Cleelok Review

Hardcover, 785 Pages
Adult/ Fantasy/ Epic
By: Sean Nuber
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟 3/4

Just because it has ‘always been’ does not mean that it was supposed to be that way.  All great events, in hindsight, appear to be planned.  But that is only because you already know their outcome.  Just because we do exist, does not mean that we need to exist.  Or that we needed to exist.  It is just that it is impossible for us to imagine not existing.”  Feyazki smiled at Croy.  “I believe you are confusing truth with reality.”

Cleelok: Chaos as defined by the limits of Eternity is a very ambitious fantasy novel standing at ~340K words. My hardcover -which I received in exchange of an honest review- is huge and is around 700 pages but translated into the standard formula, the book is around 1000 pages long. The story is told in third person POV through 4 main characters each with a goal of their own.

Nuber certainly can write and more than once, I found myself thinking about the writing process and how can one person do most of the job alone as it is a self published book. The prose flows well and it was filled with many moments where it was hard to put the book. I did not highlight a lot of quotes because I thought they won’t work as well out of context but the writing was still good. The chapters are very long as there are only 21 chapters so the average reading time for each chapter is around an hour which is something I am not used to and not a big fan of.

There are four main characters: Croy, Clerin, Vrric and Trela. Each one of them belongs to one of the main tribes representing Earth, Water, Air and Fire and each has a goal in mind they want to achieve. The story starts with Croy who is entangled with Trela from the start, then we have Clerin who gives us an idea about the world and its history and finally we have Vrric whose chapters explain the magic system. All of the Arcs start converging until all the characters meet and the story becomes more focused in one direction.

Vrric was the most intriguing character for me specially in the first chapters. I think he grows a bit too fast after that and at a later point all the characters are well balanced. To be honest, Trela kept repeating the sentence “I am the Kriishan” which became very annoying and usually these sentences that are repeated again and again are one of my writing pet peeves.

The magic system is cool and easy to understand. There is a glossary at the end of the book with some illustrations and tables explaining it. I just did not bother turning to that page whenever a spell was cast because I would get the effect from the context.

“Death is death.  The beauty of death is that there is no more pain.  No more humiliation, no more struggle.  It is not the dead who feel that this room is horrible.  No, only the living worry about those aesthetics.”

Summary: It is an epic and very ambitious story with solid writing and well written characters. The pace is slow and the chapters are very long so it is a novel that requires patience and focus. Fans of epic classic fantasy will certainly find something to like in this one!