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Awful

Revisado: 01-05-22

Worst "sequel" ever.. I profoundly hated this book. it will make you hate the original, too. HUGE mistake.

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garbage

Revisado: 10-01-20

Peace Talks was the worst book in the series. Until this one came out.

By a quarter of the way in, I was just hoping enough people could die that it could end. a slurry of cliches, over used images... complete abandonment of character networks and plotlines. It's a big mess of stupid, unintelligible fighting. VERY poorly done. Terrible writing. Just an all around awful book. I quit this series now. I'll read the summary on Wikipedia when the trainwreck is over. What a massive disappointment

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IF

Revisado: 09-18-20

If Court doesn't kill Brewer in the next book, I'll be done with this series. If Brewer is IN the next one, I won't but it. I won't pay for it till I know sh's dead. Not ever again.

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Basically Satisfactory

Revisado: 07-15-20

After 2 hours, I was ready to quit. Masterson sounds very different. Age? Illness? I don't know. I wasn't mad. More heartbroken than anything. But besides his slower, flabbier delivery, he also inexplicably altered certain voices entirely, the worst example being Mab. She went from stately, to cartoon-craggy-crone in a blink. Overall, the distinctions between characters became blurry and sloppy.

Sadly, the changes in narration mirror the changes in writing. Besides adjusting to the new Masterson (listening at 1.20x speed at least restores the old pacing), the first 2 hours were a painful exercise in patience, as Butcher artlessly staged stale scenes with starched dialogue in order to clumsily stack sudden, arbitrary obstacles before Harry to the point of absurdity. I'm surprised he didn't literally jump a magic shark somewhere in the mix.

The dam broke after a couple of hours as the action started, but even that was poorly written, confusing, and felt arbitrary. Especially Harry's odd allergy symptoms. Random, not at all adequately explained, and weird. It was nice to see Butters, but is he permanently a jerk now? Does this allegedly smart man never grasp the concept of heroism, risk and injury? His character is a broken record. Except for arbitrary, irrelevent developments in his personal life and laughable progress as a holy ninja.

How many times is Butcher going to waste 5 or 6 minutes with Harry bemoaning how the mantle gives him X &Y, but costs him A & B, and really isn't an awesome bargain, but hey, why not use it if .... blah blah blah, Spider Man reference, blah. And then some more repetitious references to how it makes him super randy and latently rapey. We've heard it a thousand times. And even if a new reader somehow started with this book, these little "leitmotifs" occur multiple times. Their purpose is served after one. It's almost as if this book were cobbled together from several "rough drafts", and the uncertainty of the author caused him to imaginally stammer, unconsciously repeating certain go-to phrases, scenes, monologues, descriptions, as he struggled to make forward progress.

And you know what? I'm ok with that. Butcher had to take a break from the series, and after a few years, he's not locked in like before. Understandable. He was ratcheting up an increasingly complex, big-stage plot, and had to pause. In the interim, I'm sure he wondered on how to proceed. How to shift the series from a more personal POV to a more mythical/epic POV.

This is where an editor should have intervened. To smooth the edges. Hide the seems. Demand clarifications. Delete repetitions. Etc. That seems to not have happened.

Nevertheless, the contours of the larger plot begin to emerge, even if with wholly inadequate explanation or contextualization. Even if the appearances of Butters, Michael, Molly and other familiar characters are dry and lifeless. As if the prior books were a mere cacoon, the new Big Plot has arisen to render them moot husks. Which is ESPECIALLY sad, because until now, whatever larger destiny Harry seemed to be approaching, it was a very intimate process, and no matter how grand it became, those personal ties - the essence of the series and of Harry - were also the essential fibers that were being woven by the Norns into whatever was to come. But the opposite is happening. Those relationships, that web of intimacy, is being coldly discarded. Instead of EMERGING, the new plot is invading the series like Outsiders. Alien, indifferent, other.

I hope the next book (part 2 of this one) somehow returns the series to its roots. Its soul. Its intimacy. I hope so. But I doubt it. The outlines are drawn. The characters, diminished. My guess is the focus will be on this climactic conflict, and then the characters we all have come to love will get brief, unsatisfying appearances at the end, as Harry tries to stake out a "new normal" in his life. Sure, some might appear in a fight scene or two, but that won't count. They're known persons playing NPC'S at that point.

Ugh. I'm making myself sad. I still liked it. I got into the new Dresden Reboot. I just grieve inside.

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Garbage

Revisado: 05-29-20

One of the worst books I have ever read. Terrible writing, terrible characters - I honestly just wanted them all to die, in way fewer pages. Tolstoy, I wish you were alive so I could light you on fire.

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Beyond Boring

Revisado: 05-29-20

I really, really, really hate this book. Pure hate. Neal Stephenson is dead to me.

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I Liked It!

Revisado: 05-15-20

I wasn't sure at first, but this was one of those stories you like more every 15 minutes or so. It builds in quiet fashion, until suddenly you find yourself higher than you thought you were. It manages a spectacular 3rd Act that seems grandiose for what preceded it, but somehow isn't, for how deftly it was executed.

Granted, I'm a "cosmic horror" junkie, so this skews my perception, but I dislike most of what's sold under that heading. This one had the right kind of understatement vibe, without being dry in the least. There was some violence, but it wasn't gory enough to turn my stomach, and I can be kinda squeamish. For my taste, it hit the right notes of subtlety, lurking menace, mystery, humanity and class.

The hardest parts to stomach were about the "historically accurate" racism - which I only stick in quotes because I'm truthfully too ignorant about the issue to speak on it like I can certify authenticity. Nevertheless, that stuff was hard to take in. Made my stomach cramp and my breathing constrict. Made me uncomfortable and triggered brute denial, for a spell.

The way the author wove the elements of human social horror together with cosmic horror was extremely skillful. The proof of this, is how unforced it played out. Sometimes meshing history lessons, or morality tales, with genre fiction, results in a clumpy mess. Like one half each of two coats being stapled together into one monstrosity. This was the opposite of that. This was so neatly done it felt entirely seamless.

It's especially impressive given the length of the story. Occassionally I felt like I was experiencing missing time, as events skipped from A to C, but I was never left confused for long. The essentials of part B would become obvious in short order. I wasn't sure I liked these episodes; they made me a tad edgy in the moment, but they facilitated the smooth flow of the narrative. I grew to appreciate the technique.

Obviously, I recommend this title. Any Lovecraft fan will appreciate the genius of this work. It's fully in keeping with the spirit of the Cthulu Mythos. And it expands that storytelling tradition by one order of magnitude, all with an engrossing grace.

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Just, Bad

Revisado: 05-14-20

DNF. There's nothing good about this book. Badly written. Disgusting, unlikable characters. An amorphous, pointless plot (assuming there is one). Author tries too hard to sound poetic, but he just uses extra words to say uninteresting things with zero grace, zero inspiration and staggering quantities of cliches. Seriously. Don't read this. It's awful and has not one redeaming quality.

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Revisado: 05-26-17

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