Books: The Unwanted Undead Adventurer

By Shelley Pallis.

The trouble with Rentt Faina is that he isn’t very good at his job. He’s spent ten years wandering the ruins of a haunted dungeon, where, for reasons that defy logical explanation, a menagerie of different creatures lurk in various rooms, guarding treasure. But he’s a pretty mediocre adventurer, ever-ready to cut corners and stick to low-risk, low-return endeavours like mugging goblins. He thinks he’s found a new motherlode of riches, but it turns out to be a dragon’s lair, and the dragon eats him.

Oh, you would hope that his troubles would be over right there, but having negotiated passage through the dragon’s bowels, he wakes up an unspecified amount of time later to discover that he is a literal pile of bones. Rentt gets to his feet, horrified at the discovery that he is now a reanimated skeleton, one of the very creatures that he and his fellow adventurers once tried to kill off. He has become an Unwanted Undead Adventurer.

Rentt reasons that he has one chance of getting out of this alive… well undead… well re-alived. He needs to undergo a process of Existential Evolution, a sort of dark-side version of the level progression of a fighter or magic-user, progressing up through the various orders of undead. If he becomes a ghoul, he’ll get some flesh back on his bones. He’ll smell a bit, but at least he might be able to pass for human back in the less salubrious parts of civilisation. Maybe he can become a wight, a thrall, a vampire even, a lich…?

Rentt questions the nature of the gamified reality that he exists in – why, he wonders are there dungeons at all, and isn’t it odd that creatures killed within seem to respawn after a month or so? But that doesn’t stop him pursuing his newfound career path, offing a series of other undead in the dungeon around him, and feeding off the glowing essence that rises from them once defeated, like the “quickening” of the Highlander series.

Luckily for Rentt, after an interminable period killing off slime monsters, he has grown enough of his vocal cords back to protest that he is not evil when he runs into his first human, a teenage dungeon adventurer called Rina. Innocent enough to believe him when he mumbles he doesn’t want to hurt her, she becomes his first friend in his new and unwelcome transformation.

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer has all sorts of possibilities: it could pursue the sensation of being a character in a world-game, conforming to the demands of a bizarre system that constantly feeds on the destruction of others. It could confront the nature of prejudice and misfortune, as what is Rentt but a human being fallen on the hardest of hard times, hoping for a little help? We may presume, in a world of magic, that there is some possibility down the line that he might get to be a real human again, like some undead Pinocchio. It might even be played for laughs, as a satire on the gamesmanship of a Dungeons & Dragons milieu, a sort of shadow-line account of what one has to do make it in the world of the evil dead.

And yet, author Yu Okano struggles to tell his own story, repeatedly bogging himself down in risk assessments and speculations, as if he is spending half of his time poring over the Dungeon Master’s Guide looking for loopholes. In what is either a triumph of method-acting or a failure of authorship, Okano manages to tell the story in precisely the same plodding, humourless way that we might expect of his also-ran, jobsworth hero. The story actually begins with its narrator being surprised, killed and eaten by a dragon, digested through its body and shat out its back end as a sentient skeleton, but its all described as matter-of-factly as if Rentt is telling us the best way to get the M62 to Leeds.

Okano crops up himself in an Afterword, in which he immediately wanders off into a tangent talking about how much spam he gets on his mobile phone these days. He, like his cursed hero, comes across as something of a wee sausage – a comedically self-involved buffer, like Alan Partridge dressed as Conan the Barbarian, trying out his special new fingerless dungeon gloves, and earnestly assuring us that despite being eaten alive, “needless to say, I had the last laugh.”

The Unwanted Undead Adventurer by Yu Okano, illustrated by Jaian, is published by J-Novel Club and available in the UK from Anime Limited.