Various Thoughts

The concluding novel in Kim Harrison‘s Hollows series makes it fairly clear that the series has been dragged out far beyond its expiration point with power-level creep that’s both ridiculous and inconsistent. Roughly half the book is someone doing something awful, blaming Rachel for it, and having everyone believe them for no apparent reason, while a quarter consists of Rachel beating herself up about ‘holding Trent back’. Only ~25% or so of it is decent-to-good and you wouldn’t lose much by just skipping straight to the epilogue chapter.

Originally R. Scott Bakker’s Aspect-Emperor series was meant to be a trilogy, but after a lengthy delay it ended up becoming a quartet. It’s very fortunate that The Great Ordeal is preceded by a detailed recap of what came before, because after nearly a half-decade gap I doubt many remember previous events at all clearly. It’s also fortunate that the book turns out to feel more like the earlier Prince of Nothing novels. I still don’t like the Esmenet/Kel sections at all though.

The Unholy Consult is a bit different though in that the disparate storylines are mostly merged into a single narrative while the vast majority of the book focuses on one battle. Ultimately I don’t think these two needed to be separate novels, as there are a number of aspects that end up completely superfluous (such as the Sorwheel/Serwa and White Luck subplots) or orphaned (those ‘vile angel’ interludes). The conclusion deserves special mention for being so… random? Though there’s a certain symmetry to the one person not damned being responsible for damnation, the way it happens does not feel natural in the slightest. It’s almost like an after-thought.