Mitchell Bonds

607pg. | ISBN: 978-0-9821049-1-0

Once Upon a Time, in a faraway kingdom, there lived an old man and his wife. They had no children, and the old man prayed every day that he and his wife would have a son.

This story has absolutely nothing to do with them.

So begins Chapter 1 of Hero, Second Class by first-time novelist Mitchell Bonds.

Hero, Second Class is the story of Cyrus Solburg, a young man who dreams of being a hero in a fantasy land in which Heroes have guild fees and Villains are not allowed more than one solar eclipse per quarter.

Follow Cyrus's quest to become first an apprentice to a hero--the righteous Hero named the Crimson Slash--and then ultimately a full-fledged Hero. Well, a Hero, Second Class, anyway.

Along the way Cyrus encounters bloodthirsty Orcs, a droll zombie, a flashback-prone gryphon named Slashback, lizard people, a keep in the swamp, a dragon with a craving for chimera jerky, and a beautiful cat-woman named Kris.

But Destiny, it seems, has greater plans for Cyrus than anyone has foreseen. Cyrus keeps finding powerful magic flowing out of his hands, in spite of the fact that he has no magical training or even magical aspirations.

Nor is Cyrus the only one to take note of these developments. The Arch-Villain Voshtyr Demonkin knows he must track down and destroy this upstart sorcerer-Hero before Cyrus can learn the power of the Elements, the Capital Letters, and the Arbitrary Numbers and thus thwart Voshtyr's plans to build the ultimate machine of evil: the P.L.O.T. Device!

Hero, Second Class is an epic Christian fantasy roast of all the fantasy elements we hold dear.

At a whopping 607 pages--and this is only Book 1 of The Hero Complex series--it truly is an epic read.