/lit/ - Literature

I've finished reading the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks today, and these are my thoughts on the three books (Way of Shadows, Shadow's Edge, and Beyond the Shadows).

These books were not nearly as edgy as I had heard them described. Sure, the characters like to say "fuck", there's graphic descriptions of all kinds of ultraviolence and more than a few raunchy sex scenes, but the themes of this story are about the triumph of love, honor, and justice over mindless destruction and hate. At its core are a group of heroes who sacrifice themselves to overcome utterly depraved monsters.

There's a lot of cheesy writing in these books. The dialogue feels like action movie banter at times, and almost Whedon-esque comedy at others, but I found myself enjoying it rather than cringing toward the end, mostly because of how much I'd come to like these characters.

I suppose one way this series holds up to its reputation is the amount of suffering characters go through, cause oh boy do they suffer. Just about every single protagonist is put through a hellish ordeal, some of them get more than one. Just when you think the horror is over, Weeks pulls the rug out from under you and reveals it was a false sense of safety and people were even more doomed than you could have believed. Which just makes the eventual triumph of the heroes that much more cathartic, even if it did come at a high cost for Kylar in particular.

The world of Midcyru is interesting to me. The cultural influences Weeks drew from to create different countries are fairly obvious, but similar to Wheel of Time he's blended different traits together to create the various nations and peoples.

One thing that makes me want to pick up more of Weeks' work is the fact that he avoids spoiling the big mysteries of the setting right up until the end of Beyond the Shadows. While a lot of facts were revealed in that book about legendary events, big questions were left unanswered (deliberately, no doubt) and the world Weeks created still feels vast and mysterious to me.

I enjoyed this a lot and I wish I had picked it up years ago.