the novel approach

Lisa says:

"After the back-to-back epics that are Caged and Sacrificed, Bey Deckard has taken a bit of a departure from both pirates and full-length novels with Sarge, a sci-fi novella set on a war-torn planet where to kill or to be killed is the underscore of each day for the men and women fighting a war not of their own making.

It would be easy to enumerate the ways in which this latest offering from Mr. Deckard differs from his Baal’s Heart series, not the least of which is that this story is futuristic while Baal’s Heart is set in a distant past. How they resemble each other, though, is twofold: first, there’s the fantasy aspect—this story being told from a time and place that is at once nondescript yet is an easily imagined setting, this time not the vastness of the world’s oceans but the immensity of outer space, and the barren and rugged landscape of a far off planet. Second is this story’s heroes, Sarge and Murphy, who, from page one, grab the reader’s attention when the harsh and unforgiving reality of their circumstances becomes evident thanks to the author’s vivid description of the action, the two men immersed in the thick of battlefield danger. These men are every bit as enigmatic and charismatic as their fictional pirate counterparts, though in different ways, and I was invested in their story right from the outset."

Read the whole review at The Novel Approach