The Monster of Elendhaven

This is an interesting book, but I can't really say I enjoyed it. I thought it was a romance, but it's a horror novella. There's a lot of explicit violence and gore, including people suffering from a plague. Johann is a murderer and delights in killing. If you prefer to look for content warnings, you definitely need to do that for this book. Or if there's something specific you avoid, ask me.

Florian is evil. Imagine the evilest villain you can. I don't mean the fun kind of villain, but someone you actively loathe. For me, I think of Prince Regal in the first Farseer Trilogy and Kai Winn from Deep Space Nine. Now imagine this villain has a henchman who is completely devoted to them, and they have sex. That's pretty much the nature of the pairing between Florian and Johann. It has an element of fated mates, as well, in a way that I found extremely off-putting.

I don't mind gay villains but these two (especially Florian) are written like deviants. Johann says flat out (not a direct quote), “you prefer men because no woman measures up to your sister.” I'm not comfortable with anything about that. It also would've been really easy to make this world queernormative, but instead, they're transgressing with their relationship too, in addition to all their actual crimes.

I did like the dynamic between them because I've never read anything quite like it. Florian doesn't have any soft edges. He is actively cruel to Johann at every turn. Johann is a brute but he loves everything about Florian, including his cruelty. There is no explicit sex, but the love scenes are like twisted games. Very dark and strange.

I also liked the imagery. The crumbling industrial city was very easy for me to see and it felt original, while reminding me of other settings. The streets and interiors felt desolate and decayed. This writer is skilled at establishing mood and at painting a detailed picture.

I think I might've enjoyed the book much more, despite all my distaste, if I had liked the writing style, but I did not. It's overloaded with metaphors. I am kind of pretentious myself and I rarely think that about books, but I did have that feeling here. I wasn't enchanted. But I listened to the audiobook and I liked the narrator, Daniel Henning, who was new to me.

Overall, I only recommend this to people who enjoy horror. I don't like the nature of the relationship, and I don't believe we are at a place as a society where we can conscionably write queer relationships this way without doing harm to the perception of real people's lives.