SOMEONE MAKE THIS INTO A MOVIE PART VII - EMPRESS BY KAREN MILLER
 

Miller scored a hit with her highly regarded Innocent Mage books recently. “Miller’s prose is earnest and engaging, and her complex story accelerates nicely toward a brutal cliffhanger finale,” Publishers Weekly said about The Innocent Mage. “Intriguing characters and a finely tuned sense of drama,” the Library Journal Review chimed in.

Like her previous novels, Empress forms part of the new brand of “gritty” and “dark” fantasy subgenre begun by George RR Martin with his 1996 novel A Game of Thrones. So don’t expect any cuddly elves, fairies and wizards setting off on a quest to find whatever. Empress is not a book for a book for “the squeamish or soft-hearted” as one Amazon.com user put it.

The plot follows the travails of one Hekat. In a family torn apart by poverty and violence, Hekat is no more than an unwanted mouth to feed, worth only a few coins from a passing slave trader. But Hekat was not born to be a slave. For her, a different path has been chosen. It is a path that will take her from stinking back alleys to the house of her God, from blood-drenched battlefields to the glittering palaces of Mijak.

“The main character, Hekat, is someone you sympathize with at the beginning of the story but as the book goes on, you come to realize she is a sociopath, incapable of sympathizing or loving,” the same Amazon.com user writes. Despite this (or maybe because of this!) the general consensus amongst readers is that Empress is a surprisingly good, must-read fantasy. Blazingly hellish and excellent they all agree.

Will it make a good Hollywood movie? Is Hollywood ready for a “darker” brand of fantasy that doesn’t deal in moral absolutes like Lord of the Rings and Eragon with clear-cut heroes and villains? Probably not, but you don’t have to wait for Hollywood to bring Miller’s books to the big screen — you can just read them yourself.
 

• You can read an extract from Empress right here:
  http://www.orbitbooks.net/an-extract-from-empress/