When Darkness Falls (The Obsidian Trilogy, Book 3)

Meh. After the strong showing from the first two in the series, I was quite disappointed in this concluding installment, but explaining why might n... (show more)

Meh. After the strong showing from the first two in the series, I was quite disappointed in this concluding installment, but explaining why might not be easy to follow.

My first beef has to do with "agency," or with a character's ownership of their own situation. I have no problem with magic being used to accomplish things, but in this series, and especially in this book, the characters didn't solve their problems with magic. They "gave themselves over to the magic," acting as a vessel, while some higher power solved the problem for them. Excuse me? What's so damned heroic about being a puppet? When somebody rescues a little kid who's fallen into a well, do we compose heroic sagas in honor of the rope he used? Sorry. No sale.

The next issue is one of timing. This entire book felt like an episode of "Three's Company" - it's one misadventure in bad timing after another. Somebody goes away, and while he's gone, we learn something useful, but he doesn't know, so when he comes back... You get the picture. And a related idea is the problem of "running around." This episode seemed to have way too many people running from place to place, and not doing anything useful while they were there. Or at least, not USEFUL. I didn't for one minute have the impression of a smoothly flowing tale leading step by step, inexorably toward a confrontation and final resolution. It felt a lot more like 400 pages of wasting time to make the book long enough, and then a stampede through the final 200 pages to slap a quick finish on things.

I also object to big costs without adequate payoff. If you're going to kill a major character, or rip out his eyes or something, make the benefit commensurate with the cost. And for the sake of all gods, DO NOT reverse yourself later by having some obscure magical by-product bring him back to life or put his eyes back in. That just cheapens the entire experience. (Lackey does this at least twice in this one book, by my estimate. Possibly four times.)

Next beef: give your major characters something major to do, or get rid of them. Having a bunch of all-powerful magicians spend three quarters of the book playing bus-driver is an embarrassing waste. So don't.

Last item. God-like power makes for boring stories. If you give your characters access to magic that is powerful enough to raise mountains and shut off the sun, how do you build any suspense? No matter how much gobbledegook Lackey slings at me to explain it away, I simply don't buy that there is no way for them to send a simple message from point A to point B when the fate of the free world hangs in the balance. This simply insults my intelligence. Either that or it marks the characters as morons. Neither of which is going to make me like the book.

Most of these issues were present in the previous installments, but in less overt forms, and I was willing to overlook them. To be honest, this one felt like it was slapped together to meet a contractual deadline, and didn't get any planning, revision or polish.

Bottom line. The charming storyteller I'd come to like and trust just lured me into a dark alley and mugged me. (show less)