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masterghandalf) wrote2024-05-20 07:59 am
masterghandalf) wrote2024-05-20 07:59 am
The Gates of Dawn: Epilogue and Final Thoughts
This is a crosspost from Das_Sporking2. Previous entries of this spork may be found here.
Warning: This post contains a scene of abuse, as well as an overall discussion of the book's various gross or problematic elements.
MG: Well, everyone, it’s time to wrap up our journey through Robert Newcomb’s The Gates of Dawn! Last time, Tristan went to scatter Nicholas’s ashes, Scrounge turned up alive thanks to everyone else’s incompetence, and Scrounge and Tristan finally had it out, with Tristan coming out victorious. Yay. Today, we reach the epilogue, where we set some things up for the next book and meet some characters we probably should have met already, and then at long last we’ll be done! Joining us once again, one last time, will be Len and Yhani!
Epilogue
Len: *putting her arm around Yhani’s shoulder* We’re almost to the end of the line, ‘Hani – we can do this! So, we open as The tall, lean wizard floated quietly above the shattered ruins of the Gates of Dawn. Through his use of the craft, a woman floated by his side. The man’s long, white hair moved casually in the swirling wind, as did the hem of his odd, two-colored robe. So… who wants to bet this is the new head of the Consuls now that Nicholas is dead? And don’t think I didn’t notice that he’s apparently floating under his own power, but he has to levitate the woman himself. He scans the area with his mind for endowed blood, finds none, and opens his eyes to look at what a scene of failure, rather than triumph so yeah, definitely a bad guy. He also spots the bodies of the scarabs and the undead Consuls, while the woman comments that Nicholas has failed at the hands of the Chosen Ones and their wizards. No, and here I thought the ruins of everything he worked for meant he’d succeeded, silly me! But I have to add… Nicholas self-destructed on his own. Princey didn’t have to do anything. That seems worth keeping in mind…
Blood Matters: 226
Gender Wars: 106
Yhani: Our nameless wizard promises his companion that where Nicholas failed, he shall succeed – all he needs are the scrolls (hmmm… I believe the next book is called The Scrolls of the Ancients, is it not?) and one other thing. The one of endowed blood that even the Chosen Ones and the wizard of Shadowood know nothing of. Only I and Wigg understand this one’s ultimate potential. Hmmm… is this something else Wigg has caused to go wrong that I sense? The nameless wizard goes on to say that Wigg and Faegan may have escaped Nicholas, but they will not escape him (ah, the typical villainous overconfidence…) and first he needs the scrolls. He tells his companion they are entombed within one of the legs of the Gates and that is another reason why Nicholas conjured the scarabs – to watch over them. Their location is marked with an enchantment, forestalled – is that another way of saying ‘a forestallment?’ – that would only activate in the event of Nicholas’s own death or the failure of the Confluence. Both of which, as it happened, transpired. He goes searching through the rubble, and at last finds a chamber hidden within one of the legs, dominated by a stone table, but to his horror, only one of the two scrolls was lying there. The wizard demands to know how this can be, and it does occur to me that clearly, Nicholas’s plans went wrong and the structure this chamber was inside of collapsed. Is it really so shocking that everything is not as it was intended to be?
MG: Do note that with the reference here to “the one of endowed blood” that even Faegan doesn’t know about, we have our first official reference (albeit unnamed) to Wulfgar. And oh, boy, when we get to the next book, we’re going to be talking about Wulfgar…
Blood Matters: 227
Dastardly Deeds: 124
Exposition Intrusion: 317
Len: *flatly* I just can’t wait. Anyway, the wizard and his companion examine the scroll they do have. It was about one meter long and one quarter of a meter thick. Solid-gold knobs adorned each end of the rod running through its center. A golden band, engraved with words in Old Eutracian, secured the massive roll at its middle. Oh, fancy. The wizard demands to know if his companion can find the other scroll, and she admits she’s not sure. Since she had been forced into his service, she had all too often been the victim of his sudden fits of rage. So, we’re wasting no time establishing who the bad guy is here, I guess… She thinks she might be able to do better if she had a piece of the other scroll, or knew who might have taken it, so the wizard literally grabs her by the throat, slams her up against the wall, and calls her an ignorant cow. Yeah, definitely the bad guy. But it’d be a lot more effective if, you know, the whole series wasn’t sexist as all hells already… He keeps choking her, telling her that she’s a blaze gazer, which sounds like some sort of diviner to me, and herbmistress and now she says there are things she doesn’t know. Uh, being learned and educated doesn’t make you omniscient – ‘Hani’s the smartest person I know, and even she doesn’t know everything!
