Dark Moon, Shallow Sea

I am not saying that you must be a better knight, my boy. I am saying you must be a better person.

I went into this book expecting something with the same vibe as the author's Adam Binder trilogy, but high fantasy (and given that the more high fantasy-ish, parallel worlds bits of the Adam Binder series worldbuilding are among my favorite aspects of that story, I was very excited). Unfortunately, this turned out to be a disappointment. :( I did love the worldbuilding here! The world is so dark and rich and evocative, with its dying gods and Greek mythology vibes and scary paladins and strange mazes and ghost-infested cities and more. Everything else, though, I found sadly lacking.

Honestly, the more I read, the more I felt like this story should have been a videogame. Everything about it begged to be interactive. That wonderful setting? I would have loved to see actual visuals, to get to wander around all those dark, threatening places, click on things, find loot, get into fights, figure out escape routes. The plot that had a series' worth of material packed into a single average-sized novel? It felt like a tangle of quests to be tackled in whichever order the player prefers. Pick a faction, have some adventures, discover lore, piece it all together. Get engaged by interaction. Also, despite the overwhelming amount of stuff going on, every twist and plot point felt so transparent and like something that would be fun to experience in-game but often frustrating to follow as a reader. Even the characters felt weirdly videogame-y. The two mains—Raef with his street smarts and grief for the murdered goddess he worshipped, Seth with his struggles to belong in the rival god's paladin-like order and religious guilt—technically had interesting conflicts and personal deals, but felt sort of flat. Like they were archetypes, semi-blank slates waiting to be filled in as the player behind the screen goes through dialogue options, chooses quest order/outcomes, and fills in the gaps in their own head. All the other characters kind of had an NPC feel to them. 

I don't even know if I'm verbalizing it properly, but seriously, I keep thinking that everything that felt like a flaw for this novel would have been an awesome feature if it were some kind of Bloodborne/Skyrim/Pillars of Eternity hybrid videogame. And hey, in a way, that made for an interesting experience, and I'll definitely be thinking about this book more, trying to dissect what makes for this effect. But I didn't enjoy it much as a book.

I had a hard time buying into the initial premise of the book: since the Knights of Hyperion murdered the Moon Goddess, a dozen years ago, the souls of the dead have been haunting the streets and may kill anyone who bleeds. Fish, or food in general, has become increasingly difficult to find. But it's treated as something that happened, whereas it's very much something the head of the main religion ordered, for reasons that only become clear near the end of the book. And people keep worshiping Hyperion without questioning his Knights' actions. If it were me, I think I would be ANGRY. (You could probably write a story about how some religious leaders made their followers' life difficult for selfish reasons and how these followers kept on believing in them, but that's not what Dark Moon, Shallow Sea is about.)

The first half of the book is a bit of a slog, not bad enough to drop the book immediately, but not good enough to actively enjoy the read. Also, good books with queer male leads written by a queer guy where the MM relationship is not the center of the story but just a part of it aren't easy to find, so I admit I was afraid I would miss the moment where the book finally shines and kept on reading.

On Twitter, the author described the city in which the story takes place as "a dark, mist-filled Venice full of empty canals" and I wish the writing had conveyed this atmosphere as clearly, because the setting felt so dull. It was also difficult to root for the main characters' romance since one of them remains a mystery until the last quarter of the story.

The second half is better: the setting changes, and characters whose viewpoints alternated until this point finally meet each other. The last quarter of the book, in particular, delivers several twists and revelations, although I feel like their impact could have been greater if the characters and their relationships had been more fully developed earlier in the narrative. It felt more like a succession of very lucky encounters than satisfying payoffs.