiciously like half a book. One set of characters had a good, solid, end-of-a-book ending, the other set were left hanging with no resolution of any kind. Acceptable in comics, yes, not so much in books. Nothing for those characters was resolved, and I feel rather cheated in that regard. Now I have to wait for the next one to come out before I get any resolution at all. So overall, a good, fun book. Not a GREAT book, and it will certainly be improved upon with a sequel and some resolution, but definitely a good read for the TES fan.