Dastardly Deeds: 127
Gender Wars: 108
Yhani: *drily* Thank you for the vote of confidence, Dear Heart… or perhaps I merely want you to think I do not know everything, hmmm? *she smiles and leans up against Len* Now, where were we? Ah, yes… the wizard keeps choking his minion, thinking to himself that even if she dies, he can get another like her, and finally she says she thinks she can find it, if she has herbs and flame to work with. The wizard lets her go and drops her to the floor, then turns to walk away, deep in thought (if I was her, I would put a blade in his back about now, I think…). He considers where to find the herbs she will need and remembers an old rumor he once heard in the Redoubt, describing the only transgression supposedly ever committed by the lead wizard… Oh, I assure you, Wigg has committed a great many transgressions! But if Newcomb admits this one is bad… it must be very, very bad indeed! At last, he remembers, and decides his seer will get the herbs she needs. And then, after acquiring them, he would pay the lead wizard and the cripple in the chair a visit they would never forget! He then takes both the woman and the scroll and levitates them away from the Gates, and on that note, the book comes at last to an end.
MG: And so, it does! And, just like the last book, it ends on a sequel hook with characters we’ve never heard of before, but probably should have. By the way, his name is Krassus, her name is Grizelda, and we definitely should have met them before, him especially when we learn his history (also, Newcomb has now introduced an evil wizard named Krassus – and later books will introduce entirely unrelated evil wizards name Gracchus and Khristos. I’m starting to think he may not be very creative at naming things…). It’s striking how closely this follows the ending of the previous book, honestly, with both epilogues providing a sudden sequel hook that’s not really connected to what the preceding book was actually about. But with the epilogue out of the way, the book is indeed done! Thank you, Len and Yhani, for sticking with me through all of this mess! For now, you’re free to go – and maybe for a while, since I may get some new guest sporkers to help me with The Scrolls of the Ancients when we get there. For the rest of us, before we go, we still have my final thoughts for the book to get through! I don’t expect they’ll be as long as they were for Fifth Sorceress, because this book just didn’t have a lot of substance. But there are still some points I want to make, so let’s get to it! Before we go, our final counts stand at:
Blood Matters: 225
Contrivances and Coincidences: 86
Dastardly Deeds: 130
Exposition Intrusion: 320
Gender Wars: 110
Gratuitous Grimdark: 90
Plot-Induced Stupidity: 188
Final Thoughts
What’s most striking about this book is what a great big pile of nothing it is. On the surface, it feels like it should have been a big deal – Nicholas is alive again! And he’s now an artificially-aged super wizard backed by evil eldritch demigods! He’s going to destroy the world if he’s not stopped! But in the end, everything mostly resolves itself, requiring very little actual intervention from our protagonists, and it feels like in the grand scheme of things, the only parts of this book that really matter are Celeste joining the team and the Consuls turning traitor. To see more of what I mean, let’s break this down into its individual pieces.
Characters
Prince Tristan: As before, Tristan is still our main character and one of the two “Chosen Ones” of the prophecy, with everyone constantly talking about how important he is. In the end, though, it really feels like he spends most of the book as a pinball protagonist, with things happening to him but him not really doing all that much. He does meet Celeste and “save” her, and he plays a necessary role in recruiting the Minions, but beyond that… he falls into Nicholas and Ragnar’s trap and gets poisoned by them. He later goes to see Nicholas and gets exposited at by him. During the big battle, his own side keeps him locked out of the loop and basically uses him as a puppet to make the Minions do what they want, and then Nicholas dies entirely of his own doing with no need for Tristan to lift a finger. His life then gets saved from the poisoning off-page. He kills Scrounge, but only after Scrounge goes out of his way to set him up for it. Beyond that, he mostly just gets talked to, a lot, far more than is strictly necessary. Despite being potentially the most powerful wizard in the world, he never learns any magic, and even the fact that his resurrected son is the main villain doesn’t get nearly as much play as it should. In the end, Tristan’s just there – he’s the vehicle for the story, but it’s not really about him, which is a major flaw in a protagonist!
