Fantasy Book Critic: COVER REVEAL: The Ashen Viper (The Forham Papers #1) by Joseph John Lee

Joseph John Lee is an author with two finished series and he has been writing for the past couple of years to launch his epic fantasy debut. The Forham Papers is the new series and book 1 is titled The Ashen Viper. The book will be launched via kickstarter and you can click the "notify on launch" button over here.

Here's what the author had revealed about it so far: "This book—and series—will take you across three continents for a tale rich with lore, deep characters, political scheming, and a truly epic scale. In this absolute brick of a book, you'll find immortal demigods influencing the world's histories from the shadows, an order of undead assassins who were unleashed to appease a madman's grief, symbiotic magicks that grant power to a user just as much as they grant insanity . . . oh, and the central character has been described as a cross between Anomander Rake and Goku.

It is a story for those long enamored with grand and epic fantasies, for the fans of works like the Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Stormlight Archive."

Here's the artwork by Christopher Cant. The book cover can be seen below with design provided by Rachel St. Clair.

Official Book Blurb: Were we not meant to know the truth?

It is by the hands of loresmen that heroes and villains are risen from history’s foundations, today’s stories that became yesterday’s histories that became the legends of yore. And from those legends emerge truths…of a sort. The truths that best serve a story when the facts have been lost to the decay of time.

The war that spelled the end of the Second Age was long mired in such murky truths, in these legends accepted as history, these fables and songs that served as the only surviving memory of those fateful days. Until now. Until these Forahm Papers, and whatever they may contain within.

For it is not the singular hero and villain who weave a story’s tapestry, but the many hands who break from the foundations and hold the truth aloft.

The ministry official who must investigate a sudden disappearance. The reluctant hero who saved a queen and doomed an entire people in the process. The exile whose very soul threatens the destruction of all around her. The son of a traitor who will stop at nothing to see honor restored to his name. The untested heiress faced with a long-dormant storm coming to rage over her land once more.

And the man whose name endured within the darker threads of history, cursed in the shadows as an assassin of kings, an arbiter of doom, a devil taken flesh. For if there is a truth hidden amongst these papers, it must begin here. It must begin with him: the Ashen Viper.