I'm reading the Jackal of Nar at the moment. It's a very irritating type of book - it's almost good, but Marco seems to have this masochistic tendency when writing, making the novel pretty awful at times.
There are some real problems - he has no knowledge of military tactics whatsoever, yet he's writing an epic/militaristic fantasy. That isn't a good start, but despite that, his battle scenes are the best ones.
His characterisation is almost uniformly terrible - admittedly, Tharn isn't badly done, and there are a couple of archetypes in there that work, but overall, it's not good. The characterisation borders on misogyny at times, but I think that's entirely unintention and simply a result of bad, lazy writing. But the way most characters act is entirely unrealistic - Richius falls in love at first sight with someone who hates him, but then suddenly loves him after a year.
Then there are the inconsistencies - he states that a certain child (just a few days old) is Richius', yet in the chapter or so before he clearly states that the last time he saw the woman was more than a year ago. There are lots of little incidents like these which are really off-putting. Other parts are just irritating in how unlikely they are - only 3000 people live in a major city? And then every single one is slaughtered? The numbers on the whole are pretty unrealistic - they're much too low, but then his world is tiny as well - he states it takes 3 days to ride from the Dring valley where they were fighting to the city Ackle-Nye - based on the map in the front, that makes the entire continent about 12 days ride from one end to the other. So the entire continent, and we can extrapolate, the world, isn't much bigger than Great Britain. Okay...
The prose itself isn't awful, but it's not special either - there have been a couple of good sections, but on the whole it's mediocre. The dialogue is pretty badly done - full of anachronisms, and almost everyone speaks in exactly the same way - all of the Narens preface a lot of what they say with "Lord", and the same is done with the Drol but with the names of their gods.
The most annoying thing is that the novel is fundamentally flawed, but has some very good parts to it. He is willing to kill off some of his characters, and to do things that would normally be unpredictable - but the problem is he sets them up in a really bad way. 1. It becomes entirely obvious what he's going to do, and the shock value is negated. 2. He makes the characters act in ridiculous ways to achieve this.
It's also full of padding - at half the length it would be twice as good. There are a lot of things he writes which make it obviously worse - he highlights his own flaws. eg Dyana, a Triin, starts teaching Richius some of the Triin language at about page 600. The problem? It made me realise - how did they ever communicate before? Dyana didn't learn the Naren language, and Richius didn't learn the Triin language, and they didn't have interpreters either. This is just laziness in writing.
It's far from the worst I've read in epic fantasy, but in all honesty I can't say it's anything much better than some of Feist's weaker novels. It has some potential and the ideas weren't bad, but Marco's technical skill as a writer is completely lacking and almost ruins the novel. It certainly isn't a Martin, Erikson, Bakker or Kay though, and I'm afraid to say that it isn't even close to Keyes, Kearney or Jones either. Marco just about has the ideas - but he often gives up on them to go and pursue common fantasy cliches, and the good ideas he does use tend to be ruined by poor writing.
Of course Tyrants and Kings is Marco's original and best work by far.
That's scary, because it's hardly a stunning series, at least from the first book. Sure, Marco is a better writer than Eddings and Jordan. But the worrying thing is the margin isn't that great, and being better than Eddings shouldn't be a challenge.
