86 pages
Published 2026
Read from May 4 to May 6
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A self-published Sword & Sorcery novella from a New Edge author, with a kickass cover painted by none other than Goran Gligović? You best believe I had to snap this one up the moment I got paid this month.
The story is a Harryhausen-esque Sword & Sandal tale set in a pseudo-Roman Empire, where bot farms of reanimated skeletons toil over propaganda pamphlets, and the ultra-nationalistic resistance leader is buddy-buddy with the imperial elites whenever the poors aren’t watching.
Some general spoilers: Our much-abused protagonist gets force-femmed with an eldritch spell in order to infiltrate a wealthy merchant’s seraglio and pilfer a powerful amulet. Within the welcoming world of the seraglio, however, other, more interesting avenues open for her to explore. She finds both self and community for the first time, in the midst of frequent passionate interludes: “They were life, unashamed and defiant.”
For a self-published manuscript, Master is solidly written, just a few tweaks shy of professional polish. Saitta is particularly fond of placing pop culture Easter eggs: Godzilla, THX-1138, and of course Lovecraft all make appearances.
The paperback’s formatting is unfortunate: just a raw Word file, double-spaced, unjustified, Times New Roman text, page numbers in Calibri, hyphens in place of em dashes. The professional quality of the cover is misleading; there isn’t even a copyright page. Formatting and writing are different skill-sets, of course, but I’m begging self-pub authors to emulate the formatting norms of the trad-pub books on their shelves.
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