The Thousand Eyes

Character: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

World: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

I loved this one. I actually read the first 25% of this book in 2022, but found I wasn’t in the mood for it. I came back to it a few days ago, skim-reading to catch myself back up on what had previously happened, and regular-reading a couple of pages here and there whilst I was waiting in line at the shops or cooking dinner.

Then I inhaled the remaining 75% in one day.

Well, Larkwood’s now an auto-buy author for me. I’m so excited to see what she comes out with in the future because her prose is such a treat. I’ve found it to be unique amongst the current ranks of 2020s Epic Fantasy trad publishing, and the closest I can compare it to is Tamsyn Muir’s (which I guess is why she’s got a pull quote on the front!). If you like The Locked Tomb, The Serpent Gates has a lot in common with it, from the necromancy aspects, to the humour, to the gays.

I read most of this book in one day simply because I found it that fun to read. My dirty secret about the first book is that I thought I would like it more than I did, and my fondness for it is for the vibes rather than the content so far as I remember it, but after having such a great experience with this one I’m curious to see my thoughts on it now. Maybe, like when I tried to read The Thousand Eyes in 2022, I wasn’t in the right mood for it and it impacted my ratings. I’ll re-read it one day, but Mount TBR is calling.

One of the only faults I can put to the prose is that it relies a bit too much on similes, but so many of them are delights to read that I didn’t care as much as I might have had they been weaker.

The sarcophagus was a great cube of unclouded marble, so white and still that it looked as though a hole had been cut into the universe to show a blank page beyond it.

-

When Tsereg opened the book, a letter fluttered out. They unfolded it and made a quiet, sad little noise, like the sound of a snail being stepped on.

But whilst this book centres around unholy Lovecraftian horrors beyond mortal ken, it’s also written in a casually funny voice that’s balanced by unexpectedly profound moments most visible, to me, in Tal’s POVs.

He closed his eyes, pressing closer, hoping it might make him feel steadier, or more certain of what he had done. He didn’t know how to find his footing. There was still that terrible familiar vacancy, an emptiness without definition. This was supposed to have fixed things. He was supposed to feel better.

Now that I have gushed enough about the prose, let’s focus on characters, plot, and world.

So, the biggest problems these characters have to grapple with is the question of dilemmas. As in, there’s rarely one good path to follow so they must take the choice between two sucky ones. Which I think more characters need to do, because there are a lot of hard decisions being made in my reads, and bad choices too (whether it be on purpose or plain idiotic), but I haven’t been finding a lot of dilemmas, which is probably just me not picking my books correctly, but ah well. Following the end of the previous book, Csorwe and Shuthmili have successfully escaped the people who controlled them through debts of gratitude, duty, and tradition, and are now in possession of their own destinies, until their old lives come to drag them back under in the form of Belthandros Sethennai, that bastard.

The most interesting stories were of Csorwe and Shuthmili, the first of who is taken out of commission for much of this book and the second who is trying to get her back into commission. The stakes were high with this one as it centred around one of those pesky dilemmas and demands the characters answer questions about how far have they really come from their roots, and can they even escape them in the end? Delicious.

This is reflected in Tal too, what with his history with all kinds of relationships. I enjoyed Tal’s subplot, and he was definitely the funniest character to follow, but I still found myself wanting to see what happened to other characters more simply because their plots were more tied to the stakes of what’s been stressed as important in this setting … mainly, that the setting functions and doesn’t start getting sucked into a cosmic horror void of madness.

“Yeah, I have some money,” he said to the girl. “It’s in my pockets. You’ll have to let me go.”

“All right. Maybe,” she said to Tal. “When I do that, you need to take off your coat and put it on the floor.”

“Why should I do that?” said Tal. “You know, this isn’t the first time someone’s tried to rob me, but I’ve never had to talk them through it before.”

But for all of the entwining stories, they manage to make matters of such importance to the universe’s health and make its fate rest on the shoulders of a few people’s emotionally charged decisions, which means the stakes are high, folks.

Like with my memories of The Unspoken Name, this book has a lot to get through for the page count. Am I just used to my Fantasys taking much more time to get places? Probably! The Thousand Eyes takes liberal application of timeskips and getting from one place to another in a matter of words, but it’s all done with such grace and humour I felt comfortable pinging around like this.

Overall, I very much enjoyed my time with this book and I will definitely be re-reading the first book at some point in the future. A.K. Larkwood, ya killed it, can’t wait to see what you put out next.