#if you're not listening to shylmagognar/haken whilst reading this book you're not getting the full experience

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - The Malice

The Malice - Peter Newman - It’s rather telling of me that on my month off from uni, I opt to spend my free time reading grizzly shit like this, but god damn is it fucking worth spending my free time on - As a sequel to ‘The Vagrant’, I was expecting good shit (please don’t expect me to read a sequel without comparing it to the original), and the two things that really stood out to me about that book, the amazing world and the beautiful writing (in lovely juxtaposition with how fucked up everything that goes on in the world is), are still here in abundance -> The world especially was something that I really liked, because in this book Newman not only shows us new unexplored elements of the world (I especially liked how this book follows the Empire of the Winged Eye a lot more than the last one, which only properly delved into the Empire at the very end), but looks at how elements of the first book had changed in the time-lapse (and it’s always the return of stuff that I didn’t expect to see returning, which was fucking sweet) -> I also liked how, unlike the previous book which only really delved into the main cities, this book shows us the wider wild world in all its glory, meaning that we are able to definitively say that the wilderness of this world is just as fucking horrifying as everything else - The characters were a bit hit-or-miss but generally likeable enough, especially Vesper -> Newman has a skill of taking characters that should at best be uninteresting and at worst actively annoying in how little they can do, such as silent protagonists, babies, goats and in this book children, and actually managing to make me like them; as a rule I’m not fond of children and find their presence in books irritating because of how helpless they often are, but Vesper proves herself to not only be independent but very likeable in her optimism and legitimate care about those who surround her -> Duet made for a great counterbalance to Vesper and provided some pretty sweet scenes; I was a wee bit concerned at first that the duo in this book would just be a recreation of the duo in the previous book (i.e. Duet as a grim put-about honour-bound killer like the Vagrant, Vesper as the more human and genial of the two like Harm), but the circumstances surrounding Duet, especially all the stuff with the Harmonised, was enough to make Duet a stand-alone character separate from the Vagrant character mould -> I do kind of wish that the adventurers weren’t weighed down by the burden of that fucking baby goat; yes the goat in the previous book was an arsehole who got the Vagrant into shit, but that was because the animal was actively being an arsehole, whereas in this book shit often goes awry because the goat is just a gormless idiot, which is far more frustrating to read -> I wonder about the purpose of Samael besides beings a means to reveal more about the wider world and the infernals; he was an alright character in that low-effort way of being in the ‘inoffensive put-about warrior with a sense of justice’ character mould, but he didn’t really add anything or do anything noteworthy, and really only seems to be there to a) retain a link to the Knights of Jade and Ash from the last book, b) remind the reader that the supposedly horrifying threat of the Yearning and the infernals is still relevant (because although defeating the Yearning supposed to be the whole goal of Vesper’s adventure, it’s rarely ever brought up), and c) pad out of the length of the book -> The side characters were all pretty alright, my favourites being the returning revolutionaries from the first book, and of course Ezze/Little Ez, the greatest of geezers - Whilst we’re on the subject of characters, I need to rant for a bit about how much I fucking love the First, and how glad I am that it had a bigger role in this book than it did in the last one -> Okay so in my reading experience, there’s a lot of ways of making a villain, and it all depends on the book (and now I’m gonna bring up The Gentleman Bastard sequence as evidence for my point because that’s what I always do and fuck you for trying to make me do otherwise); in ‘The Gentleman Bastard Sequence’ the villains have to be bigger dickheads than the dickheads we’re rooting for, in ‘The Kingkiller Chronicle’ the main overarching villains are supernatural murdering dickheads with no redeeming qualities but such a villain is necessary in a book that’s intended to be like an archetypal tavern-told story, etc. -> I’d liken the First to Shrake in ‘The Gates of the World’, as it is an effective villain due to both its persuasiveness and how fucking overpowered it is, but whilst Shrake exists as this sort of aloof and cantankerous character who no one in the cast can really relate to, the First finds a way to get through to humans and make them side with him -> That, and the multifaceted and fucking awesome ‘innumerable collected bodies controlled by one hive mind’ thing, makes the First one of my favourite fucking villains in a long while - The whole ending was really really nice, with a contemplative and pleasant journey back the way they came to right all their wrongs that equally warmed my heart and made me very excited for the final book in the trilogy, whenever that’s coming out - I do have a few concerns regarding how the world has changed; not wanting to spoil, but a lot of the main overpowered antagonists of the previous book aren’t really around in this one, and there isn’t a whole lot to fill the void they leave behind -> Like the world seems a lot emptier in this book; there are limited trips to major cities and the cities that we do go to don’t have the same enigma and threat to them now that the infernal deities that once presided over them aren’t around any more, meaning that the adventure seems less like the risky dangerous trip through city after city that we got in the previous book, and more like just a journey through fucked-up wilderness interspersed with run-ins with characters who progress the plot - Come to think of it, a lot of the issues that I have with the adventure as a whole is the stuff that is different from the previous book, which sounds petty but let me elaborate -> Yes obviously I love the idea of Vesper picking up the sword that her father once held and going off on her own quest in her father’s footsteps, and obviously Newman wanted this as well, which is why I can’t help thinking that the setup to put Vesper in her father’s position is kind of contrived -> The adventure itself, the exploration of the world and the interactions between Vesper and Duet, is all fucking great and I loved reading it, but in order for this to happen Vesper had to be completely shanghaied into the midst of this shit with little to no warning and no time to recover, and this only happened because Vesper made a poorly-justified impulse decision -> And this therefore results in a completely jarring tonal shift between Vesper’s quaint life on the farm, raising goats and wistfully dreaming of something more, to crashing in a military compound prison and being marched through a battlefield whilst all the people who took her there get gruesomely fucking obliterated around her; compare this with the first book, which starts off mid-adventure to establish the dark tone of the story, which is then retained throughout -> Also I guess a minor thing I was uneasy about is how the Vagrant was a fully grown man and therefore could take a bit of a beating in the harsh world, but Vesper is only like twelve or something and may very well have gotten the shit kicked out of her by everything throughout the course of the story, but as it turns out a) Vesper was strong-willed and quick-thinking enough to not be too up against the odds, and b) had Duet with her, who could fuck shit up to a radical degree, so feel free to disregard this point -> However, what the child protagonist thing does negatively alter is that children don’t know shit about sword fighting, so there’s way less radical sword fight scenes in this book than there were in the previous book; the Malice just kind of functions like the Luggage in Discworld, coming along from time to time to dramatically deus ex machina Vesper and Duet out of whatever shitty situation they’ve stumbled into - 8/10

I have a load of other book reviews on my blog, check that shit out.