Princess Shailiha and Morganna II: She gets a better showing than in Fifth Sorceress, but considering she spent most of that book either catatonic or brainwashed, that’s an incredibly low bar to clear. Unlike Tristan, she actually gets the chance to spend much of the book learning how to use her powers, which is a plus… but in the end, the only contribution she’s really allowed to make isn’t nearly as much as what she could have. Seriously, we go out of our way to establish she can control the hatchlings… and then the final plan involves her controlling only one hatchling, which was already broken? It’s just a letdown. Beyond that, she’s one of the only characters to show a level of basic human decency, which is good on her, but not really enough to elevate her when her author seems determined to keep her on the sideline as little more than a backup for her brother. Baby Morganna on the other hand… is a baby, and she’s rather adorable, and I have absolutely nothing further to add.
Wigg and Faegan: In one of the few interviews I’ve read of Newcomb’s, he said he deliberately wanted Wigg and Faegan to contrast and play off of each other, with Wigg being grumpy and serious, and Faegan whimsical and playful. It doesn’t really work out that way, mostly because the two characters are joined at the hip in this book and might as well be one person for how they behave, and that combined person is awful. Wigg continues to be dour, self-righteous, and responsible for more of the conflict than he ought to be, while Faegan alternates between obnoxious smugness and near-Fair-Folk levels of cheerfully amoral sociopathy, but ultimately, both of them are here to deliver lots and lots and lots of exposition in a droning and condescending manner. Even Wigg’s blindness ends up adding absolutely nothing to the plot (beyond giving him an excuse to try to read Nicholas’s blood signature by touch – and Newcomb could’ve come up with any number of other reasons for that) and is casually cured off-page with no lasting consequences. Worse is that neither wizard really grapples with the fact that their mistakes, between them, were responsible for causing almost all of this mess – nor does the author (who will occasionally acknowledge the wizards have messed up, but then never have them learn from it or change their behavior) give any indication he’s aware it’s something that needs to be dealt with!
Celeste: She’s basically just a rehash of Narrissa from the last book – a pure, tortured woobie who exists to suffer nobly and be saved by Tristan so she can swoon into his arms. Alas, that doesn’t leave room for much of an interesting character, despite her connection to two of the book’s main villains. The narrative occasionally allows her to have lasting trauma from her centuries of abuse, but it seems to go away the moment it would inconvenience the “romance” with Tristan; her relationship with her father goes underdeveloped, and her desire for revenge on Ragnar amounts to exactly nothing. Really, she just feels like a hollow waste of a character, but at least she gets to live… for now…
Geldon and the Gnomes: In Fifth Sorceress, I found Geldon to be one of the only more-or-less sympathetic characters in the whole book. That’s still largely the case here, but he’s sadly out of focus, having very little to do but show up periodically to run errands for the wizards; the gnomes are in the same boat. Ultimately, their existence just serves to reinforce the protagonist-centered morality of the series – they serve the wizards and are therefore Good. The fact that the gnomes in particular get a very… patronizing… depiction only makes it that much worse.
Martha: Martha also comes off as one of the more decent people in the story, displaying genuine loyalty and protectiveness to the students under her charge. Unfortunately, once she’s dropped off at the Redoubt to deliver Scrounge’s message, she’s mostly shoved into the background and forgotten beyond a few domestic scenes, because she’s a woman in a Newcomb book and not a main character, and so that is her sad fate.
Traax: Traax as a character basically seems to exist to embody the Minions, and as such the narrative can’t quite seem to decide what to do with him. On the one hand, he can display shocking brutality and represents the narrative’s continued love-affair with the grimdarks. On the other hand, once Tristan has met with him, he forgets all that and immediately turns into a loyal, honorable warrior whose courage and devotion are beyond question and whose defining characteristic is his sense of duty. It’s kind of baffling, and makes it feel a bit like Newcomb wasn’t willing to grapple with what he’d actually written about the Minions, and so he brushed it all under a rug and flipped a switch to make them the good guys now, with Traax being the chief representative of that.
Ox: Ox is another character who seems more-or-less decent and escapes the worst of the baggage the Minions in general carry by having not been involved in their worst atrocities. Unfortunately, Newcomb mostly ignores that in favor of seeming to want us to laugh at him for being stupid, including having him speak in broken English in a way no one else does to hammer it home. On the other hand, in terms of his actual behavior he doesn’t really seem any dumber than anyone else, which seems quite telling…
Nicholas: Nicholas II is our big bad for the book, and what really hits me is how much wasted potential he had. He was essentially a tykebomb, having his head crammed full of knowledge by the Heretics and aged to adulthood to carry out their plans, and never really given a chance to be anything else. There’s material for a really interesting tragic villain there. Alas, Newcomb can’t manage it, and everyone generally treats Nicholas as if he was evil by choice and beyond redemption, while any sense of depth he might have in himself is buried beneath his tendency to speak in nothing but pretentious Heretic propaganda. Even his death, in the end, is hollow, because it comes out of nowhere with no buildup and requiring no one else to do anything to defeat him, making it feel like his entire story was a pointless detour that did nothing but waste our collective time.
