Fantasy Fiction Book Review
Title: God of Nothing: Book #1 The ALL
Author: Shane Scott
Imprint: Self-published
Released: February 6, 2021
Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 978-1735518275
Stars: 3.5
Gods, Devils, Titans, Dragons, Angels, Demons, Bool (a.k.a. Werewolves), Vampires, and Mortals all inhabit the fantastical worlds created by gifted author Shane Scott in his debut novel, God of Nothing: Book #1 The ALL.
At the beginning of each chapter, the reader is provided with knowledge about the facts of the worlds that Scott has created by Miranda, God of Knowledge (a Titan librarian and historian of the ALL). Don’t skip reading these, as they contain essential information that you will undoubtedly go back to.
The story shifts back and forth through time, beginning in the year 2002 (January) on Planet Earth with Aja Ashe Jensen, a seventeen-year-old girl who lives in Maine with her father, Matthew Jensen. Vacationing at Matthew’s cabin in Naples, ME, with her dad’s friend, Dr. Theodore Kane, and his son—her best friend, Bobby—Aja is itching to take the new Ski-Doo she received for Christmas for a ride. As a blizzard is in progress, she must wait for the storm to pass.
We know almost immediately that there is something very different about Aja as she has begun to notice an electric blue and gold aura emanating from her person while a serpent has been twisting and turning through her insides.
The next day, Aja goes for her snowmobile ride and ends up having “an accident” that results in her and her machine going through the ice, and her body instantly freezes. We soon discover that Silver, the God of Death and a Titan, is responsible for the death of Aja, the Dragon. We also discover that Aja’s father is Memnoth, God of Love, who has been hiding as a Mortal. However, not only is he God of Love, but also the God of Hate, Satan. And Lucifer is the God of Evil. I’m not clear on whether Lucifer is also Memnoth.
This is just the beginning of an extremely ambitious, complex story that weaves in and out of time, space, and different planets that make up the ALL. The author has provided the reader with a timeline that explains the main characters, significant dates for their introduction to the tale, and how they are related, but it is a bit hard to understand until we read more. There is so much going on in this story that one must pay close attention so as not to miss any key plot points.
We learn about different Immortals’ romantic relationships, how they are related to others, and what part they will play in the future of the ALL. We also learn that “before the beginning, God existed without form or substance. In the realm of Nothing, She existed as something.” The author’s creation of the history of the universe that exists in this novel is interesting. Nothing is what we would expect based on anything in this genre we have read before. God creates time yet finds it difficult to hold Her thoughts, existing in a battle for Self. The only weapons in God’s arsenal are Her Will and Her Word, but She nevertheless made nothing into something and, with it, created Her own body. Time confuses many cultures in the ALL, and Immortals can walk through doorways into various places and times.
This book turns the myth of Creation that we understand upside down. God created Memnoth to be different from Her so that She wouldn’t be alone. Memnoth was her Next (soul mate). Memnoth named God Ashe, and he loved Her, but She didn’t love him. She was not capable of emotion. So, Memnoth created Spirit, resembling DNA, compiled of threads that go beyond infinity, as well as threads of emotions, to fix her or to give her the choice to love him or not. From this gift exploded a massive Dragon of Spirit that amalgamated itself with Ashe.
Ashe and Memnoth created Silver, God of Death, and the first of the Titans. However, Silver wanted what she couldn’t have, Memnoth. Silver kills Ashe, destroying Memnoth’s love, and Memnoth, God of Love, became Satan, God of Hate. Satan curses Silver to bring pain, suffering, and misery into God’s creation. And with her dying breath, the Voice of God whispered in Memnoth’s ear, “let there be life.” “An endless explosion of God’s perfect, pure love turned nothing into Everything. God’s ALL, 12 dimensions of infinite, came into existence.”
The use of the capitalization of the pronouns is a bit tedious for this reader. However, the story itself is compelling and engaging, and the author is a mad scientist genius with a wicked sense of humour.
In Part Two, we visit Planet Gella, Home of the Immortals (a place with few rules or laws), where no Immortal ever harms another as it is forbidden. The Immortal races control energy without technology. They touch sources of power and shape it to their will, which is majik. What a person does with majik or tek defines if it’s good or evil. Mortals capable of doing limited majik are known as Seer, Witch, and Sorcerer.
Sel, a Dragon, falls in love with Lilith, who is a Demon and a prisoner in the dungeons of The Castle Sovereign. He rescues her from the dungeons, and after Lilith gets sick because she has trouble acclimating to Planet Gella, Satan (Sel’s grandfather) and Sel take Lilith to The Downstairs (where Demons are chained) and set her in Hellfire. She absorbs its energy and stores it in her heart, which restores her health. Lilith slowly finds her way to trusting and then loving Sel.
