RANTS AND RAMBLES
NOTE: Though I strive to adequately support the opinions expressed in my reviews, they are still just opinions. If you like a book I hate, I’m happy for you. Additionally, while I regularly rant about mere irritants in a novel, something must be remarkably good to garner the same level of comment. This means my rants and rambles often skew more negative than I intend my review to be, so please refer to my overall star rating for my unified opinion on this book.

• This review is somewhat abbreviated as it is the second in a series and I did not feel like belaboring points made previously. Please check out my review of In Darkness Cast if you want a more in-depth discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the series.
• I love Captain Cayne, an important member of the supporting cast. He is realistic, relatable, and down-to-earth. Like most military men, his language is foul and his outlook on life jaded. He shows outward disdain and dismissal of his soldiers but only because he wants so badly to keep them alive and knows he can’t. He thinks outside the box, breaks the rules when they don’t make sense, chafes at dumb commanders, and still follows orders. I love this depiction of a noncommissioned officer and a military member in general. This is the best developed character in the book by far, which is unusual for a supporting character.
• MINOR SPOILERS: In this book, zombies are dead beings raised by necromancy magic, so their bite should not turn other people into zombies. Despite this, one of the characters makes the statement that being bitten will turn a person into one of them, a fact which is clearly incorrect since Gideon is bitten later in the story and does not turn. Why does this character get this important fact wrong? Perhaps it is a reflection of real life where people never perfectly understand the situation so the conclusions they draw may be incorrect. This is a compelling explanation but for two things. First, the soldiers of Samothrace have been fighting zombies for a long time, so they should have a pretty good idea of how exactly they work. Second, when Gideon gets bitten, no one so much as mentions the possibility that he might turn into a zombie. This throwaway line about zombie bites feels like a remnant of a previous version of the book which was missed during revision.
• MINOR SPOILERS: Here’s a sentence I never thought I would write about Shades of Black: anachronistic language crosses the line into fourth wall-breaking situations. An example of this is the inclusion of crosses as holy symbols. As far as I am aware, there is no direct analogy in this universe to Jesus dying on a cross for the sins of the world, so exactly what power does a cross shape have? There is also the inclusion of a group of special forces military members who are referred to as, and I am not kidding when I say this, US Marines. Is this supposed to be a far-flung future of our world? Even if that is the case, why would the US be remembered, much less the Marines? The inclusion of pseudo-Marine tradition, lore, and jokes is a bit too much for me and ruined my immersion in the world.
• SPOILERS: When the love triangle of this story was introduced, I literally groaned and rolled my eyes. This is an epic fantasy series, not a whiny teen romance. That isn’t to say that romance and, indeed, love triangles can’t exist in epic fantasy (ex. Aragorn-Arwen-Eowyn), but this one feels shoehorned in to manufacture drama rather than to develop the characters and expand the story. This romantically conflicting situation and its consequences are not committed to but rather dissipated in a massive cop-out when one of Gideon’s love interests turns out to be a bad guy. The twist that this character is a bit of a villain is actually pretty good, but it would have worked just as well if she had simply been presented as Gideon’s childhood friend. There’s no reason for her to be a love interest as well.
• SPOILERS: What sets the Bonescribe apart from ordinary necromancers in this fantasy universe is that he controls the bones rather than the flesh of dead beings. This difference is taken to an absurd extreme where skeletons are ambulatory due to the magical control of their bones, but if they have no flesh, muscles, or tendons, how do the skeletons hold together much less move? Perhaps the idea is that magic levitates the bones in roughly human shapes, but if this is the case, why would inscription of magic runes on a single bone, as appears to be the case, control the whole skeleton? Also, why does the Bonescribe not use his magic in more inventive ways than simply creating an army of soldiers?
• MAJOR SPOILERS: Action in this book encounters three big problems. First, a single, extended battle scene spanning nearly two-thirds of the story doesn’t leave much time to explore the world, develop the characters, or advance the plot meaningfully. The sequence is interesting and tense when new, non-super powered characters are on the line and truly in danger. This tension quickly dissipates as the story shifts focus to god-power-level heroes. The second problem with the action is that of power creep. Gideon is so powerful that nothing can meaningfully threaten him except similarly over-powered villains. This should leave the major supporting characters with little to do since they are not super powered, yet they do engage in the fight, holding their own to an astonishing degree. This begs the question, if the not-so powerful characters can counter the super powered villains nearly as effectively as Gideon, is he actually as powerful as the first book indicated? This power discrepancy is a very common symptom of power creep. The third problem with the action is that the battle scenes don’t tell a story with push and pull where the action rises and falls. People smash away at each other with weapons though why exactly we don’t know because the protagonists have no feasible way to win. But the reader knows the one way the good guys can win, and that’s exactly what happens. When all hope seems lost, they are saved by a deus ex Ashkelon. When one character can beat anyone, there is little real danger or tension.
• MAJOR SPOILERS: Oh, how the mighty have fallen. In the first book, Ashkelon was an interesting twist on a fantasy trope, an uber-powerful being who has given his life to the dark and done unspeakable things simply because he could. He hates the dark yet continues to wage war against the light, and his reasoning makes a twisted sort of sense. He longs for good but finds it nowhere and so reasons that by creating the worst evil ever seen, good will rise to counter it. But good does not rise, and Ashkelon continues along his trajectory, killing an entire world. His twisted fatalism and view of morality created a truly evil but understandable villain/anti-hero. He was a mass-murdering psychopath desiring a worthy hero to defeat him, adding just one more link to the chain of his sin of pride. In this book, however, that backstory appears to be retconned. It turns out that Ashkelon didn’t actually want to kill the world he massacred; in fact, he feels really bad about murdering all those people. He created a magical Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) to draw the greatest hero of the light into combat, but he defeated that hero. Then he forgot to turn off the WMD. I’m not sure if this was always the plan for his backstory, but it feels like one of the most unique characters in the series was castrated by this expansion of his story.