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lizshayne's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Let me be clear, I had ABSOLUTELY no idea what I was getting myself into when I picked this up. To the point that what I knew about this book was that there was history and romance and possibly magic.
Which is not, like, wrong, so much as it is, to borrow a line from Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, a charming understatement.
There's a lot of eldritch horror. What Hawk does here is take the Lovecraftian mythos and find some queer heroes and, having done that and apparently started a massive series in the process, dissects and critiques Lovecraft's idea of monstrosity and evil to the point where he revisits the monsters from earlier in the series and asks us to reevaluate what we know about them It's a series about not fitting in and making homes with the other weirdos and also Whyborne and Griffin banging like a screen door in a wind spell.
There is less sex as the books go on, which makes sense—at a certain point, the drama is not will-they/won't-they anymore because we've gone through all of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of queer romance: denial, fear of inadequacy, distrust of partner's motives, fear of loss, and acceptance, at which point the relationship is pretty solid and the sex no longer advances the plot and so, by nature of the fact that 11 books is an epic horror series, it happens less.
The question of whether this is a romance series where the plot cthulhu escaped or a fantasy horror series that takes relationships and the erotic seriously is honestly a good one. I don't know. Maybe both? It feels like the kind of series that can only exist post-fanfiction precisely because it is not beholden to genre form. Or because the genre that it is was one invented by fanfiction in the first place: the evolving story that was originally character-focused, but then grew to encompass a grand plot. This series, especially when you attempt to read it basically in one go, has big "this was supposed to be a one-shot" energy to it and I kind of love it. I also appreciate fanfiction for making this kind of narrative more familiar to readers and creating a mode for the romance series that isn't "one couple per book". I like those too, but variety is delightful.
I have absolutely no idea how much of my experience was colored by read the series in...umm, nine days? Probably a fair amount. I debated whether to put this in to storygraph as one book or 11, but since I do not remember what day I finished each of the other books on and while I can probably make a guess at what happened in each book, thanks to Hawk's convenient approach of naming the book after the location of the narrative, I definitely cannot make intelligent commentary about them on their own. Also, people notice when you read 11 books in a row, for some reason.
Cool cool. Off to read Rath and Rune, since that was why I picked this series up in the first place. *lolsob*
Which is not, like, wrong, so much as it is, to borrow a line from Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, a charming understatement.
There's a lot of eldritch horror. What Hawk does here is take the Lovecraftian mythos and find some queer heroes and, having done that and apparently started a massive series in the process, dissects and critiques Lovecraft's idea of monstrosity and evil to the point where he revisits the monsters from earlier in the series and asks us to reevaluate what we know about them It's a series about not fitting in and making homes with the other weirdos and also Whyborne and Griffin banging like a screen door in a wind spell.
There is less sex as the books go on, which makes sense—at a certain point, the drama is not will-they/won't-they anymore because we've gone through all of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of queer romance: denial, fear of inadequacy, distrust of partner's motives, fear of loss, and acceptance, at which point the relationship is pretty solid and the sex no longer advances the plot and so, by nature of the fact that 11 books is an epic horror series, it happens less.
The question of whether this is a romance series where the plot cthulhu escaped or a fantasy horror series that takes relationships and the erotic seriously is honestly a good one. I don't know. Maybe both? It feels like the kind of series that can only exist post-fanfiction precisely because it is not beholden to genre form. Or because the genre that it is was one invented by fanfiction in the first place: the evolving story that was originally character-focused, but then grew to encompass a grand plot. This series, especially when you attempt to read it basically in one go, has big "this was supposed to be a one-shot" energy to it and I kind of love it. I also appreciate fanfiction for making this kind of narrative more familiar to readers and creating a mode for the romance series that isn't "one couple per book". I like those too, but variety is delightful.
I have absolutely no idea how much of my experience was colored by read the series in...umm, nine days? Probably a fair amount. I debated whether to put this in to storygraph as one book or 11, but since I do not remember what day I finished each of the other books on and while I can probably make a guess at what happened in each book, thanks to Hawk's convenient approach of naming the book after the location of the narrative, I definitely cannot make intelligent commentary about them on their own. Also, people notice when you read 11 books in a row, for some reason.
Cool cool. Off to read Rath and Rune, since that was why I picked this series up in the first place. *lolsob*
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