The Darkslayer Omnibus

By: Craig Halloran

Narrated by: Lee Alan

Length: 86 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

They want him dead, but he won't die.

Venir didn't choose to be the defender of this unforgiving world full of bloodthirsty, magic-wielding underlings set on world domination. The helm of power and his waraxe called Brool chose him. And there's no turning back.

With enemies closing in from all directions, Venir, his thief friend, Melegal, and their companions must battle through an endless cycle of backstabbing royals, bloody skirmishes, and waves of lies and deceit. Or see their home descend into total chaos and devastation.

The Darkslayer series is an epic sword and sorcery adventure set in a world where bored immortals play with the lives of the unsuspecting inhabitants. Fans of R. A. Salvatore's Drizzt Do' Urden, Frizt Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, David Gemmell's Druss the Legend, The Witcher, Raymond E. Feist's Pug the Wizard, or Robert E. Howard's Conan get delighted in the Darkslayer series. Perhaps you will as well.

©2017 Craig Halloran (P)2022 Craig Halloran

I could not get over the terrible background nose.

Returned this one. Aside from the intentional sound effects, there is a constant ringing noise.

Constant background sound

Any additional comments?

There is a constant background noise. It sounds like an "electric cricket" making a constant electric chirping noise when the narrator is speaking. It will give you headache after listening for while, like its doing to me. Lee Alan narration is fine, if you can stand constant electric chirping.

Screeching noise ruined book

I got maybe 2 hours in after 10 plus attempts to read the book, but the background Screeching gives me an instant headache and makes me feel nausea.

Cliches, Stilted prose, plodding narration.

I've been a subscriber to Audible Audio books for more than a decade and this book and its audio performance are the worst I've ever heard. The story line is adequate, but the book is over narrated with clumsy writing and riddled with cliches, stock phrases, and stilted exchanges between the characters. The characters come off as cartoonish, lacking any nuance or depth.

The narration by Lee Alan compounds the one dimensional nature of the story and manages to emphasize cliches and stock phrasing. A more skillful narrator could have made the story seem less stilted and unnatural. Instead, Alan seems to pull out one laughably ridiculous intonation after another, decreasing the realism of the plot and characters with every word.

This is also one of the few book narrations I have heard that used sound effects or back ground noise to enhance the story. This was used to good effect in a bar fight scene. However, often, the narration included a background melody that seemed poorly matched to the mood of the scene being read.

I have never read a book by Mr. Halloran before and I hope this is not indicative of his work. I wish him the best in the future.

it’s a D&D Adventure

The Story is good, just like a D&D adventure, reader did a good job with the story and the voices he uses for each character are great, but here the bad part, the production is pretty bad, from a quite high pitch tone for the first hour of the book to the pops, scratches and hisses that plague the entire book, I feel I could have done a better job with my iPhone and GarageBand and made a better finished product

What happened to the last chapter?

Very dissapointing. I struggled with this one. Narrator was ok. But after listening for so many hours and no last chapter?

only good thing about this book is it's length

this is the worst audio book I have ever listened to. the narrator makes it a struggle to listen too. long unnecessary pauses in the middle of sentences, mispronounced words, and he makes every female character sound like a 90 year old man. the sound effects and music sound like my son did them in our garage. did they record the internal dialogue in a bathroom, or did they just walkie talkie it in? seriously I want to know. now do I need to get into the story? if you kill people off and bring them all back to life, eventually the reader/listener just assumed they are all going to come back to life. there are so many holes in the story it's frustrating. like scorch did something to bish. ok can we know what he did or is it a mystery that will never be solved. but again it's 84 hours long so if you have low standards and a lot of time to kill listen to this book.

lots of loose ends, low production value

For the price (80 hours for one credit) it was well worth it. The book did fall short of expectations but the author has a really unique way of world building.

Pathetic beyond belief

It would have been better if you had killed every character in the 1st paragraph. All the characters had the minds of twelve-year-old children. An endless parade of cowards and fools.

I think this is an old recording,

I cant listen to the background ringing anymore.Sounds like a 70's cartoon. Slow and monotonous wrtiting.

My thoughts

This might have been a great omnibus , but it was let down by the delay between chapters but the main problem was the bloody stupid sound effects with was so bloody annoying and for that reason I rated this low

I really want to rate this series higher

Overall there are so many interesting story points and characters in these books with the narrator seemingly putting in loads of effort, but I just can't give it a high rating due to it's failings.

