Gladstone is such a genius when it comes to epic fantasy and no one comes close to what he’s doing with magic and souls and capitalism. Ruin of Angels very obviously follows earlier books and draws on them, but it also breaks with the sequence in an interesting way. It’s as though Gladstone has been setting the world up until now, even though that does the complexity of the books a disservice, and now he’s putting pressure on the seams to see how it breaks.
Gloriously, of course.
One of the other things I love about the Craft Sequence is Gladstone understands revolution and break and change in the fabric of society. He often uses magic to make change...faster, but the trajectory and overall workings of revolt feel real. It’s not a polemic, but as he says at the end, we need our narratives to imagine our futures in a way that is both fantastical and deeply real even if lacking in...verisimilitude.