An End To Sorrow (The Obsidian Path 3), Michael R. Fletcher, 2022 (531 pgs)
At the end of book 2, She Dreams In Blood, Khraen is freed from captivity by his god. He gets a fairly straightforward set of orders: “Find the pieces of you that matter. The piece that understands power. The piece that drives you to master your world. Destroy the corpse queen.” And, in case the consequences of failing aren’t clear enough he’s warned, “Fail me again, and I’ll scrape your world clean of life.” (And then a mob of rats eat someone, just to underline the point I guess.)
So as the kids say, you had one job...
If the first two books of the series were -- very roughly speaking -- his birth and adolescence, An End To Sorrow sees our narrator jump straight into a mid-life crisis. And it’s not caused by the threat to extinguish life on the planet. No, the fulcrum here is the corpse queen: his wife, the long-dead but variably-decayed Henka.
What a beautiful trap she’d concocted. I loved her and couldn’t keep her enslaved, and yet I could neither free nor destroy her.
—Khraen, lamenting the lack of easy choices.
An End to Sorrow sees Henka’s intricate manipulation of him become so obvious even he can’t ignore it any more. And he admits, round about page 512 or so that he loves but doesn’t, you know, like her. Oh, and there’s the dreamer in blood’s very pointed threat. But up to the end, the once-and-maybe future Lord of Darkness mostly...mopes.
To be fair: it’s a carefully-scripted extended dance remix of moping interspersed with copious bloodshed and drama. Think of Hamlet meets Cthulhu. And there are some some excellently-drawn set pieces of conflict and survival. Nietzsche even gets a nod at one point, in a necromantic kingdom whose official motto and approved crowd refrain is the chilling, “What kills us makes us stronger.” It’s odd, but also very on-brand for the whole Obsidian Heart series.
Trying to carefully avoid spoilers, this book was both intense and faintly disappointing. Intense in that it’s packed with action, adventure, intrigue, deception, murder, necromancy, wizardry, necromancy, travel, necromancy, drama, necromancy...you get the idea. And it’s largely, as before, done really well.
The writing is strong and in the midst of all the concentrated death there are flashes of dry humor -- I particularly appreciated that our Emperor has a demon-infused sword named “Kantlament” in a blunt but appropriate little play on words. Bren also is a serial claimant to having “one flaw” -- ten different ones just in this volume -- usually accompanied by a story that’s slightly off, as when love is compared to a smelly cheese.
The problem is that there’s just a bit too much of everything. I’m glad Fletcher didn’t try to stretch this into a fourth book. But this adds well over a hundred extra pages to the earlier two volumes’ length. The characters and very elaborate plot wind up slightly but palpably diluted, and by the end this dragged a bit.
Character flaws: Khraen’s personality is oddly suggestible for someone who ruled the world for millennia. All of the Hamlet imitation apparently squeezed out the strategic intuition and single-minded drive you’d expect from someone of his accomplishments. And the first book’s exploration of if or how to be a better man has long since petered out.
By the end of this volume, Khraen is gearing up for another round of genocidal war while still managing to seem…sort of tired. As was I -- by the last third of the book, I caught myself starting to wonder when and how it would end.
The plot remains baroque up to the end, with Fletcher giving the book two sequential endings. The second book creaked audibly under the strain of incredibly ambitious plot and world-building. In the penultimate chapter that labored construct rings up the curtain and goes to join the choir infernal, but takes pages and pages to do it.
The main storyline sort of thuds to a vaguely dissatisfying halt. There’s a contrived deus-ex-machina delivered by Bren, to whom Khraen is apparently out-sourcing a lot of his critical thinking.It’s followed, though, by a short and tightly-written hint that this is so not over. The contrast is jarring. It’s hard not to wonder if the author was just tired.
On the whole, though -- wow! The book is a worthy conclusion to a monumental work of grim dark delight. Fletcher’s prose is delightful, even when describing awful things. And his characters, while twisted and sometimes a bit one-dimensional, are always interesting. He clearly has the genre down.
Smirk factor: All clear: 2 pts (1 smirk, used to accurately describe a facial expression.)
Immersion factor: Chest-high: 1.5 pts
Writing quality: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Character/plot development: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Innovative/interesting: Above-average: 1.5 pts
Total: 8/10 (4 stars)