Sel is the son of Aja and Wyatt/Yennifer/Gia, and his partner is Lilith. Jaxx is the son of Sel and Lilith, and his partner is Olivia. Jaxx and Olivia’s story takes place in the year 2236 on Planet Gella. Jaxx is the only Dragon with a Demon heart. He is in love with an eighteen-year-old Vampire named Olivia. Miranda helps Jaxx and Olivia understand their place in the ALL and the difference between Nothing and Everything, which is very helpful to the reader.
These characters mostly behave like humans, eating, sleeping, having sex, working, and participating in a fantastical soap opera directed by Satan.
In Part Three, we go to The Upstairs, a part of Hell and a place of decadent pleasure. Cassamodia (Cassy) manages The Upstairs, which is a hedonistic nightclub for every species in the galaxy. It’s where everyone comes to party in Hell. It’s also a place where they have a tough time keeping staff, but when Cassy hires a human named Evangeline (Eva), she soon finds not only a capable, loyal employee but, after a long Ebezzian courtship, a life partner as well. Eva has an AI chip she calls Hal installed in her brain, and it helps her to figure out how to win Cassy’s heart.
Wen, God of Chaos, is a Titan who stands between chaos and order. Her mother is Ashe, aka God. Her best pal is Beelzebub, the Chained God, who does anything he wants and makes the impossible possible. He hangs out in The Upstairs, where he enjoys teasing the hell out of Eva.
In Part Four – Dragon, we’re introduced to Hugh and Alexa Nash (nee Conroy), who met in 1587 at the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, and married soon after. Hugh Nash works for the Devil at H-Corp as a lawyer who lies for a living. And Alexa works there too. They are still working for H-Corp in 2002 and have been taking care of Aja’s body while she has been comatose. After two months in this state, Aja awakens to discover her inner Dragon, who she soon discovers is her identical twin, intended as a weapon of mass destruction. Dragon keeps Aja’s body alive and teaches her that lightning is hers to command and that she can do anything she likes, even go to Mars.
Alexa (aka Lexxi) tells Aja about the true nature of her father, but Aja has trouble believing that he’s the Devil. And I mean, really, who wouldn’t?
Aja meets John, a handsome young man who she discovers is a Bool, joined with Yennifer, a female human, and Gia, a female two-thousand-pound polar bear. Aja is attracted to John and stalks him until she bumps into him. John can shift into Yennifer (born approx. 900 AD and raised and tortured by Silver before she turned Yennifer into Bool), and he can see the past and all possible futures. He can also shift into Gia, and that is when things get remarkably interesting.
Establishing all the characters, their relationships, and their place in the ALL takes up almost half the book, so one must be a patient reader because the main plot point concerning Aja isn’t revisited until Chapter 16 in Part Four. I haven’t even mentioned all the characters here. There is little action in the first half of the book, but this is Book #1 in The ALL series, so the author intends for there to be lots more action to come.
This self-published fantasy novel has been very well edited, has striking, colourful cover art that may lead one to believe this book is for Young Adults (I would never let my children read something like this if I was a parent), and there is no denying the clever twisted mind or ambition of author, Scott. He has included a warning on Amazon to let readers know that this book is intended for people 18 years or older.
It turned my stomach to read this passage:
“Excitement coursed through Silver when she conducted her experiments. She touched herself when torturing others. The amount of animals, sentient animals, and human species the Titan tortured, raped, maimed, and murdered would have left Charles Manson vomiting and begging for it to end.”
I was afraid to read further because this isn’t the kind of content I like or am interested in, but I pushed on anyway. And that’s not all. Silver hates all cats and tortures kittens. Ugh. Silver and Lucifer help each other, but as often as they do, they also screw each other over, figuratively and literally, because Lucifer only wants to make Demon Bool while Silver creates the Born Dead. They kill their assistant and lover, Dr. Susan Baker, via sexual torture. The story contains considerable profanity, including the F-word and C-word, so read it at your discretion.
As someone who believes in a Higher Power, reading a book like this feels like bad juju to me. It’s like watching a graphic horror movie that I must turn my head away from because I don’t want to go there anymore. The world we live in is horrific enough. However, then the author writes statements like “No abomination can stand in the Light of God.” I’m curious as to what comes next, so I proceed. By the end of this book, the tone shifts, and the reader is left to wonder about the answers to many unanswered questions asked by Olivia. We’ll just have to wait for those answers until Scott publishes God of Everything: Book #2 The ALL.
If you read all the above and still want to read God of Nothing: Book #1 The ALL, then this book is definitely for you. I didn’t read the Amazon warning before I read it, but I would have given God of Nothing four stars if the areas I found offensive had been toned down. All in all, Shane Scott is a writer to be reckoned with.
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