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Recommended by Donna Sirianni, Grace McDermott, Sarah Suleski, and 1 other member.
Larkenia’s Flaws
An abandoned novel.
Cyrne is a town on the brink of self-destruction, where humanity is Blessed, gender is immaterial and They linger behind every home. Preying on the weak, They slip from their wooden natures for a brief respite.
With more humans winding up dead each day, public officials have fostered a program to destroy Their habitat and drive Them out. So far the success has been a double-edged sword; looking for a new home, They have begun leaking into the human gene pool- resulting in a Flaw whose very existence is punishable by death.
Larkenia’s Flaws
Death is only the beginning
— contains pervasive graphic violence; also, some graphic sex and harsh language —
Tags: bi cannibalism dark fantasy ensemble fantasy gay lesbian online novels past tense romance shapeshifters third person urban fantasy
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Editorial Reviews
A highly visual, visceral trip to another world
Larkenia’s Flaws is a dark fantasy. I like dark.
A lot.
There is something very addicting about the story, world, and characters that pulls you along. When I first started to read it, I caught up on 53 installments in one day (44 in one sitting).
I am having trouble putting into words just what exactly about the story made me keep going and going . . . but keep going I did. There’s tons of atmosphere and it’s a dark, twisted, disturbing atmosphere. It feels bizarre yet real, like by starting to read it you just stumbled down a rabbit hole and landed in Cyrne. I felt like I was there, in the world, even when I was a little confused about what was going on.
It’s very visual.
The whole thing, actually, feels like it should be an HBO series, with its ensemble cast and bleak, snowy landscape.
I really liked the dream cast page, and the character illustrations which link to character sketches. In fact I would say reading the sketches is a MUST to get a good grasp of all the characters.
I think the references to hair color and such are overdone. It does add to the very visual feel to the prose, but I felt that several of the sections that say "the blonde" or something else could read easier if it just used the character’s name instead. But this wasn’t a make or break issue for me.
The prose is very visual, as I mentioned before, but it’s also often very vague in places. I often had to read something over to get what was going on. This happened moreso in the early installments, however, and in my opinion the writing improves as the story goes on.
The dialect is a little distracting at first, but becomes easy fairly quickly. But there were times later in the story that this was dropped completely, and all the character started speaking normally. It was a break in consistency and since by then I’d gotten used to the "ds" for "ts" and such, it felt jarring again. Then the dialect picked back up again, so I’m not sure what happened there.
There are a fair number of typos throughout the whole story. I was, personally, too concerned with reading on to stop and point them out, like I normally would. But I think they’re prevalent enough that an editing pass of the entire story would be a good thing.
Many of the installments are lacking a "Next" link and you have to go back to the installment page to continue. This began mid Book III and continued on almost all the way to the end.
I was expecting more sex, actually, and thought it would be more explicit. Not sure why. Oh there IS sex, don’t get me wrong, but in most cases is not quite as detailed as I thought. I rarely felt like I was reading "a sex scene."
I mention this as being neither a good or bad thing — just an assumption I had going in that wasn’t entirely accurate.
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It’s a gritty, sexy world that makes you want to dive right into it.
Larkenia’s Flaws, if memory serves me correctly, was the first web serial that I ever read and damn! What an introduction! The world that Morgan has created is one of the most vivid, gritty places I’ve ever read about. This isn’t your typical prancing fairies fantasy land. Very bad things happen to perceptively bad people, and a few who are stuck in the middle. Unlucky for them.
There’s a fair amount of sex in this story and not just hetero, either. Lines of sexuality don’t exist in this story so it’s pretty much if you want to have sex with it, nothing’s going to stop you. The world gets rid of any and all barriers when it comes to sex but it doesn’t mean that the world is free of prejudice, though. If you’re a Flaw, you’re nothing but bad. Sucks for you!
Something that’s rather prominent in the middle two sections of the story is an over-abundance of adjectives. I remember one chapter that was only a few paragraphs long but amounted to, once the fat was cut, a couple of sentences of action. The rest was very thick description. For me anyway, it became overwhelming as the story went on but since the site switch, it seems that Morgan’s toned down a bit on the description. Not that I don’t like description, but this became a little much.
The world is a very complex one and you have to follow it pretty closely in order to understand what’s going on, especially considering there are so many characters and so many subplots interwoven into each other. Chances are you’ll have to read back a chapter or two when you get an update just to refresh your memory of what’s going on. Not necessarily a bad thing but is it a little hard to keep track of you’re just leisurely reading it.
I love the fact that Morgan actually worked with a speech therapist to come up with the dialect in her story. That just shows how much effort she’s willing to put into her work. Unfortunately i can’t help but connect that accent with how people sound when they have a head cold. It’s a consistent piece of the story but I just can help it, every time I read it, to connect it to clogged sinuses.
Overall, very much worth the read. We got another "don’t miss" here. The effort of the author reflects in the quality of the writing, the intricacies of the world and the development of the characters. Every character in this story has the feeling that you can just reach out and touch them, they’re that realistic. Their beings are as gritty as the world around them and it makes their sufferings and triumphs all the more fantastic to read. If you want a rich, dirty, vivid vortex of a world, read this story. It certainly won’t be time wasted.
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