/lit/ - Literature

Finished Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio earlier today and it's absolutely a massive improvement in my eyes over Empire of Silence in terms of pacing and worldbuilding. From the very beginning I found myself far more invested in what's going on this time around since it seemed to focus far more on being a SciFi story whereas EoS to me felt that it could have easily been a fantasy novel with how little I felt it took advantage of it's genre.
There's just one thing that really bothered me and somewhat tainted a really strong last 1/4th of the novel and that's the death and resurrection of Hadrian after Aranata beheads him it just strikes me as a bridge too far towards magic shit but I'd love to know how other people felt about that plotline and if I'm in the minority for being annoyed by it. Visions and references to soft prescience is one thing but I feel that timeline altering influence to prevent the death of a character that already has permanent plot armor did a disservice to this story and prevents me from giving it a 5/5 rating in spite of how much I liked this book. Side note but the hostage negotiation scene and the two conversations Hadrian and Switch have in the last half of this book are absolutely incredible scenes.

another 4/5 for this series but it was damn close to being excellent