Halloween Bingo 2024
I’m not sure why, but reading this book felt like wading through pudding. It was delicious pudding, but I felt like it was much more than 600 pages. None of the characters are particularly endearing, yet I like them and I’m interested in their antics. I mean, Sand dan Glokta has a fabulous inner dialog. Logen Ninefingers, when he’s not berserking out as the Bloody Nine, has plenty of practical wisdom (Better to do a thing than live in fear of it. You can never have too many knives). Ferro, with her disgust for the vast majority of humanity, is highly entertaining. Even poor old Jezel has his moments.
I suspect my problem was a combination of the plethora of battle scenes and the torture sessions. Lately, I have found the endless battle scenes in fantasy fiction to be exhausting and repetitive. And much as I enjoy Glokta, his profession as torturer is off putting. The good news is that the second half of the book seemed to go easier and I picked up steam. The writing is excellent, the settings well realized, the plot is complex enough to keep me reading, but as I indicated above, it was the characterization that cinches this book as well worthwhile.
Abercrombie has tied up enough loose ends to satisfy me. At this point I don’t believe I’ll be continuing on beyond the First Law trilogy. Dark fiction has just worn me down. My apologies to the unfortunate person waiting patiently for me to return this tome to the library—it will be 3 days overdue when I chuck it in the book return tomorrow.
I read this book for the Dark, Darker, Grimdark square of my Bingo card. It is also Book number 529 of my Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Project
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