Negative:
The narrator doesn't seem to utilise normal human inflections when reading. There are so many pauses in between words that confuse or change the flow of the sentence. For example one sentence was read "they reached..... the edge..... of the forest" the pauses really feel like they're for dramatic effect until you slowly realise that they just seem to be everywhere without concern for the impact they have on the flow of the story.
There are numerous mispronunciations of words, some recurring such as "chimera" and others minor that really impact on the scene being portrayed. And as stated in a few other reviews there's a high pitched buzz in the background for most of this recording.

Most of the characters are similar, warriors fighting all the time. I felt like the story also included a lot of racist undertones, and not just with human characters. It seemed like dark skinned characters were frequently referred to as such, for example "... said the large black man" and "his dark skin shone", while there's nothing wrong with these descriptions I noticed it a lot with very little comment about pale skined characters. This seemed to be compounded by referring to non human characters by what seemed like racial slurs 'dog-faced gnoll' was used very frequently.
There is also the same catch-phrase repeated during the story about a thousand times, which gets a bit tiring.

Positive:
The narrator seemed to put a load of effort into this book, with loads of sound effects and even background music which was really great for atmosphere in the majority of the audiobook. Some of the character voices were really interesting too.

The book has some really interesting story points and character points with some side characters being really captivating while they are in the story.

The main positive is this one audiobook is really long and lasted me over a month with approximately 30 mins listening a day.

don't bother

Made it through the first book, not sure which was worst the narrator or the lack of a story/writing style.

I could not do any better and my only reason for writing this is that I feel I wasted more time listening to this book and feel the comments do not reflect the book I listened to.

Reading these reviews - this is like Marmite!!!

First things first - I have listened to this epic 86+ hours and absolutely loved it. If you like fantasy, magic, proper hero vs villain sagas then you will love the books - there are more cliffhangers and resurrections in these books than any I've read before and for the last couple of months this has been a great entertainment.
Now - the narrator gets a bit of a slating in these reviews .... but, his mispronunciation of certain words and the pregnant pauses in the middle of sentences (where I think he's turning a page 🤣) is simply part of the entertainment !!! Just go with it - his voices and accents for each of the characters are endearing and I'm genuinely quite sad that this is now over.
All I can say is that for 1 credit to get 86 hours is pretty awesome - stick with it and just chuckle at the mistakes xxx

Worst audio book I’ve listened to so far

The theatrical approach to the narration of this book did not resonate with me. I recommend listening to the sample before downloading the book.

not great

I did want to enjoy this but the further it went to worse it got. the main characters, and there is quite a few, spend a lot of time whining and are mostly unlikeable. The main character Vanir is basically useless and spends more time getting mutilated,tied up and beaten than actually doing anything, always getting beaten even though he's supposed to get bigger and stronger. Also having 8 different scenarios running at once isn't a great idea as by the time it Jumps back to the first one you have almost forgotten what was happening. the narrator isn't great, pausing in strange place like "he didn't know what to..........do" also makes every female sound like an old hag and don't let start on the 'screams' and 'yells'. I sadly cannot recommend.

It's certainly long...

The Darkslayer Omnibus is a strange and expansive story, at times feeling like a sprawling roleplay campaign written by its players. Its characters are heroic archetypes in a novel world which Halloran clearly loves.

The societies, crudely sketched to start with, do get fleshed out as the stories progress and Halloran uses some interesting magical items that engage the audience's curiosity. I'd certainly be interested to see how the more powerful artefacts are used in different characters' hands.

The main setback to my enjoyment was the poor editing, which magnified the frequently disjointed & strained narration. Otherwise, here's the trigger warning, there are sustained scenes of sexual violence against women which makes it inappropriate for younger listener's while others may wish to avoid this content. In contrast, male protagonists seemingly shrug off the effects of torture and violence against them as if acknowledging mutilation is unmasculine.

Outside of what I presume is the author's intent to create a "gritty and darkly realistic" world you should
prepare yourself for light fantasy and suspend your disbelief for the characters' implausible adventures.

Disappointed

Great story concept but poorly written and not very well narrated. It would seem this was written for ages 5 to 10. There is a complete disconnect between plots and characters' personalities change from o e chapter to the next, making it impossible to connect to them. It feels like twists in the story were written to fill space.

Not an enjoyable read.

shame, could have been so much better

production is aweful, reading by narrator is bizarre in places, writing is poor, but cost me nothing so got what I paid for