Brandon v.

Max was murdered, but now he is mostly over it. Living on earth as a recent college graduate, he can still perfectly recall his past life on Albion, a sword and sorcery world. He'd been hailed as the "Hero of the World" after crawling his way up from poverty, eventually enjoying great fame and luxury. But on mana-starved Earth, he's just a guy.

Meet Laszlo, eight-hundred-year-old demon and Hell’s least productive Curse Keeper. From his office beneath Midtown, he oversees the Drakeford Curse, which involves a pathetic family upstate and a mysterious black monolith. It’s a sexy enough assignment—colonial origins, mutating victims, et cetera—but Laszlo has no interest in maximizing the curse’s potential; he’d rather sunbathe in Ibiza, quaff martinis, and hustle the hustlers on Manhattan’s subway.

Dying might just be the best thing that ever happened to Dare. Not the dying itself, of course, although thankfully he doesn't remember it. He finds himself in a gray void, where a mysterious voice offers him a choice: Continue on to whatever awaits him in the afterlife, or be reborn on a world with video game-like mechanics. Which as far as he's concerned isn't a tough choice at all. Just that quickly Dare begins a new life full of possibilities, eagerly venturing out to explore a breathtaking world, level up and become powerful, and romance and fall in love with beautiful women of an ...