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The Scourges Pentadecaphron
The Scourges Pentadecaphron is a fifteen-book set of ElemenstorLance books which turns the epic fantasy of the more traditional Elemenstor books on its head. This series chronicles twelve villains, The Twelve Scourges of Battal in their individual bids to raze, conquer, destroy, obliterate, or eat Battal. The final books take a crack at accounting for the First Great Elemenstation War mentioned in The Elemenstor Saga, which came about when the Twelve joined forces in a great final battle. Since some of the Twelve died prior to this, the authors make liberal and unashamed use of timesorc'ley throughout the Pentadecaphron.
This premise sounds promising, but unfortunately the books on the whole are marked by very poor characterization, formulaic plots, dull, predictable action, interminable, pointless conversation, typographical and typesetting errors, and an overall lack of quality in writing which has led to some very serious speculation -- followed up by an official investigation by the Washington State Department of Education -- that the book was outsourced to grade-schoolers. In aggregate, this amounts to an almost total lack of engagement on the part of the reader. Many appreciators of the epic Elemenstor Cycle were very disappointed by this series, but it continues to sell well, particularly to angsty teenage boys, who appear to enjoy the constant, unnecessary, over-the-top violence and destruction, as well as the glorification of the darker impulses and the plots so predictable it makes the boys feel insightful to have forseen their turnings.
These books, by virtue of their graphic depictions of violence, as well as their constant use of coarse language and graphic -- though frequently highly innacurate -- descriptions of sexual acts, of types possible, impossible, and criminal, bear the sad distinction of being the only Elemenstor literature to have been banned by Congress from use in any public school library, or to have been denounced by Christian activist groups as "works of the Satan".
One stunningly successful attempt to salvage The Twelve Scourges of Battal and the First Great Elemenstation War into a worthwhile plot was the Nintendo 64 turn-based strategy "EFWQ Tactics," which nonetheless managed to bomb by being cancelled after a limited production run for odd (mysterious?) reasons.
Books in the Sourges Pentadecaphron
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