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A review by yak_attak
Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio
Howling Dark is a solid step up from Empire of Silence, expanding and stretching the premise in cool exciting ways, but it's also kinda a disappointment - everyone else seems to be wholeheartedly in on this series by the end of this book, and it's just simply not there for me yet.
First, the good, which is primarily wrapped up in Ruocchio's world, and willingness to Go There. Things get weird, trippy, and confusing. Things get dark, depraved, horrifying. There's a strong emphasis here on a chthonic bleakness - Lovecraftian yes, but even more specific than that - this solid immensity that he does so well - ruins, spaceships, and metal monstrosities, all are on display here in prime form. I don't know if I really like the actual *descriptions* of the environments (I remain completely confused what anything looks like or how anything works or is laid out), but hey the atmosphere formed is utterly fantastic.
Moreover, the characters actually get a chance to shine here. I can't say I like Hadrian much still, but he's at least fleshed out quite a bit more here than just "What if Paul Atreides was also whats his name from Gladiator." There's still a dearth of secondary characters for him to work against, we get countless names but none of them worth your time except two - Valka is again a strong presence whenever she shows up (arguably the best formed character, including Hadrian), but also now we get a really cool, creepy antagonist whose motives I'm not entirely sure make sense, but dang I like him a lot. So there's a solid core to base the book around.
And there's excitement, there's action, it's still big and fun and impressive and readable, but it's also just kinda... not doing much with it? There are questions brought up, especially around personhood, clones, cybertronics and body modification, but I don't know that much is ever done with it beyond using it as a background for cool (and they are cool) body horror scenes. I don't know that much is ever done with Hadrian's (what could be fascinating!) genetic tinkering, or the alien cultures... Partially it's because this book ends in such a downer place that maybe I'm just disappointed in the plot, but it seems like we brought up all this cool stuff and then systematically shut it down in the simplest, most direct way possible, and now we're back to square one. Huh. Okay.
And I really don't know that Ruocchio's writing is good enough to sell it. We see everything through Hadrian's writing, as an old man, looking back talking about his life - this creates this endless affectation around which all the prose is based of this dialogue back and forth and while I enjoy it in touches, after two full (big!) books of the same patterns used over and over, I'm not sure it helps so much as bogs everything down. Future Hadrian tells us what past Hadrian thought might be the case, but then it turns out he's wrong, and OH but in the FUTURE Hadrian will know so mUCH MORE and just like... tell me the dang thing already. It's rare I'm asking for tomes to be edited down, I liked to bask in and savor a long book, but I legit felt it at times. Things repeated, sentences, words, plot beats, and it just felt stretched out.
So: Cool, big, explosions and robots and aliens and shit like that, but I want just that touch more for it to really be a favorite, and I'm less confident that the series is going to deliver on it now.
First, the good, which is primarily wrapped up in Ruocchio's world, and willingness to Go There. Things get weird, trippy, and confusing. Things get dark, depraved, horrifying. There's a strong emphasis here on a chthonic bleakness - Lovecraftian yes, but even more specific than that - this solid immensity that he does so well - ruins, spaceships, and metal monstrosities, all are on display here in prime form. I don't know if I really like the actual *descriptions* of the environments (I remain completely confused what anything looks like or how anything works or is laid out), but hey the atmosphere formed is utterly fantastic.
Moreover, the characters actually get a chance to shine here. I can't say I like Hadrian much still, but he's at least fleshed out quite a bit more here than just "What if Paul Atreides was also whats his name from Gladiator." There's still a dearth of secondary characters for him to work against, we get countless names but none of them worth your time except two - Valka is again a strong presence whenever she shows up (arguably the best formed character, including Hadrian), but also now we get a really cool, creepy antagonist whose motives I'm not entirely sure make sense, but dang I like him a lot. So there's a solid core to base the book around.
And there's excitement, there's action, it's still big and fun and impressive and readable, but it's also just kinda... not doing much with it? There are questions brought up, especially around personhood, clones, cybertronics and body modification, but I don't know that much is ever done with it beyond using it as a background for cool (and they are cool) body horror scenes. I don't know that much is ever done with Hadrian's (what could be fascinating!) genetic tinkering, or the alien cultures... Partially it's because this book ends in such a downer place that maybe I'm just disappointed in the plot, but it seems like we brought up all this cool stuff and then systematically shut it down in the simplest, most direct way possible, and now we're back to square one. Huh. Okay.
And I really don't know that Ruocchio's writing is good enough to sell it. We see everything through Hadrian's writing, as an old man, looking back talking about his life - this creates this endless affectation around which all the prose is based of this dialogue back and forth and while I enjoy it in touches, after two full (big!) books of the same patterns used over and over, I'm not sure it helps so much as bogs everything down. Future Hadrian tells us what past Hadrian thought might be the case, but then it turns out he's wrong, and OH but in the FUTURE Hadrian will know so mUCH MORE and just like... tell me the dang thing already. It's rare I'm asking for tomes to be edited down, I liked to bask in and savor a long book, but I legit felt it at times. Things repeated, sentences, words, plot beats, and it just felt stretched out.
So: Cool, big, explosions and robots and aliens and shit like that, but I want just that touch more for it to really be a favorite, and I'm less confident that the series is going to deliver on it now.