A review by emizh
House of the Beast by Michelle Wong

1.5

Thank you netgalley for the arc. 

This is unfortunately a critical review. 
I followed Michelle Wong for years due to her work on the Legend of Korra comics, and seeing artists break into publishing piqued my interest. 

This book unfortunately felt very undercooked. The prose is direct, with little sentence variation and perhaps the worst case of telling not showing I have read in a long time. The book telling you exactly what is happening at all moments so your mind doesn’t need to fill in anything or have any questions to ponder made me think this was YA until I looked up the book and it says adult. It really doesn’t read that way. 

The love interest is supposedly the dread beast, a god whose followers are great fighters. Why is his personification so boring? Having him have some more otherworldly aspects would make sense as being something Alma imagined as a kid where he can have a more horrifying appearance that Alma still finds comfort in would help emphasize how lonely she is. Instead we learn he makes himself beautiful because she wanted him that way and the only otherworldly part of him is his hair and maybe eyes. She really couldn’t give him more interesting features?

He falls in line with the many shadowy but also incredibly plain love interests that have dominated romantasy. 

Him being manipulative and not aligning fully with Alma is so telegraphed it makes her seem stupid. The book is already incredibly direct with the plot, and it is in first person. Alma catches all these hints about him and has doubts, but not enough to think even a little deeper? She only seems to get what's happening when someone tells her. 

The book is described as an epic fantasy, but it really doesn’t read like it. The world and the gods do not feel filled in enough. We get some sense of the magic with the tinkerer that I really enjoyed, but the other gods and their vessels are really lacking in what they grant their followers. The dread beast’s vessels are all great fighters, but they also train from a very young age. Their connection to their god just doesn't seem to grant them much. 

Alma’s connection to her god also takes away so much tension. You are never worried for her because her god is right there helping her. She moves her prosthetic hand immediately when it should take weeks, she is good at swordfighting without training because of her god, she defeats the test better than her cousin and father with more training than her because her god is there. 

The book just feels like it has a lot more to offer but doesn’t. More of the body horror or sacrifice aspects of their gods and powers would help to give a sort of consistent logic to the world. At first I thought all of the vessels need to sacrifice something to their gods, but now I’m not sure. The beast takes an arm, the heavenseer takes an eye? The tinkerer’s things seem to take a piece of them but it's unclear and The weeping lady’s followers just don’t get much to work with. 

I will say I liked how Alma breaks away a lot. She meets and grows to trust others and learns to care for them the way her mother always told her. Sevelie and her relationship was a highlight for me.

Overall 1.5? Only the climax kinda interested me. The rest of the book just doesn’t give much for you to chew on.