Fantasy Soaps: The Daylight War

Never have I seen such a strong start to a fantasy series fall so far. The third book of Peter Brett's Demon Cycle, The Daylight War, promised a climax to the first two books, which built up both the war between humans and demons, and between Arlen Bales, the Warded Man/Deliverer, and Ahmann Jardir, the murdering, raping, bloodthirsty conqueror from the east.

I probably wasn't alone in hoping for Jardir to get what was coming to him. But no, of course we weren't going to get that. A good portion of the book is spent rehashing events from the past book, just from Jardir's wife's point of view. Which really was a waste - it didn't really tell us anything about Inevera that we didn't already know, and it did nothing to change the reader's perception of the character as a hard, honorless witch. The amount of writing that progressed the plot took up only a tiny slice of this lengthy book, and it just didn't do enough on the fantasy/action/horror/adventure front. Even in what was new, it felt more like watching The Young and the Restless. There were endless (repetitively described) sexual encounters - more than you'd find in a straight romance novel. Those, too, did nothing to progress the plot. And in Leesha and Rojer's case, the characters are making a lot of stupid decisions that really make me less empathetic, and are not really in keeping with the way these characters were built in the first place.

The whole thing is unraveling - which is a shame. I can only hope that the fourth book, The Skull Throne, will be a return to form.

K. Rating: 1/5