Joseph D'Lacey's THE BOOK OF THE CROWMAN

I really enjoyed last year's Black Feathers, Joseph D'Lacey's first half of the saga of Gordon Black (what is it with Angry Robot Books and people named Black and blackbirds these days, by the way? It's impossible not to think of Gordon and Miriam Black as siblings of some twisted and horrible kind), but I gotta admit, this second half, The Book of the Crowman, was kind of a slog, you guys.

And that makes me really sad. Even as it suggests rather strongly (ok, more like shouts, for reasons I'll get to below) that in appreciating the subtlety, ambiguity and lack of preachiness in the first volume, I was appreciating Black Feathers all wrong. Either that or I was being set up in the first volume for the rhetorical bludgeoning I got in the second. I think I'd almost rather have been appreciating it all wrong.

For The Book of the Crowman takes all of the things I liked best about Black Feathers and throws them onto the compost heap. Gordon is now explicitly a hippie Christ figure (although yes, he kills a lot more people than Jeebus ever did) (well except all the ones that Jeebus has indirectly killed over the centuries) (but maybe not, 'cause dude kills a lot of people with his little lock knife). Megan becomes less of a Lemmiwinks but still manages to be boring. And the chilling villains of the first volume, Skelton and Pike, stop feeling quite so much like Neil Gaiman/BtVS villains (they totally reminded me of The Gentlemen in Black Feathers) and more like Satan and Saddam Hussein in South Park.

What kept me going was the writing itself, the one quality that truly does carry over from the prior volume. D'Lacey really lets himself rock out this time around, with great escape sequences, action scenes, whole set-piece battles (longbowmen versus tanks, y'all. S'all I'm saying), and also some more of those powerful, quietly emotional scenes that stay with you long after the last page of the book is read.

Ultimately, though, all of that beauty and excitement wound up not being enough when weighed against the feeling of being preached at. It's an open question for me whether it's people with whom one agrees (as is pretty much the case here) or people with whom one disagrees who are more annoying when they just won't shut up about their cause, but the experience of reading this book has added extra weight to the former notion. When you're drinking/talking with an earnest hippie friend who feels passionately about this cause -- nature versus industrialism, pastoralism versus exploitation, tribal egalitarianism versus macro-societal authoritarianism -- sooner or later you can get them to shut up and realize that they're wasting their breath and energy trying to convert the already converted. One cannot, at present, tell a novel to just shut up and enjoy the sunset though. So far. Ah, me.