Emily

A really charming short story that highlights James’s talent for pillorying everyone from the working class to the ivory tower intellectuals. Plus a genuinely creepy narrative of a haunted engraving? Delightful!

I love how much fun the ride is, even when the plot is so clearly telegraphed. I’m not sure if it’s just a convention of the times, but to me it feels like James is supremely confident in his ability to write a gripping yarn, he doesn’t need to be coy with his foreshadowing.

Found this to be a nice little october snack. A guy discovers something fascinating and it comes with a little more than he bargained for. Not much going on with character or interiority, just a set up, plot actions, and an ending that felt a little bit like the James just trailing off, which I rather enjoyed. It felt like someone you’ve just met in a pub telling you a story, and once the action ends, the story’s just over, why come up with a drawn out denouement. Could easily have ended with the traditional German fairy tale ending: “and if they haven't died, then they are still living today."

what a spectacular end to a riveting trilogy. at first, i missed the six duchies and the fool, so it took a little bit of time to warm up to these new faces, but once hobb gets going, i was inexorably drawn into the lives of these incredible characters and by the final pages i was completely swept along, unable and unwilling to put the book down until i had finished

I really wanted to like this one much more than I did, and in the actual reading of it, I did enjoy it quite a bit. I love the setting, the mossy, stony dankness of it, the wild old danger, the withered old magic. But its apparent theme emerged very late into the book, and frankly, the recontextualization did the preceding book no favors.

Deep into the book (like 20 pages from the end), there was a passage that suddenly slapped me with the realization that this might be a men’s rights activism trojan horse (or maybe just tinged with subconscious men’s rights-flavored anger lurking in the author?). The drips and drops of information about Dom and Phil’s harridan shrew wives, gobbling up their money and children in the divorce suddenly began to make sense along with the descriptions of Surtr as nothing more than a lasciviously fat lump of malice (while her comrades at least got personalities). The thing that had been stalking the hikers throughout the book had been assiduously termed: it. But suddenly, it became she. She became mother. And “Moder’s [mother’s] rule and her pitiful congregation had to end. She was an isolated God; the last black goat of the woods…No more sons and fathers and friends should hang from trees. Not that, ever.”

So, that was a bit of an “Oh.” moment. Like, oh, I didn’t realize I’d been reading The Angry Cry of The Divorced Dad this whole time. If I’d known, I might not have bothered.

And finally, the last passage of the book takes the opportunity to muddy what came before. Our protagonist goes through a meat grinder and makes it through, and over and over during his travails he thinks about his parents, his sweet little dog, his friends, even the casual hookup he was last seeing. He rails at the black metal losers for thinking they could take all of that from him, it fuels his rage and will to live! And yet, the last passages are him ruminating upon how nothing matters, no people matter, he doesn’t matter, all anyone has is themselves and a little moment of time to exist. like, what? that’s the conclusion you reached? alright bud, have a good one [I say as I walk away from a guy I don’t want to be talking to anymore]