Ragnar: Ragnar, like Nicholas, had the seeds of a good tragic villain in him – a man partially turned into a monster, driven mad by Wigg’s botched attempt to “cure” him, driven to seek revenge on everyone who he perceives as having wronged him (which is, well, everyone). But Newcomb can’t let us have that, so he deliberately sets out to make Ragnar as thoroughly repulsive as possible – he’s a sadist, he’s a rapist, and he’s just plain gross, with elements like his addiction to his own brain fluid that seem designed purely to be squicky. In the end, even though two of our heroes have very personal beefs with him – to Celeste, he was her tormenter for centuries; to Wigg, he represents his mistakes come back to roost – he doesn’t even manage a final confrontation with them, instead dying to his own master after he’s outlived his usefulness. In the end, I don’t think even Newcomb wanted him around. Also, his name is stereotypically Viking, to a distracting degree because of how that doesn’t really suit the character; if Norse names were a theme in the setting, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but since they’re not… yeah, it just sticks out awkwardly.
Scrounge: The final member of our villainous triumvirate is perhaps the worst assassin ever. He’s billed as a cold-blooded, professional killer, but Newcomb characterizes him with what feel more like serial killer tropes than assassin tropes, with him obsessing over particular “worthy” targets, leaving taunting messages, and so on. The result is that sends very mixed messages that end up making him feel less like a deadly assassin and more like a bloodthirsty idiot who’s constantly undermining himself – and indeed, his final confrontation with Tristan basically involves him setting himself up to fail out of misplaced pride and cruelty. For that matter, even having that confrontation happen required some serious contrivances – was there any reason Scrounge couldn’t have just died in the final battle? It wouldn’t have changed anything meaningful that I can tell. Also, his poetry is very bad, and he should feel bad about it.
Joshua: Poor Joshua; you seemed like a decent man trying to do what was right, a rarity in these books, and then it suddenly turned out, with minimal foreshadowing, that you were a traitor, you turned into a cackling melodrama villain, and you got killed immediately afterwards, seemingly because Newcomb can’t abide to write an actually interesting character in these books. In fact, like Natasha last book, killing off characters as soon as they become interesting seems to be a trend of Newcomb’s, one that will be continuing… hmmm…
The Heretics: They’re boring. Seriously, they’re a bunch of undead uberwizards, but they exist at arms’ length from the story, communicate only in faux-meaningful pretentious ramblings to Nicholas, show up in person in one scene when they’re summoned, and vanish just as quickly when Nicholas dies. Despite being the big bads of the whole saga, they’re very underwhelming here, and are some of the least interesting, most generic ancient evils I’ve run across in all my years reading epic fantasy (which is saying something). They also have nothing to do with how the Heretics are presented in the later books, but considering how dull they are here, part of me can’t blame Newcomb for deciding to retcon them into something else (though he really, really should have handled it more gracefully!).
Plot and Setting
Doing these together. Setting wise, we’re still in Eutracia (and a bit in Parthalon) with the same issues regarding the small size of the world and the thinness of these two places as the previous book had. This book introduces a new problem, though, regarding how absolutely empty Eutracia seems. We have a brief sequence in Tammerland near the beginning of the book, and then we have another city get wiped out by Nicholas later on… but beyond that, so far as the book is concerned, Eutracia’s population might as well consist of Team Tristan, Team Nicholas, their associates, and no one else. The countryside is staggeringly empty, and it almost leaves it feeling like the characters are fighting over the shell of an already post-apocalyptic world, which makes the threat of the Heretics ending the world feel rather hollow.
