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A review by mrjgyfly
Infernal Sky by Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweaver
2.0
Read the review of the entire series (plus much more ranting on the overuse of exclamation points!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) at The Books in My Life.
Oh boy. The beginning of the end. Infernal Sky isn’t godawful, though godawful is coming in the final entry, but it is a wild deviation that becomes increasing nonsensical over the course of the narrative. It appears that in an effort to turn the lack-of-narrative of the video game into a coherent story, the authors have attempted to justify everything that happens in a game with the same amount of plot as Pong, creating something entirely incoherent.
This one picks up on the beaches of Hawaii, where Fly and Arlene are vacationing. No kidding. Also, Arlene is naked during these scenes and her body is now a constant subject of Fly’s internal monologue. It’s as if the two writers suddenly popped boners at the start of writing the final two books and never got rid of them. Fly’s hard-on for Arlene, which never really existed before because they’re both “best buddies” as he likes to remind every five seconds, never subsists, and the deviation is frustrating, skewering what was once a strong female lead. Now her inclusion seems obligatory, as evidence by the constant references to political correctness. (Arlene is a man, goddammit. If you’re a Marine, then you’re a man. But when she’s naked, she’s a woman.)
So the whole gang is hanging out in Hawaii, putting out the occasional zombie fire and prepping to save the world. How so? Fly and Arlene must return to Phobos and fight their way through the hordes of zombies once again. How does this help? Something about getting to the real aliens responsible for the attack, the ones who created these imitation hell spawn in the first place.
And find them they do. With the short-lived help of Albert and a strict military captain, Hidalgo, they progress through the levels once more, but when they jump through the gate that originally led from Phobos to Deimos, they’re intercepted by Sears and Roebuck, a pair of Klavians fighting the Freds (the real bad guys). These two Klaves operate as a single being, and they closely resemble a pair of Magilla Gorillas that talk like Yoda.
Can we go back to demon killing? Er, faux demon killing.
The Klavians and the Freds have been fighting for a long time, and Earth has been caught in the crossfire for reasons that were probably explained, but you can probably now see why I don’t remember what they were. They are fighting over differing interpretations of what are essentially spiritual texts. One of them represents deconstructionism and the other hyperrealists. It is a galactic war of literary criticism.
Also, the Freds are humanoids with brains in their chests and artichoke-like leaves for heads.
I really can’t bear to continue describing this plot. Is it original? Sure. I guess. Compared to the source material, it certainly is. Going off the rails with a wild plot filled with unbelievable characters isn’t necessarily a bad thing; however, this series attempts an ever-graver serious tone and, worse, a message. The mashup is a boring, inconsistent escapade.
Fly is becoming unbearable, starting with the addition of Hidalgo. Hidalgo is a strict leader who doesn’t know what he’s doing, which clashes with Fly’s rugged individualist nature. Rugged individualist? The guy who bleeds red, white, and blue and is obsessed with weaponry? Essentially, he’s a staunch conservative stereotype parading around as some literary-minded dude who is somehow a rugged individualist maintaining military status despite the military being essentially destroyed. Basically, he’s Brad Linaweaver (Google his blog and you’ll see what I mean) pretending to be a fictional character. The inconsistency is grating, as he’s now obsessed with Arlene’s bodacious bod (it’s the nineties, yo), being a rugged individualist, saying “oo-rah,” and constantly reminding the reader that he hates college students. He trashes college students as much as he employs the exclamation point, which is still constant.
Hidalgo’s nonsensical addition can be summed up in the dumbest line of the serious, and believe me, most of the sentences are pretty inane. Hidalgo is given a backstory, despite not remaining in the narrative for long. His wife was killed by a cyber-demon (formerly a steam demon), even though he originally says it was a baron of hell that did her in. (Exclamation points and typos galore!) However, he’s not saddened about her death:
“I thought about killing her. I even started to formulate a plan. Then the monsters came, and our personal problems went on the back burner for a while. I was off fighting the war to begin all wars, and she was safe at home, just waiting for a big red minotaur to turn her into a taco with special sauce.”
Don’t ask me why I didn’t give up on the series right there. I was in too deep. Knee deep in the dead, you might say.
But the cardinal sin of this one is the waste of time that is the first half. There are whole chapters devoted to Fly and Arlene relaying different accounts explaining how they made it out of the tower at the end of Hell on Earth, and both renditions are so poorly detailed, I’m not entirely sure how they did it, but I know the biggest goddamn boot they could find was involved. This is deliberate stalling to reach the obligatory two hundred fifty pages, and its inclusion allows Hugh and Linaweaver to forgo coming up with a creative way for their characters to escape. Thing is, the escape didn’t need to be realistic. The escape from Phobos wasn’t realistic, and that was perfectly fine.
Also, the zombies being studied on the Hawaii base à la Day of the Dead (yes, yet another George A. Romero rip-off scene) escape and cause some mayhem for a chapter or two. They escaped because the scientists neglected their procedures. I’m only kidding. They escaped in order to inject some action into an exposition-plagued novel.
Infernal Sky is trash, and not trash in the same manner the first two are trash. It’s trash in the sense that it’s so poorly crafted. I’ll take derivative. I’ll take fan service, and there’s a fair amount of that here. I’ll take the authors taking a creative jab at a kooky storyline. But this is shoddy storytelling and the voices of the characters have become vehicles for the authors to spout uninteresting, chauvinistic opinions.
