This book took me forever, compared to my normal speed. And that’s a little weird, considering how readable it is. It took me a bit of thinking to figure out why I didn’t want to return to it.

I really like the concept of this novel. Literalizing the agency people have on the world with their beliefs and delusions and psychosis -should- be extremely compelling. And sometimes it is. But the problem is that it actually feels a lot like fantasy already to me. Sure, it’s much more grim and disgusting. The characters are not good people whatsoever, a bunch of murder hobos, essentially. And the antagonists have an actual reason to be bombastic and deluded—they actually are those things, believe those things, and so they are actualized.

But the problems come when you actually think about the world and what it’s communicating. One antagonist is a slaver, characterized as fat and disgusting, and single-minded. Everyone around him is forced to love them and thus do as asked. This power comes from, as with all people do this type in the world, a profound loss of agency. Torture, pain, shame, loneliness, etc.

In other words, they internalize trauma and then that becomes their agency in the world. Only… that agency comes at the loss of their moral faculties and reasoning because they are literally broken. The more powerful they become, the closer they come to their destruction via the manifestation of their own inner demons.

At face value, it’s interesting. In practice it says some pretty shitty, wide-sweeping things about the trauma and those that suffer it; things that don’t actually jive with victims place undue responsibility on them and then characterizes them as agents of others' destruction, as well as their own, ultimately.

And yeah, sometimes trauma begets trauma, unfortunately. But the characterization of it, the overall aesthetic, is the author's prerogative and how readers are going to internalize what the story is “about”. And in this, it’s just more of the same, really. We know the slaver is “bad” because they’re fat and disgusting and unloveable and derives sexual pleasure from others' pain. Which, btw, is a through-line with a bunch of characters.

The main band of characters has such glaring flaws that we can’t expect heroism either. And those flaws are continually flogged until you notice the foreshadowing, or else! They ostensibly hate each other and have agency through their shitty qualities; the root of which is gestured at but not really explored to the quality you’d want for a nuanced appreciation when everyone is demonstrably terrible via their actions.

The ending was better than most fantasy, and I’d say this is the opposite in the spectrum of traditional fantasy. Bright and bushy-tailed moral purity and goodness are demonstrated with the “right” decision, even when it’s hard. I agree that’s not that interesting and this is more compelling than that, from a saturating of the market and what I’ve consumed standpoint…

But neither is there critical thought given to the major world-building blocks and ‘evil’ _looks_ and acts like, it’s just now we’re saying traumatized people bring out the worst in people and while this is morally grey, it’s also quite shitty toward mental illness. A complex understanding of humanity this is obviously not, IMO.

Fatphobic, “insane” people perpetuate the pain and loss that initialized more trauma in an endless cycle. I do like these people ultimately destroy themselves and I do think displacement and trauma could have been interesting. There’s a lot of potential and the natural questions I thought this question would prompt aren’t brought up.

Instead, it’s a thriller-paced dark fantasy where you just watch the wheels fall off. All the characters can do nothing but drive themselves into the ground with such principles of the world that are made most important. And while it’s undeniably entertaining sometimes, as soon as I start to think about it, I always come back to the fact that the concept is what’s compelling—and it could have been so much more.