Plot-wise, the book is pretty straightforward – Nicholas wants to activate the Gates of Dawn and summon the Heretics back, and Our Heroes want to stop him. Perhaps it’s a bit too simple; this is one of the shortest books in the overall Blood and Stone series, but it still feels like it doesn’t have nearly enough plot to fill itself with. I have a higher tolerance for “slow burn” type books than a lot of people do, but a slow burn is taking its time because it’s developing the setting, the themes, the characters etc. In these books, the characters are paper-thin, the setting is worse, and the themes are both straightforward and pretty terrible… The Gates of Dawn is not a slow burn, it’s just slow. The book is packed with filler. People sit around and talk and talk and talk, mostly about things they, or at least the reader, already knew, and hardly ever do anything about it. Even when they do take action, it’s often needlessly convoluted- ie, Nicholas going out of his way to hide his existence and make Tristan and Wigg think Ragnar is the one in charge of their enemies, only for them to quickly figure it out, and then for him to reveal himself to Tristan a few chapters later anyway. It takes two separate missions to Parthalon to ascertain the Minions’ loyalty, both hitting more-or-less the same beats. Speaking of the Minions, we have a whole rigmarole about whether they can be trusted and how cruel and brutal they are – and then as soon as they raise the Galland flag, that’s swept under the rug, and they become perfectly noble, loyal warriors for the remainder of the story. The wizards and Shailiha don’t tell Tristan their plan for no reason other than to create and draw out artificial tension. It’s all just padding, and it adds nothing to the story beyond making it several hundred pages longer than it needed to be.
For that matter, much of the plot feels… familiar. The main villains are Vagaries users who are trying to pull off a ritual that will end the world as we know it. Said villains are even familiar archetypes – we have the mastermind (Failee, Nicholas) a depraved sadist and hedonist (Succiu, Ragnar – albeit that since Ragnar is a dude, he gets to be gross rather than sexy) a non-magical warrior who becomes Tristan’s rival (Kluge, Scrounge) and even a potentially interesting double agent who gets killed off suddenly and anticlimactically once revealed (Natasha, Joshua). We have the post-climax confrontation with the rival character. We have the last-minute sequel hook in the epilogue. And so on. Beyond that, in order to make the plot work, the characters on all sides have to consistently make terrible decisions for no adequately explained reasons. Seriously, my “Plot-Induced Stupidity” and “Contrivances and Coincidences” counters both ended up higher than the first book, despite this one being shorter, because characters keep doing dumb or inexplicable things to grease the wheels of the plot. And sure, you can argue that of course, all characters do what they do because the plot and author requires it – but Newcomb makes the strings really obvious in this book. And then the ending, with the conflict resolving itself without any need for intervention from our protagonists, just renders the whole rest of the story even more pointless than it already was.
Theme and Tone
This section is easy, because this book has the exact same problems on this front as its predecessor. Tonally, it still has the distinct sort of immaturity that comes when an author mistakes lots of darkness, gore and sexual violence for maturity and slathers it on too thickly. In terms of themes, we’re still hung up on blood, with everyone waxing poetic about blood at every opportunity and making it clear that a person’s value is based entirely on the quality of their blood (though Newcomb seems to have at least quietly phased out the idea of Tristan’s blood literally talking to him) – this is also where we’re introduced to the idea of blood signatures, which will continue to be a thing across the rest of the series, and will get even creepier as we find out more about what they do. Even though the gender war plot is over and done with the Coven wiped out in the previous book, the sexism never goes away, with the women being consistently sidelined and deemphasized compared to the male characters. Newcomb does try to start walking back some of the rank misogyny with the (I strongly suspect retconned) introduction of the Acolytes and Fledgling House, but it’s far too little, too late. Finally, we also have the unspoken theme that Wigg and Faegan are always right, and should always be listened to, no matter how they’re acting or how little sense they seem to be making.
How Would I Fix It?
Like Fifth Sorceress, I can think of a lot of individual aspects of the story I might fix, but the whole thing is such a mess the best option would probably be to chuck it all and start over. One idea which has occurred to me that I think would drastically improve matters is this – make Celeste and Scrounge the same character. Celeste is Ragnar’s assassin, raised and trained by him (he’s still abusive in this scenario, but in a more subtle and insidious way than the brutish rapist Newcomb wrote him as) specifically for the purpose of killing Wigg. In Ragnar’s mind, killing his enemy using his enemy’s daughter as his tool is perfect poetic justice (naturally, in this rewrite we should also make Wigg a somewhat decent person, so we can buy that his death would be a bad thing). This is hardly the most original backstory in the world (hells, it’s basically the backstory of Grianne Ohmsford/the Ilse Witch from the later Shannara novels, and nobody would ever call Terry Brooks a paragon of originality!) but it’s better than what Newcomb gave us! For this version, I’m assuming the only reason Ragnar hadn’t set Celeste on Wigg already was he had orders from Failee to lie low and keep her alive and was only set free of them after she died. In this case, instead of Celeste just falling for Tristan after he interrupts her suicide, she would have a growing realization that her mentor is cruelly using her and doesn’t have her best interests at heart, and his enemies aren’t what he’s told her they are. Honestly, you could even keep the bad poetry, but do it on purpose as a humanizing touch, in that there’s something this seemingly terrifying magical assassin just genuinely sucks at.
