(This review was written several months ago, before I launched the review site)

I just finished reading Blade of Tyshalle, book two of Matthew Stover’s Acts of Caine series.

Quick synopsis: Having rescued his wife and given the finger to the Studio system in the first book in the series, Hari Michaelson (sometimes known as Caine the assassin) has a really fucking massive mid-life crisis as he discovers that getting everything he ever wanted actually kind of sucks. Meanwhile, in the alternate earth where he made his name, a colliding mess of conspiracies ends up unleashing a bioengineered plague that is going to kill pretty much everything if nothing is done to stop it. Also, the collective unconsciousness of the human race is the villain, because apparently we’re leaning hard into cliched misanthropy and colonial guilt today.

I have some problems with this book.

First, though, the good stuff. The pulp fantasy action–once the book finally got to it–was fantastic. Caine feels most alive, both in character and as a character, when he’s encountering impossible problems and applying brutal and desperate solutions to them, and it remains an absolute delight to watch him work.

However.

The book has three big problems with it, in my mind at least. This is going to involve some spoilers of the plot, so I’ll do a quick summary first: the book is okay, but not nearly as good as the first, and I’m really hoping that the next one in the series drops the main plot of this one and does something more interesting. The fact that I still want to read more of the series should tell you that I think it still has some promise, even if I didn’t like Blade nearly as much as its predecessor.

If you want to read Blade of Tyshalle spoiler-free, then skip the rest of this review.

For everyone else, here’s the details.

First: the villain is, frankly, garbage.

In Heroes Die, all of the characters were humans trying their best to live in a terribly cruel world. We could see how this future Earth had been shaped by catastrophe and cold practicality into the caste-based dystopia that the novel posited, and a major theme of the novel was (in my mind, at least, now that I’ve finished reading Blade I’m less certain that the author would agree with me) these human actors fighting for their own truths and their own goals despite everything that the System was trying to tell them they could or couldn’t do. It was a very human story, and in its own bitter way a very hopeful story. Even in this fascist police state, you can still fight, and still triumph.

In Blade of Tyshalle, on the other hand, that fascist police state is revealed to actually be controlled by a supernatural collective consciousness thing called the Blind God, which represents the worst of human instincts as imagined by an unimaginably bitter misanthrope. At first it seems like it’s a metaphor, if a heavy-handed one, but no, it’s an actual entity, which can pour itself into individual human minds and run them like a puppet. And the fact that it’s everywhere, and that you literally can’t fight against it because it is you, is just so terribly uninteresting.

It turns out that all that fighting against the police state in the previous book didn’t actually matter, because the blind god that represents true human nature is, quite literally, a murderous cannibal rapist, and there’s nothing you can do to change that except try to protect the precious magical world of elves from the terrible nasty humans. No hope of change, no hope of redemption, no struggle to be human in the face of inhuman systemic forces, none of that matters at all because this generic-brand-evil Blind God controls literally everything down to the way you think. It’s never really explained what the Blind God is, how it came to be, what it’s done, what it can do, nothing–it just is, and it’s just boring.

The second problem is related to the first problem: a lot of the conflict is abstract to the point of meaninglessness.

Many, many times, characters discuss their personal philosophies about life with each other or the reader instead of actually doing anything to demonstrate those philosophies. This is excusable at first because the language being used is so well-written that it’s still enjoyable to read, but then it keeps happening, up to the very last page of the book.

To back up those abstract motivations is a boatload of mystic combat that isn’t even half as interesting as a single knife fight (which I know for an absolute fact that this author can write masterfully). Problems are often solved through magic, which is fair because it’s a fantasy novel but also boring because it’s not done in an interesting way. The magic is too…floaty, I guess. Too wee-woo. Filled with metaphors and indescribable things, the sort of event that in a movie would be represented by people glaring furiously at nothing, as though they could draw power from their forehead wrinkles. There’s nothing concrete, like people throwing lighting at each other or something (though that does happen at various points in the novel, and it’s awesome when it does), but rather people wrestling with concepts, drawing undefined power from inexplicable sources, getting involved with things called the Worldmind and managing the Flow and all kinds of stuff where I’m almost happy that no explanation was offered because I know my eyes would glaze a little bit as I skimmed over it to get to the good stuff. Or maybe there was an explanation, and I skimmed over it and forgot. Either way, same result.

The third problem is directly caused by the second, but is probably a bigger issue. I’m talking about all the rape metaphors.

Because the magic being used throughout much of the book is somewhat abstract, the author needs to invent ways of telling the reader what’s actually going on in a way that they understand. Metaphor needs to be employed. And in a weirdly high number of situations, the book’s go-to metaphor seems to be nonconsensual sex.

This is especially noticeable in one particular plot thread where a sorcerer is using a young girl’s magical connection to a river goddess to try and connect with the magic of the river in order to do…something that I was never really clear on. All I know is that it’s bad, because the book repeatedly informs you that what this sorcerer is doing is rape. This gets mentioned at least half a dozen times, very explicitly.

And honestly? I lost a lot of respect for the writing because of that. It’s a cheap metaphor. And furthermore, the story shouldn’t have been in such a bad place, with such a lackluster villain and lame-duck mystical conflict, that it needed to use such a cheap metaphor. Not after the absolute batshit action and perfect noir meditation that was Heroes Die. Not when I know the author can do better.

So…yeah.

That’s Blade of Tyshalle.

A book that took too long to get to the good stuff and stumbled around too much with vague mystical bullshit right up until the point where it pulled itself together, remembered what kind of story it really ought to be, and put a knife back in Caine’s hand. And in its defense, once Caine comes back–not Hari Michaelson, his identity on Earth, but Caine–the book once again becomes delicious pulp fantasy action. In particular, Blade of Tyshalle gives us one of the best fantasy prison segments I’ve ever read, and you had best believe that it is hard to make that list.

This return to pulp form lasts right up to the point where the stupendously silly climax reminds you that the plot doesn’t make any kind of goddamned sense. I am still unsure of what, exactly, the bad guys’ plan actually was. All I know is that it seemed to involve a lot of things blowing up at random, and a lot of them shooting their own troops.

Man I hope that Caine Black Knife, the next book in the series, just ignores the Blind God and all its ilk. What a stupid villain. This novel would have been way better with recognizable faces and motivations powering the struggle. Maybe that’s just my own personal preference, I don’t know, but I’ve written all this to try and get these thoughts out of my head and I still can’t get over the waste of potential represented by that mad, blind creation.

I think that’s why I’ve written so much here, and why I’m so annoyed by this book. In some alternate world there’s a better version of this novel, and the one I read is so close to it that I can see that other timeline from here. Cut out the blind god and the river, but keep the plague, the prison, the fallen god-emperor plotting in another world, the racist anti-nonhuman conspiracies and the elven gangsters, and you’ve got a fucking incredible novel. One that I really wish I’d been able to read.

At least the mythic sections, where an unknown narrator tells the events of the story as though they were oral legends passed down through generations, were cool. More fantasy books should do stuff like that. Give me more crooked knights and fallen angels, and less blind gods and abstract bullshit that you can’t seem to explain properly.