spaceponies

This tril­ogy is my new canon­i­cal exam­ple of a 1+2 tril­ogy. The first book is a self-contained story that exe­cutes well. Then the fol­low­ing con­ver­sa­tion between pub­lisher and author occurs¹.

"This is great! This will sell. But you know what peo­ple really like? Trilo­gies. Was this a trilogy?"

"Sure! I mean, yes!"

The prob­lem is that few authors can pull this off. One of my favorites, Nancy Kress, failed to pull this off with her Beg­gars "tril­ogy". Luck­ily for her, the first book (Beg­gars in Spain) is utterly excep­tional and stands alone.

The first Night Angel book, "The Way of Shad­ows", is bristling with har­nessed imma­tu­rity. It's like the author asked him­self, "What would be the fuck­ing awe­somest thing that could hap­pen right here?" Not the best, or most sen­si­ble, or most inter­est­ing — the fuck­ing awe­somest. That energy is well-used. There are dirty streets and cor­re­spond­ingly low peo­ple, every­thing is grim and near-cheerless. The story fol­lows a street rat from those streets through his weird jour­ney of becom­ing an assas­sin. While over­wrought in a cou­ple of places, I enjoyed the book.

The sec­ond and third books read more like first drafts. Incred­i­bly improb­a­ble plot leaps and for­tu­itous coin­ci­dences. A con­vo­luted mythol­ogy with arbi­trary focus in detail. Entire char­ac­ters with long-spun sto­ries, neatly wrapped up in inex­plic­a­ble off-camera sum­mary. Entire ten­sions, char­ac­ters, and con­flicts unre­solved. Char­ac­ters reduced to car­i­ca­ture, going through some emo­tional arc that feels com­pletely forced. In short, the series got away from the author.

The worst part for me was the end of the tril­ogy, with its big rock fin­ish: the kind where every­one is jam­ming on their instru­ments as fast and loud as they can, whether it makes any sense. The lack of restraint made them tough reads for me — with­out that inten­sive revi­sion that kept the first book so tight, the author tick­les his own funny bone:

"It will take a few min­utes before they get in posi­tion," Garoth said. "Where was I?"
"I think we were at the fight-to-the-death part," Kylar said.

Such a tone can work fine, if the book is designed from the begin­ning to work this way. But you can't expect peo­ple to care about your character's hard­ship and inter­nal strug­gle when your dia­logue has ran­dom wink­ing Fozzie Bear wocka wocka moments.

By the end, I was really glad that it was over. I wouldn't rec­om­mend the tril­ogy to any­one, but the first book is a good guilty read.

Ama­zon links:

Way of Shad­ows (Book) | Way of Shad­ows (Kindle)

Night Angel Tril­ogy (books) | Night Angel Tril­ogy (kindle)