The Fall of Shadows

Last night, I finished reading Beyond the Shadows, the final book of the Night Angel Trilogy (following The Way of Shadows and Shadow's Edge). I'd found the first two books pretty good, if not fantastic.

The third book was a wreck.

I mentioned in commenting on book two that it felt like the story had basically concluded at that point, other than a few minor subplots left unresolved. Having now read book three, I feel this even more strongly. After two books, author Brent Weeks suddenly seemed to want to be a George R.R. Martin and write a lengthy book of war and politics. But he doesn't do so with a fraction of the skill.

This final book splits into a number of different narratives, following different kings and religious figures as they each try to amass power for their own purposes. Pages are still devoted to Kylar, the assassin that was the main focus of the first two books, but suddenly the fantasy no longer seems "high," but "personal." A poorly-paced plot of being caught between two women who both love him, every chapter of it feels like some sort of bizarre wish fulfillment for a writer vicariously living a dream to be a badass and satisfy two women at once.

The other plots amble along at no better a clip. There's little sense of anything leading anywhere, and indeed the real plot (as even the publishers chose to define it in their synopsis on the back cover of the book) doesn't materialize until page 550 of of 690-page book. And then, when it finally arrives, it's largely similar to events from the end of book two.

Whether it was a dip in writing quality, or boredom from the aimless plot, I even found myself tiring of all the characters in this final volume. At some point early on, I became hyper-aware of the fact that virtually every major character was some super-powerful figure with magical powers bordering on the godly. Everyone was special, and so no one was special. Hell, even a supposedly dead character from an earlier book came back for a return engagement, because what's death to these people?

A few clever turns of phrase here and there in the writing kept the book from being a total loss, but ultimately the only thing that pulled me through to the end was a desire to finish it as quickly as possible so I could start reading something else. I might have abandoned it entirely, but the first two books had left me feeling that at some point, something of what I'd enjoyed there would have to show up in this final volume. Wouldn't it?

No. I recommend in all seriousness that if you should ever decide to read these books (and the first one, in particular, is worth it), that you simply not read book three. It might sound odd to suggest that people walk away from an incomplete story, but I say that whatever ending you'd imagine for yourself would probably be better than the one it actually has. I rate Beyond the Shadows a D-.