The Land of the Undying

Dark Elf Chronicles, Book 1

By: Dave Willmarth

Narrated by: Justin Thomas James, Laurie Catherine Winkel, Jeff Hays

Length: 13 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Shari is a med student, months away from being a doctor. Mace is a coder on his first day of an exciting new job. When the world comes to a sudden and horrifying end, none would have expected them to be among the few survivors.

Hyper-aggressive undead zombie creatures hunt anything living on the surface, where even the grass and trees can kill you. Hiding underground is safe, but not much of a life. Their only escape is a virtual world of magic and monsters where Shari can use her healing skills, and Mace can focus on something other than his fears.

But Shari is a light elf, and Mace is a drow. Their people are ancient enemies, and neither would be welcome in the other's world. Still they strive to come together in the game, while they scavenge for food and fight to stay alive in the real world.

The odds are against them, and their food will eventually run out. Is their best hope for survival to find a way to upload themselves to the game permanently?

©2018 Dave Willmarth (P)2018 Dave Willmarth

I’m pretty stingy with my 5 star reviews...

And while I’m not sure that this is technically the best LitRPG book I’ve listened to on audible, I can say that I’m experiencing the same feeling I had after listening to The Land for the first time...

...I am feeling bereft that the book has ended, and I’m seconds away from going on Patreon to donate money to this author to get the next book recorded already!

I will breathlessly await the sequel to this book. For those of you out there like me who just can’t trust a highly reviewed LitRPG book on Audible to be well-written, or even edited, this is one where the positive reviews can be believed. It’s definitely made the list of LitRPG series that I comb the “coming soon” list for.

Tops on that list are: Chaos Seeds, The Gam3, The Dark Herbalist, The System Apocalypse, and the first five books of Alterworld, plus a whole bunch of other series that only have one or two books in them so far.

My favorite LITRPG

I'm loving this series. I appreciate that the reason for getting into the game is more of an escape than an accident.

It has potential

Love the post apocalyptic setting. I would like the author to build more on the state of the world. But mayb in book 2?

Buy the Audible!

Absolutely loved listening to this book!
Normally, I bounce between the kindle version and the audible depending on where I’m reading (driving in car vs a quiet moment at lunch), but with this book, I ended up walking around in headphones all day just to keep it going.

On content/plot: this was a pretty decent blend of two worlds, each with their own stories going on, told from two cooperative viewpoints. You have the post-apocalyptic world full of infected “zombies” with our survivors huddled together in an underground shelter. Then you have the VR world, which is pretty standard fantasy, but done pretty well, with NPCs showing concern over the sudden loss of players, and our two protagonists experiencing the world differently (standard hero vs dark race just trying to survive)

The Voices: the two main narrators were amazing, and the tonal shifts and emotion added so much to an already decent story. You can hear the smile and joy in Laurie Winkle’s voice and it made it nearly impossible not to fall in love with Shari just a little bit.

I’ll stop rambling now. Just make sure to grab this book the next time you want to walk around laughing to yourself and confusing the people around you.

Great story

This is a great novel that combines two seemingly disparate genres and does it well. The real life storyline is zombie survival. Mace lucked out getting into a secure facility, and even through he has running water, electricity, and a safe place to sleep, he’s alone. He plays a VR game so that he won’t go crazy from the loneliness. He still has to risk his life against the monsters outside to scavenge for food every couple weeks. Then one day he hears someone over the radio, Sheri, and two meet up so that they can work together to survive. Lots of great survivalist stuff in the real world story and a little romance.

The game storyline, is mostly action, adventure MMO stuff. But something that the author is able to do, is make that game stuff relevant to the real world storyline. Mace wants to upload his mind to the game, giving him the possibility of living there as long as the electricity in their geothermal powered facility stays up, possibly centuries. But to do that, he needs to achieve a level of synchronicity with the game by training his mind to think of the game like it’s the real world. This gives the story the excuse to have both characters play the game. But what the author does that I think is interesting, is that he keeps the theme of survival in the game, at least for the drow storyline. In addition to that, the game itself notices that all the players have gone missing and tries to figure out how to adjust, even going so far as to give quests to Shari to bring players back to their world.

Overall, I had a great time listening to this. Though I’ll admit, I was already partial to the apocalypse survival genre.

Story is just not interesting

The writer has taken on too much, He doesn't know whether he is writing a LITRPG novel, or a earth disaster. The earth part of the novel is just too boring and dull, The LITRPG part of the novel is not well developed. The main characters are just not believable. The story is just to boring, The writing is good, but the subject matter is poor. Eric. The narration is good also but does not fit this novel. The author is all over the place.

it truly pulled me right in from the get go

I loved every thing about this book the story the charm of the characters the voice acting

Not bad but it had some flaws too

It wasn't a half bad book, I have been through something like 15 litRPG series now and I would say maybe this would be a middle of the pack experience. I think there were things that were done well but I also felt like there were several complaints on my end as well. I am writing this review after having listened to the second book as well so this is sort of my assessment of the series so far:

Flaws:
1) I found the actual gameplay to be lacking which was surprising to me. Normally I hate the IRL moments of litRPG books that have some sort of video game but it was actually the gameplay I found underwhelming. I didn't mind the character building and character interactions but the actual mechanitcs of the game and combat itself felt very generic and boring to me.
2) The IRL situation in these books is actually a little over the top. Its post apocolyptic but the acutal situation of the world leaves me to strongly question how the main character is still alive. It seems a little flawed as it sounds like if you breath air you would just die so I found that a little questionable. I think I would have been a little more generous as to how many people were still alive or maybe scale back the global disaster on how exactly it works because my understanding of it makes it sound like nobody anywhere would ever have even a remote chance of being alive still. It sounds like you would literally need a completely closed system recycling air and water to even maybe still be alive.

Good:
1) IRL situation I found compelling and interesting. I constantly wanted to see and hear more of the real world rather than the game.
2) The NPC to character interactions was quite good. I really enjoyed the feeling of this game being sort of a social lifeline for these people in a super shitty situation.

Overall, it wasn't half bad. The game mechanics seem completely bland to me though. If this was a real video game that we could play the only redeeming elements of it would be the NPCs and the fact that its an immersion game. I really love post apocalyptic content though and I did overall enjoy the IRL happenings of this book quite a bit more than I did the video game parts.

Awesome book

Love this book. Basically two adventures involving in game and in real world and both are interesting. Very well written and the narration is as always incredible.

solid story and audio performance

I am a fan of the Greystone series and the shadow sun as well. Now I guess I will add this series to that list