YMMV / Chronicles of the Necromancer

• Complete Monster
  • Jared Drayke, the evil elder half-brother of hero Martris "Tris" Drayke, is introduced when Tris stops him from raping a servant. Later making a dark pact with the Vayash-Moru mage Foor Arontala, Jared launches a coup against his own family, killing his father and destroying his soul, as well as Tris's mother and Jared's own younger half-sister. Becoming a vicious tyrant, Jared has his men slaughter entire villages for insufficient payment of taxes, while leading purges of magic users in the kingdom. Jared has members of the Sisterhood of mages slaughtered and tortured, while also butchering the other Vayash-Moru. Having others abducted, tortured and slowly impaled, Jared also becomes a Serial Rapist who abducts, tortures and rapes women regularly before murdering them. When he finally confronts Tris, Jared boasts that he will take Tris's beloved, Jared's former arranged fiancée, and rape her endlessly, killing the first child she has to remove any issue with paternity.
  • Foor Arontala assists Jared with everything listed above, torturing members of the Sisterhood and also leading purges of his own race, the Vayash-Moru. In addition, Arontala enslaves the souls of his victims, holding them in agony, while regularly using the spirit of Tris's dead sister to torment him. Holding the trapped spirit of the evil mage the Obsidian King, Arontala feeds it the captive souls while intending to revive him at a certain time and become his new host, bringing a wave of death and destruction to the world, claiming that if the Obsidian King does annihilate everything, Arontala will simply rebuild it in his own image.
  • Malesh is a particularly vicious Vayash-Moru who savors the hunt. While at first he has to limit himself to vile criminals due to treaties and laws, Malesh is fond of tormenting them and draws out their fear at death. Deciding that it's time for vampires to reign over humans, Malesh brutally slaughters the population of multiple villages while attempting to provoke a battle with the goddess The Dark Lady's chosen Vahanian. Malesh attempts to turn his lover Carina and promises that if Vahanian delays in challenging Malesh—while knowing that to kill Malesh might doom Carina, as a Vayash-Moru fledgling's life is linked to its makers—then Malesh will continue butchering villages. Intending to spark a war between humanity and vampires and make oceans of blood flow, Malesh attempts to flee Vahanian by using a child as a Human Shield, only to reveal he had already drained the child to the point of being impossible to save anyways. Even his own maker is horrified at Malesh's actions, at which point Malesh declares him a weakling before intending to create a slaughter so great that Malesh believes he will be raised to serve as the consort of the Dark Lady and reign over a new kingdom of undeath and destruction.
• Recycled Script: Most noticeable in book 2, which recycles chunks of dialogue and occasionally features the same conversations twice, with marginally different wording. There's also the tendency to remind readers incessantly of each character's hair color.
• Ho Yay: There's the occasional moment between Tris and Vahanian.
• Wangst: Tris spends a lot of time angsting over the deaths in his family.

---