It’s not the worst read, though. That’s reserved for the final volume, Endgame.
Oh boy. The beginning of the end. Infernal Sky isn’t godawful, though godawful is coming in the final entry, but it is a wild deviation that becomes increasing nonsensical over the course of the narrative. It appears that in an effort to turn the lack-of-narrative of the video game into a coherent story, the authors have attempted to justify everything that happens in a game with the same amount of plot as Pong, creating something entirely incoherent.
This one picks up on the beaches of Hawaii, where Fly and Arlene are vacationing. No kidding. Also, Arlene is naked during these scenes and her body is now a constant subject of Fly’s internal monologue. It’s as if the two writers suddenly popped boners at the start of writing the final two books and never got rid of them. Fly’s hard-on for Arlene, which never really existed before because they’re both “best buddies” as he likes to remind every five seconds, never subsists, and the deviation is frustrating, skewering what was once a strong female lead. Now her inclusion seems obligatory, as evidence by the constant references to political correctness. (Arlene is a man, goddammit. If you’re a Marine, then you’re a man. But when she’s naked, she’s a woman.)
So the whole gang is hanging out in Hawaii, putting out the occasional zombie fire and prepping to save the world. How so? Fly and Arlene must return to Phobos and fight their way through the hordes of zombies once again. How does this help? Something about getting to the real aliens responsible for the attack, the ones who created these imitation hell spawn in the first place.
And find them they do. With the short-lived help of Albert and a strict military captain, Hidalgo, they progress through the levels once more, but when they jump through the gate that originally led from Phobos to Deimos, they’re intercepted by Sears and Roebuck, a pair of Klavians fighting the Freds (the real bad guys). These two Klaves operate as a single being, and they closely resemble a pair of Magilla Gorillas that talk like Yoda.
Can we go back to demon killing? Er, faux demon killing.
The Klavians and the Freds have been fighting for a long time, and Earth has been caught in the crossfire for reasons that were probably explained, but you can probably now see why I don’t remember what they were. They are fighting over differing interpretations of what are essentially spiritual texts. One of them represents deconstructionism and the other hyperrealists. It is a galactic war of literary criticism.
Also, the Freds are humanoids with brains in their chests and artichoke-like leaves for heads.
I really can’t bear to continue describing this plot. Is it original? Sure. I guess. Compared to the source material, it certainly is. Going off the rails with a wild plot filled with unbelievable characters isn’t necessarily a bad thing; however, this series attempts an ever-graver serious tone and, worse, a message. The mashup is a boring, inconsistent escapade.
Fly is becoming unbearable, starting with the addition of Hidalgo. Hidalgo is a strict leader who doesn’t know what he’s doing, which clashes with Fly’s rugged individualist nature. Rugged individualist? The guy who bleeds red, white, and blue and is obsessed with weaponry? Essentially, he’s a staunch conservative stereotype parading around as some literary-minded dude who is somehow a rugged individualist maintaining military status despite the military being essentially destroyed. Basically, he’s Brad Linaweaver (Google his blog and you’ll see what I mean) pretending to be a fictional character. The inconsistency is grating, as he’s now obsessed with Arlene’s bodacious bod (it’s the nineties, yo), being a rugged individualist, saying “oo-rah,” and constantly reminding the reader that he hates college students. He trashes college students as much as he employs the exclamation point, which is still constant.
Hidalgo’s nonsensical addition can be summed up in the dumbest line of the serious, and believe me, most of the sentences are pretty inane. Hidalgo is given a backstory, despite not remaining in the narrative for long. His wife was killed by a cyber-demon (formerly a steam demon), even though he originally says it was a baron of hell that did her in. (Exclamation points and typos galore!) However, he’s not saddened about her death:
“I thought about killing her. I even started to formulate a plan. Then the monsters came, and our personal problems went on the back burner for a while. I was off fighting the war to begin all wars, and she was safe at home, just waiting for a big red minotaur to turn her into a taco with special sauce.”
Don’t ask me why I didn’t give up on the series right there. I was in too deep. Knee deep in the dead, you might say.
But the cardinal sin of this one is the waste of time that is the first half. There are whole chapters devoted to Fly and Arlene relaying different accounts explaining how they made it out of the tower at the end of Hell on Earth, and both renditions are so poorly detailed, I’m not entirely sure how they did it, but I know the biggest goddamn boot they could find was involved. This is deliberate stalling to reach the obligatory two hundred fifty pages, and its inclusion allows Hugh and Linaweaver to forgo coming up with a creative way for their characters to escape. Thing is, the escape didn’t need to be realistic. The escape from Phobos wasn’t realistic, and that was perfectly fine.
Also, the zombies being studied on the Hawaii base à la Day of the Dead (yes, yet another George A. Romero rip-off scene) escape and cause some mayhem for a chapter or two. They escaped because the scientists neglected their procedures. I’m only kidding. They escaped in order to inject some action into an exposition-plagued novel.
Infernal Sky is trash, and not trash in the same manner the first two are trash. It’s trash in the sense that it’s so poorly crafted. I’ll take derivative. I’ll take fan service, and there’s a fair amount of that here. I’ll take the authors taking a creative jab at a kooky storyline. But this is shoddy storytelling and the voices of the characters have become vehicles for the authors to spout uninteresting, chauvinistic opinions.
It’s not the worst read, though. That’s reserved for the final volume, Endgame.