Stolen Lives is a literary fiction book by author Keith Ahrens.
Trapped in another world. All stats are against them. It’s fight or die.

When Caleb reported on his usual shift, he never thought he would make it from the front seat of an ambulance to a bloody battlefield in the medieval Kingdom of Fey. Kidnapped and beaten unconscious, he wakes up with a concussion and a new tattoo. This might not be entirely unusual for him, but it’s normal for the tattoo to project images of his stats and gear like some kind of old-school desk RPG.
He finds himself thrown into a cell with three strangers who have also been kidnapped. They all come from different time periods, and since the timeline between the real world and this world is not continuous, it’s hard to understand each other. They will have to learn to work together.
Months of training will lead to an annual battle they are kidnapped to fight. That’s the law. But Caleb has other plans. Outnumbered and lacking in weapons, but attracted to his freedom, he can stay and fight in the games, or attempt to lead the way to the escape to the only portal back to their world. Either way, it lives or dies.

This is a high action story with almost no stops in action from the first moment when Caleb is mysteriously captured through a mirror to the very end when there is a desperate fight to hold the gate while Caleb and His friends escape from the mysterious Fae and them. The land “under the hill”.

But that’s the problem. The character recoils from the frenetic nature of the constant action. We can meet many characters by name, but their personalities never get a chance to be shown. Instead, we had to deal with countless descriptions of battles and then frenzied action to recover from battles, run away from battles, plan future battles. hybrid, etc.

The fights are fun, but they can’t be the only part of the story, and in this one, it looks like the story has become that way. There are not many characters in this movie despite the large cast.

On the other hand, it’s not bad, but it has too much potential and that potential is squandered by the overly simplistic plot, with nothing but action and little time to think about building the rest of the theory. why does everything happen.

I’m really looking forward to the second one. I think I might be a bit lost with only knowledge of Dnd and rpg games but even without understanding the stats part I got lost in the great world building. It was as if the roar was its own and pulled me into the story.

I really like the descriptions and I believe what I like best is when Caleb is presented to the MRE with the dessert taken out… it’s a special kind of torture in and of itself.

• Stolen Lives

• Underhill Chronicles, Book 1
• By: Keith Ahrens

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