Halfway through this book, I thought I
had it all figured out. All the ADB books I've read up till this point were
about Chaos space marines - read irredeemable scum – who have been
humanized, given real personalities and back stories to the point
where I found myself often rooting for them even as they continued doing
horrible things that marked them irremediably as Bad Guys. Here,
ADB's writing instead about the Grey Knights, basically as good a group of guys
as you'll find in the WH40k universe. And sure enough, about halfway through
the book, they end up behaving less than heroically - not of their own free
will, but still.
"Oh,"
I thought smugly to myself. I see what he's doing here; instead of taking bad
guys and humanizing them so they're real characters, he's taking good guys
and making them do bad things, so they're more like
real characters too. And had that been the case, this would have gone
down as a good but not great book - nothing to complain about, but a step down
from ADB's previous work.
As it turns out,
that's not the case. ADB pulls it off, and although I can't really say what
"it" is without getting into spoilers, suffice to say I was shown who is the
boss (Ed. note: the boss is your wife).
ADB is even nice enough to have the book's “villain” come out and sum
everything up:
"Some stories have no villain... Merely a mix of
souls, each seeking to find where the answers lie."
Grade: A
No comments:
Post a Comment