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vitalbeachyeah 's review for:
Moon Witch, Spider King
by Marlon James
I'm glad I bothered to read this: it's a vast improvement on Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Marlon James seems to have reflected on the various issues with the first book and addressed them. This time the protagonist is (kind of) sympathetic, the dialogue is not just a series of vague riddles, and it's easier to piece together what the hell is going on (helped by this being, in part, a Rashomon-style retelling of the events of the first book from a different perspective).
Plus the prose is still great (honestly, on a sentence-by-sentence level, this is probably the best writing I've ever encountered in a fantasy book) and there are moments of really effective horror.
Like the first book, it's also nihilistic and extremely pessimistic in its portrayal of human behaviour, but I'm getting a little fed up with the yay-friendship-is-magic tone of most contemporary fantasy/sci-fi so it's sort of a welcome relief to read something which pushes too hard in the other direction.
Plus the prose is still great (honestly, on a sentence-by-sentence level, this is probably the best writing I've ever encountered in a fantasy book) and there are moments of really effective horror.
Like the first book, it's also nihilistic and extremely pessimistic in its portrayal of human behaviour, but I'm getting a little fed up with the yay-friendship-is-magic tone of most contemporary fantasy/sci-fi so it's sort of a welcome relief to read something which pushes too hard in the other direction.