Review: Intrinsic by Jerry Collins

★★★★

Jatara is a powerful and of course, beautiful and magical Kali-like goddess who can destroy men and cities in a moment. Her war of terror spans Ancient Greece, Egypt and the slaves of the Pyramids where her humble beginnings are revealed, to modern-day New York, with her dark magician son Kragon taking on the power of the nastiest demons to conquer all men, despite having a mortal, pregnant girlfriend.

Intrinsic, Book One of a series, follows various uber-evil superbeings through a vast amount of time, mostly following Kragon, a flawed antihero with magic skills who thrives on gore and violence to get his own way. However, he is in thick with the politicians and statesmen of an alternative world Manhattan, where he reigns (and kills many of) the jail’s political prisoners held in a 1984-like regime, unable to speak against the takeovers by dark forces. With a feeling of the movie Equilibrium, those who speak out not only will lose their life, but those around them will also die with Kragon’s zero tolerance approach.

The book is written in a very biblical, fantasy way with very dense language that sometimes may not make much sense to the reader, but after a while it settles and the use of words becomes a poetic dialect of the world created.

However, Collins will need to be more detailed in Book Two if he is to get away with leaving out so much explanation and back story – if he does fulfill the promise of more flesh for the story starting here, and gets a balance worthy of the ideas in terms of the plot arc (the third act is far too quick) and motivations (why do these characters want so much death?) this could turn into an epic tale worth digging into if you don’t overthink the reasoning behind these mass slaughters that basically happen in each chapter on the turn of a dime.

For fans of graphic gore and blood battle quests such as 300, Battle Royale, and Immortals, this book will go down very well. Graphic novel fans will get into it too, given the huge and vast visual descriptions of murder most foul in every possible way, guts and glory flying everywhere on every page.

Just don’t think about why too much, and you’ll read some of the most hardcore fighting scenes this reader has come across in a fantasy world in a long time. Therefore, reader discretion is advised.

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