Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.
Short version: the Hog Father (twisted Santa Clause) is missing, extra belief is sloshing about causing all sorts of trouble, and Death has stepped up to fill the roll.
It’s not healthy having God sleeping right there where we can all watch him dream.
After the events of Leviathan Wakes, the protomolecule is just hanging on doing strange things on Venus… or is it?
On one hand, it’s over. It’s a solid series with a lot of interesting world building that kept me turning pages right up to the end and managed to wrap up a surprising number of plotlines up into a huge final battle. If that’s all you’re looking for and you’ve already read the first two books, go ahead and read this one. It’s the first two books, only bigger.
On the other hand, I still don’t like Kylar. He’s too powerful almost without ill effect (other than the cost that finally gets revealed for coming back from the dead; that was a well deserved punch to the gut).
Structurally, Leviathan Wakes is an interesting novel. It’s science fiction / space opera but also has fairly strong threads of crime novel / horror / military scifi threading through it as well. It’s an interesting mix and done well.
Characterwise, we follow Holden and Miller. Holden is initially second in command on an ice trawler who cares about people to a fault. He wants people to know the truth, even if doing so might cause even more problems than it solves. Miller on the other hand is an older cop on a space station. He’s had a hard life among the more criminal elements of society which leaves him with a somewhat less rosy opinion on humanity. The contrast between the two of them drives the story, especially as things really start going wrong.
John is down to the last few Withered and he’s got a lead. One thing leads to another and he ends up in another small midwestern town, working at a mortuary. Sound familiar? It’s a nice blend of old and new and works well as a conclusion for the series.
Eventually, the FBI show up and help to wrap up that storyline through the previous three books. We meet a handful of new Withered (including some surprising new powers) and get a bit more backstory. It doesn’t explain as much as I still want to know, but it’s more at least.
Following the disastrous ending of The Devil’s Only Friend, John and Brooke are out hunting Withered on their own.
On top of John’s sociopathy in the previous four books, we now have Brooke with a supernatural cousin of multiple personality disorder as she has to deal with the fallout of ten thousand years of Nobody’s memories and suicides. It’s also interesting to watch John try to figure out how to deal with this, both as a source of information in his hunt against the Withered but also as Brooke’s friend.
In The Devil’s Only Friend , John Cleaver is at it again. As I hoped, the story has moved away from Clayton County. This time around, John and Brooke– now with many of the memories and personalities of the demon (Cursed/Withered) Nobody–are part of an FBI task force tasked with hunting down and killing as many of the demons as they can.
It’s a cool way to take the story and I’m glad to see the change. I like seeing how John interacts with his new team members. It’s interesting that they’re all screwed up in their own ways, but they’re still trying to hunt something even worse. I wish we’d gotten a bit more depth on them before the end of the book, but it’s still a new situation to see John react to.
Oof.
So at the end of Mr. Monster, John literally called up a demon and told them to bring it on. So of course there’s another serial killer in Clayton County.
“My favorite part of family togetherness is when we aspirate body cavities. What’s yours?”
Mr. Monster takes basically everything that was in I Am Not a Serial Killer and cranks it up another notch. Creepy supernatural serial killer? Check. Long detailed descriptions of embalming? Check. John trying and sort of succeeding in coming to terms with being a sociopath? Check.