Otherwise… I think playing up Nicholas’s tragic villain status should also be important. He was never given a choice in any of this, from his conception onwards – and, when the chips are down, who even is Nicholas when he’s not being the Heretics’ agent? His “upbringing,” if you can call it that, has denied him any normal human contact or interactions. You could even play up the parallels between Tristan, Nicholas, and Celeste in this version, all of them walking paths others have set for them, all of them trying to figure out who they are and what they want – and Shailiha, for that matter, only just escaped becoming someone else’s pawn! And the Minions are trying to figure out who they are as a people, now that their creators are dead! There’s a theme here, if you have an author willing to engage with it… Another possible, related theme lies in the fallibility of authority figures. The Sorceresses thought they were powerful… now they’re dead. The wizards’ mistakes cost them everything, and in a better story, they’d need to grapple with that. Ragnar is a hypocrite who just wants to burn the world down out of spite, but in my version would at least try to present himself as someone who perceives himself as having legitimate grievances (and, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong). And this is also where we could start working in some actual foreshadowing that the Heretics may not actually be what they present themselves as being…
None of these ideas would save the story from the rotten foundation it’s built on, but I do think it’s telling the number of ways to improve it that can be thrown out even casually like this.
Conclusion
First off, it seems helpful here to compare my final counts from this book and the previous one. Blood Matters is slightly higher in this book, but similar; not surprising, considering the series’ general fixation on magical blood. Dastardly Deeds was noticeably lower here, but still prevalent, which I’m attributing mostly to the villains being less proactive, though still pretty vile, especially Ragnar and Scrounge. Gender Wars is also much lower, with the Coven out of the picture, but still up there, because the basic sexism of the series hasn’t gone away. Gratuitous Grimdark is also a bit lower this time around, for much the same reason as Dastardly Deeds. Exposition Intrusion is slightly higher, which I think is telling – for all that this is a shorter book than Fifth Sorceress and with less going on, characters sure do love to sit around in it and talk a lot! But Contrivances and Coincidences is noticeably higher, and Plot-Induced Stupidity is more than twice as high, which should tell you something about some of the absolutely baffling decisions and plot elements that went into this story!
Overall, The Gates of Dawn just feels like a hollow mess, full of padding to make it longer than it needs to be, and therefore feeling more bloated than a book of its length has any right to be! Even though in theory it’s supposed to be the bridge between Fifth Sorceress and the rest of the series, it doesn’t really manage that, since so much of the lore it introduces is going to end up getting retconned into something quite different, and so many of its plot elements end up fizzling without satisfying resolutions. Stylistically, it has a lot of the same problems as Fifth Sorceress in terms of the writing being bland and clunky and generally failing at conveying the emotions it’s supposed to, though I’ve certainly seen worse (and Newcomb retains the habit of overusing odd words or turns of phrase – for this book, the most obvious being “dynamism”). Compared to the other books in the series, it’s not as foul as Fifth Sorceress, and it’s not as outright bonkers as some of the later books get, but it may be the most utterly pointless book in the series, which is saying something. If Nicholas stayed dead at the end of the last book, and Krassus discovered the existence of the Heretics and the Scrolls through his own research, devised his plans on his own, and turned the Consuls to his side without help… we’d be pretty much exactly where we are now, and the next book would be set up just as well, just with a less convoluted path to get there.
I’ve mentioned before that I intended to spork up at least through The Scrolls of the Ancients, which is the next book and the end of the Chronicles of Blood and Stone trilogy (though as we’ll see, it’s… not much of an end). I still intend to do that, though I’m not planning to do so right away. This time, I want to take a break from Newcomb for a bit, so I’m going to first focus on wrapping up The Last Ringbearer over the next few weeks. After that, I have something else planned to spork over the summer as a palate cleanser, something quite different from anything I’ve sporked before, but is much more in a “so bad its good” vein. I’m looking forward to this one, not going to lie! After that, I should be ready to start my spork of The Scrolls of the Ancients in mid-September! After I’m done with that – which will take a while, as Scrolls is one of the longer books in the series – I’ll see how burned out I am and if I want to do the second Blood and Stone trilogy or not (and even if I don’t do full sporkings, I’ll still probably post shorter reviews, just because there’s some stuff in those that deserves to be seen). Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone who’s followed us along on this strange and often disturbing journey, and hopefully I’ll see you again on one or more of my upcoming projects! Thank you all!
