Forged in Death by Jim Melvin
Forged in Death , the first of six books in Jim Melvin's Death Wizard Chronicles, starts out with a scene from a claustrophobic's nightmare – Torg, the Death-Knower and king of the Tugars, is imprisoned by the evil wizard Invictus at the bottom of a cold, dark pit bored hundreds of feet into a mountain. He can't stretch out because the pit is too small, and he can't lean against the walls, because they're enchanted with flesh-burning magic. He either has to stand or curl into an uncomfortably tight fetal position. We're only in the prologue, and the book is already giving me the willies. And that's a good thing. Torg eventually escapes the pit and embarks on an Odyssey-like journey back to his desert home to stop Invictus from enslaving the world of Triken. Jim Melvin's world-building was at once fantastic and logical, from the unique human cultures to the strange twists on traditional monsters. It's obvious Melvin put a lot of thought into the...