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kateofmind's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.25
This is a quick pulpy potboiler stretched out to long novel length, but not for the reasons you might expect. Not a lot of energy is spent on characters' back stories or complex inner lives; they are mostly figurants enacting a captial P Plot. And there's a lot of Plot in this story of a wave of sanity-destroying terror hitting a medium sized Chinese city with its origins in a remote mountain village, where figures from Ming/Qing era Chinese history once did heroic and terrible deeds and possibly also captured and contained a demonic force that seems to have been unleashed in modern times! The tension between this being a supernatural horror story disguised as a Sherlock Holmesian detective story, or a detective story disguised as supernatural horror, is maintained almost all the way to the end, so I forgive a lot of flimsy characterization and Sudden Feats of Acuity. The best feature is its incorporation of Chinese history into its plot; the worst is its tendency to describe characters as having Trustworthy Faces, as though physiognomy denotes virtue or vice (ick), and a lot more attention to how Wise and Respectable everybody is. A decent, but not a brilliant, read.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Murder, Violence, and War
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