Warning: This post contains a scene of abuse, as well as an overall discussion of the book's various gross or problematic elements.
MG: Well, everyone, it’s time to wrap up our journey through Robert Newcomb’s The Gates of Dawn! Last time, Tristan went to scatter Nicholas’s ashes, Scrounge turned up alive thanks to everyone else’s incompetence, and Scrounge and Tristan finally had it out, with Tristan coming out victorious. Yay. Today, we reach the epilogue, where we set some things up for the next book and meet some characters we probably should have met already, and then at long last we’ll be done! Joining us once again, one last time, will be Len and Yhani!
Epilogue
Len: *putting her arm around Yhani’s shoulder* We’re almost to the end of the line, ‘Hani – we can do this! So, we open as The tall, lean wizard floated quietly above the shattered ruins of the Gates of Dawn. Through his use of the craft, a woman floated by his side. The man’s long, white hair moved casually in the swirling wind, as did the hem of his odd, two-colored robe. So… who wants to bet this is the new head of the Consuls now that Nicholas is dead? And don’t think I didn’t notice that he’s apparently floating under his own power, but he has to levitate the woman himself. He scans the area with his mind for endowed blood, finds none, and opens his eyes to look at what a scene of failure, rather than triumph so yeah, definitely a bad guy. He also spots the bodies of the scarabs and the undead Consuls, while the woman comments that Nicholas has failed at the hands of the Chosen Ones and their wizards. No, and here I thought the ruins of everything he worked for meant he’d succeeded, silly me! But I have to add… Nicholas self-destructed on his own. Princey didn’t have to do anything. That seems worth keeping in mind…
Blood Matters: 226
Gender Wars: 106
Yhani: Our nameless wizard promises his companion that where Nicholas failed, he shall succeed – all he needs are the scrolls (hmmm… I believe the next book is called The Scrolls of the Ancients, is it not?) and one other thing. The one of endowed blood that even the Chosen Ones and the wizard of Shadowood know nothing of. Only I and Wigg understand this one’s ultimate potential. Hmmm… is this something else Wigg has caused to go wrong that I sense? The nameless wizard goes on to say that Wigg and Faegan may have escaped Nicholas, but they will not escape him (ah, the typical villainous overconfidence…) and first he needs the scrolls. He tells his companion they are entombed within one of the legs of the Gates and that is another reason why Nicholas conjured the scarabs – to watch over them. Their location is marked with an enchantment, forestalled – is that another way of saying ‘a forestallment?’ – that would only activate in the event of Nicholas’s own death or the failure of the Confluence. Both of which, as it happened, transpired. He goes searching through the rubble, and at last finds a chamber hidden within one of the legs, dominated by a stone table, but to his horror, only one of the two scrolls was lying there. The wizard demands to know how this can be, and it does occur to me that clearly, Nicholas’s plans went wrong and the structure this chamber was inside of collapsed. Is it really so shocking that everything is not as it was intended to be?
MG: Do note that with the reference here to “the one of endowed blood” that even Faegan doesn’t know about, we have our first official reference (albeit unnamed) to Wulfgar. And oh, boy, when we get to the next book, we’re going to be talking about Wulfgar…
Blood Matters: 227
Dastardly Deeds: 124
Exposition Intrusion: 317
Len: *flatly* I just can’t wait. Anyway, the wizard and his companion examine the scroll they do have. It was about one meter long and one quarter of a meter thick. Solid-gold knobs adorned each end of the rod running through its center. A golden band, engraved with words in Old Eutracian, secured the massive roll at its middle. Oh, fancy. The wizard demands to know if his companion can find the other scroll, and she admits she’s not sure. Since she had been forced into his service, she had all too often been the victim of his sudden fits of rage. So, we’re wasting no time establishing who the bad guy is here, I guess… She thinks she might be able to do better if she had a piece of the other scroll, or knew who might have taken it, so the wizard literally grabs her by the throat, slams her up against the wall, and calls her an ignorant cow. Yeah, definitely the bad guy. But it’d be a lot more effective if, you know, the whole series wasn’t sexist as all hells already… He keeps choking her, telling her that she’s a blaze gazer, which sounds like some sort of diviner to me, and herbmistress and now she says there are things she doesn’t know. Uh, being learned and educated doesn’t make you omniscient – ‘Hani’s the smartest person I know, and even she doesn’t know everything!
