1. Max Fiumara's art is uniformly excellent. The world and its inhabitants are designed beautifully.
2. Remender certainly knows A couple of thoughts.
1. Max Fiumara's art is uniformly excellent. The world and its inhabitants are designed beautifully.
2. Remender certainly knows how to tell a story. Good characters, good pacing.
3. The story itself is okay. It's a bit derivative. There are several stories that it more or less copies; the one it reminds me the most of is The Dark Crystal.
4. Remender explains that he won't be explaining anything. He mentions David Lynch as his favourite storyteller. Lynch is one of my favourites too. That Lynch doesn't explain much in his work, seems to me one of the lesser interesting things about him. Lots of storytellers do this, explaining too much is bad writing. To me Lynch is great because his storytelling is intuitive, he plows the furrows of the subconscious. That's why his work can be so affecting, it bypasses the rational, hits you right in your subconscious fears. I don't see any of that in this book, which isn't what Remender is trying to do of course, it just feels like he's taking the less interesting things from Lynch.
5. The title is terrible. It's clunky and kind of childish, especially for dark fantasy like this.
6. Remender is quite ruthless with his characters, but he's not cruel to them. That's important; characters die, but not so much for shock.
7. I hate letter pages. They never fail to be self-indulgent. I understand Remender wanting to communicate with his readers, but publishing that communication feels performative. It ends up being pages and pages of arselicking. (I am guessing these letter pages won't be in the trade, though.)
8. I have some questions about the setup (I know, they won't be explained). (view spoiler)[If the deal is to have the sacrificed children feel joyous, why the whole doomy sacrifice thing? Why take the children and chain them together, lead them around like prisoners? (hide spoiler)] It feels like that's purely happening for storytelling purposes, and it' feels inconsistent with the world building.
9. Not bad, overall.
(Picked up a review copy through Edelweiss)...more
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