/lit/ - Literature

>>21911416
The Golden is a quasi-detective story set in a Castlevania tier castle. Carmilla and The Pale Lady are very influential pre-Dracula kino, if not ott fantastical.

So I read pic related on recommendation from another Anon here, and it was alright. Seems like someone played Castlevania and wanted to write a book set in a comically huge video game castle, and actually had the imagination and writing chops to pull it off well. The plot is a White Wolf style personal tragedy / coming of age story, which Shepard seems to understand well enough, but didn't have the will to execute with conviction. Your protagonist is an incompetent, privileged shit who judges everyone constantly but never suffers for it, and ultimately succeeds because nepotism.

There's a whodunnit subplot and a romance subplot, but they're both pretty shit. The whodunnit is a Scooby Doo mystery wherein the author never tips his hand and you follow the investigation on rails until one of the characters introduced at the beginning is arbitrarily unmasked as the villain. The romance is entirely based on infatuation that happens because the author says it does, and goes into unnecessary details about consensual sex in the missionary position. Which is just dirty and humiliating for everyone involved.

Overall 2.5*: Arguably better than LKH. Recommended for anyone with vampire autism.