The Land of the Undying

Dark Elf Chronicles, Book 1

By: Dave Willmarth

Narrated by: Justin Thomas James, Laurie Catherine Winkel, Jeff Hays

Shari is a med student, months away from being a doctor. Mace is a coder on his first day of an exciting new job. When the world comes to a sudden and horrifying end, none would have expected them to be among the few survivors.

Hyper-aggressive undead zombie creatures hunt anything living on the surface, where even the grass and trees can kill you. Hiding underground is safe, but not much of a life. Their only escape is a virtual world of magic and monsters where Shari can use her healing skills, and Mace can focus on something other than his fears.

But Shari is a light elf, and Mace is a drow. Their people are ancient enemies, and neither would be welcome in the other's world. Still they strive to come together in the game, while they scavenge for food and fight to stay alive in the real world.

The odds are against them, and their food will eventually run out. Is their best hope for survival to find a way to upload themselves to the game permanently?

©2018 Dave Willmarth (P)2018 Dave Willmarth

I’m pretty stingy with my 5 star reviews...

And while I’m not sure that this is technically the best LitRPG book I’ve listened to on audible, I can say that I’m experiencing the same feeling I had after listening to The Land for the first time...

...I am feeling bereft that the book has ended, and I’m seconds away from going on Patreon to donate money to this author to get the next book recorded already!

I will breathlessly await the sequel to this book. For those of you out there like me who just can’t trust a highly reviewed LitRPG book on Audible to be well-written, or even edited, this is one where the positive reviews can be believed. It’s definitely made the list of LitRPG series that I comb the “coming soon” list for.

Tops on that list are: Chaos Seeds, The Gam3, The Dark Herbalist, The System Apocalypse, and the first five books of Alterworld, plus a whole bunch of other series that only have one or two books in them so far.

My favorite LITRPG

I'm loving this series. I appreciate that the reason for getting into the game is more of an escape than an accident.

It has potential

Love the post apocalyptic setting. I would like the author to build more on the state of the world. But mayb in book 2?

Buy the Audible!

Absolutely loved listening to this book!
Normally, I bounce between the kindle version and the audible depending on where I’m reading (driving in car vs a quiet moment at lunch), but with this book, I ended up walking around in headphones all day just to keep it going.

On content/plot: this was a pretty decent blend of two worlds, each with their own stories going on, told from two cooperative viewpoints. You have the post-apocalyptic world full of infected “zombies” with our survivors huddled together in an underground shelter. Then you have the VR world, which is pretty standard fantasy, but done pretty well, with NPCs showing concern over the sudden loss of players, and our two protagonists experiencing the world differently (standard hero vs dark race just trying to survive)

The Voices: the two main narrators were amazing, and the tonal shifts and emotion added so much to an already decent story. You can hear the smile and joy in Laurie Winkle’s voice and it made it nearly impossible not to fall in love with Shari just a little bit.

I’ll stop rambling now. Just make sure to grab this book the next time you want to walk around laughing to yourself and confusing the people around you.

Great story

This is a great novel that combines two seemingly disparate genres and does it well. The real life storyline is zombie survival. Mace lucked out getting into a secure facility, and even through he has running water, electricity, and a safe place to sleep, he’s alone. He plays a VR game so that he won’t go crazy from the loneliness. He still has to risk his life against the monsters outside to scavenge for food every couple weeks. Then one day he hears someone over the radio, Sheri, and two meet up so that they can work together to survive. Lots of great survivalist stuff in the real world story and a little romance.

The game storyline, is mostly action, adventure MMO stuff. But something that the author is able to do, is make that game stuff relevant to the real world storyline. Mace wants to upload his mind to the game, giving him the possibility of living there as long as the electricity in their geothermal powered facility stays up, possibly centuries. But to do that, he needs to achieve a level of synchronicity with the game by training his mind to think of the game like it’s the real world. This gives the story the excuse to have both characters play the game. But what the author does that I think is interesting, is that he keeps the theme of survival in the game, at least for the drow storyline. In addition to that, the game itself notices that all the players have gone missing and tries to figure out how to adjust, even going so far as to give quests to Shari to bring players back to their world.

Overall, I had a great time listening to this. Though I’ll admit, I was already partial to the apocalypse survival genre.