The Rune Lords

Epic fantasy that goes bad. In short, I would say the magic system is quite fascinating and unique, almost making up for the fact that everything else is pretty bad. Almost.With the exception of maybe Sanderson's allomancy magic in the Mistborn series, The Rune Lord's magic system just about tops off all the other magic systems out there. Stealing attributes from other people and adding them to your own to gain powers is genius. Keep taking people's abilities and become even more powerful till you achieve something like Godlike superhuman abilities.Everything else about the series comes off as pretty crappy, however. The plot -- there is a bad guy to kill and giant cockroaches to stamp out. There's a young prince with some amazing gifts who just might be the one to save the world from evil. Pretty typical stuff. The whole plot threads get even more muddled later on in the series when Farland, perhaps to keep the money train flowing his way, starts writing a sequel, turning the whole series into a sort of angels vs. demons story right along with a fantasy version of Jesus (the lightbringer) and a bad god/dark lord who's a sort of Satan. It's pretty clear that this whole good vs evil thing was hastily added to the canon of the world to continually milk the series. The whole thing brings to mind Raymond E. Feist's milking of the Riftwar universe by having the heroes continually struggling against a world-crushing dark god (who the heroes conveniently find out by book 10 is the real one pulling the threads behind all the lower bad guy dark lords they keep defeating). Bah, absolute garbage.All in all, Farland's writing comes off as tasteless and bland, devoid of any sort of actual style. There's also some pretty big inconsistency between what he's trying to say with his words and what he actually describes. This is even more true in the sections where he's trying to convey something grand and dramatic, but in actuality the whole thing comes off as unintentionally funny (because it's so gosh darn corny and badly written).There are certainly worse books out there, and in the epic fantasy category, there's plenty of dreck. The Rune Lords are not terribly bad, but there is something missing in them. Only read these if you've plowed through everything else that's good. The books are not really bad enough to label as the worst, but I feel I should point them out as books you should try to avoid unless desperate.