The Unwanted Undead Adventurer: Volume 1

A warning to future readers, the volumes of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘈𝘥𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘳 are extremely short, I’m curious as to why, but the books are still worth buying for the story even if not much happens in each volume.

It’s a great idea for a light novel. Nice fresh breath of new ideas after the isekai craze, (not that they’re all bad mind you). In this book, a weak, yet experienced warrior walks down the wrong path in a dungeon, gets eaten by a dragon, and wakes up an indeterminate amount of time late as a skeleton. He must then figure out how to get back any semblance of his old life to continue his quest of becoming a high ranking adventurer. Great idea in concept, but really poor execution in my opinion. The first 200 pages are full of endless exposition. The author tried to capture the mind of the protagonist as the kind of person who thinks to themselves a lot, but basically ends up using over 100 pages to describe the world and how it’s magic system works before our re-risen hero can even fight his first enemy. 20 more pages of exposition and he encounters his second enemy, followed by 5 more pages of exposition before fighting it, during which another 2 pages of exposition take place before it finally dies. I think you get the point. To be honest, it’s like the author read some of “So I’m a Spider, So What?” and tried to copy the protagonists’ way of monologuing to herself. Thing is, that book didn’t have mindless exposition between, and during, every encounter. Instead, the protagonist, being as clueless to how the world works as we are, must find out how the magic and skill system works as she progresses. In this story, the protagonist already knows everything, and spends easily half the book explaining it all to us, rather than letting the reader fill in the blanks of knowledge as they read. This is an amazing idea, and I don’t want to discourage the author from making more, but it’s simply too much of a slog to read through. The endless exposition unfortunately weighs down any true potential this book had. In that reasoning, I cannot give this a rating higher than 2 out of 5. Maybe the later books have less explaining since this one got it out of the way, but I’m too disinclined to find out after trying to read the first volume.

Book feels well thought out in the way it wants the worlds system to function. It shows promise as well, enough where i will read book 2. This story, however, suffers from regurgitating information and reasonings for hundreds of words at a time. You can literally skip 200-800 words once a decision has been made or anxiety driven rant about not being human begins. Makes one feel like they were trying to forcefully extend the word count. So i am assuming this is just a cash-cow to trick people into buying 1-2 books. Will leave my impression of #2 to see if it confirms this for any who want to save their money and time.

I was absolutely hooked on this book; but the one thing that kept making me put it down was the lack of dialog. There was so much narration I found myself skipping pages at a time and still keeping up with what was going on. I under stand in the beginning; *possible spoilers*, he didn’t have any muscles of to speak with; but there were times later in the look where he’s traveling with another companion but he has the conversation within his head. That being said that’s the only complaint I had, and will definitely be reading book 2 and 3 :)