Dastardly Deeds: 127
Gender Wars: 108
Yhani: *drily* Thank you for the vote of confidence, Dear Heart… or perhaps I merely want you to think I do not know everything, hmmm? *she smiles and leans up against Len* Now, where were we? Ah, yes… the wizard keeps choking his minion, thinking to himself that even if she dies, he can get another like her, and finally she says she thinks she can find it, if she has herbs and flame to work with. The wizard lets her go and drops her to the floor, then turns to walk away, deep in thought (if I was her, I would put a blade in his back about now, I think…). He considers where to find the herbs she will need and remembers an old rumor he once heard in the Redoubt, describing the only transgression supposedly ever committed by the lead wizard… Oh, I assure you, Wigg has committed a great many transgressions! But if Newcomb admits this one is bad… it must be very, very bad indeed! At last, he remembers, and decides his seer will get the herbs she needs. And then, after acquiring them, he would pay the lead wizard and the cripple in the chair a visit they would never forget! He then takes both the woman and the scroll and levitates them away from the Gates, and on that note, the book comes at last to an end.
MG: And so, it does! And, just like the last book, it ends on a sequel hook with characters we’ve never heard of before, but probably should have. By the way, his name is Krassus, her name is Grizelda, and we definitely should have met them before, him especially when we learn his history (also, Newcomb has now introduced an evil wizard named Krassus – and later books will introduce entirely unrelated evil wizards name Gracchus and Khristos. I’m starting to think he may not be very creative at naming things…). It’s striking how closely this follows the ending of the previous book, honestly, with both epilogues providing a sudden sequel hook that’s not really connected to what the preceding book was actually about. But with the epilogue out of the way, the book is indeed done! Thank you, Len and Yhani, for sticking with me through all of this mess! For now, you’re free to go – and maybe for a while, since I may get some new guest sporkers to help me with The Scrolls of the Ancients when we get there. For the rest of us, before we go, we still have my final thoughts for the book to get through! I don’t expect they’ll be as long as they were for Fifth Sorceress, because this book just didn’t have a lot of substance. But there are still some points I want to make, so let’s get to it! Before we go, our final counts stand at:
Blood Matters: 225
Contrivances and Coincidences: 86
Dastardly Deeds: 130
Exposition Intrusion: 320
Gender Wars: 110
Gratuitous Grimdark: 90
Plot-Induced Stupidity: 188
Final Thoughts
What’s most striking about this book is what a great big pile of nothing it is. On the surface, it feels like it should have been a big deal – Nicholas is alive again! And he’s now an artificially-aged super wizard backed by evil eldritch demigods! He’s going to destroy the world if he’s not stopped! But in the end, everything mostly resolves itself, requiring very little actual intervention from our protagonists, and it feels like in the grand scheme of things, the only parts of this book that really matter are Celeste joining the team and the Consuls turning traitor. To see more of what I mean, let’s break this down into its individual pieces.
Characters
Prince Tristan: As before, Tristan is still our main character and one of the two “Chosen Ones” of the prophecy, with everyone constantly talking about how important he is. In the end, though, it really feels like he spends most of the book as a pinball protagonist, with things happening to him but him not really doing all that much. He does meet Celeste and “save” her, and he plays a necessary role in recruiting the Minions, but beyond that… he falls into Nicholas and Ragnar’s trap and gets poisoned by them. He later goes to see Nicholas and gets exposited at by him. During the big battle, his own side keeps him locked out of the loop and basically uses him as a puppet to make the Minions do what they want, and then Nicholas dies entirely of his own doing with no need for Tristan to lift a finger. His life then gets saved from the poisoning off-page. He kills Scrounge, but only after Scrounge goes out of his way to set him up for it. Beyond that, he mostly just gets talked to, a lot, far more than is strictly necessary. Despite being potentially the most powerful wizard in the world, he never learns any magic, and even the fact that his resurrected son is the main villain doesn’t get nearly as much play as it should. In the end, Tristan’s just there – he’s the vehicle for the story, but it’s not really about him, which is a major flaw in a protagonist!
Princess Shailiha and Morganna II: She gets a better showing than in Fifth Sorceress, but considering she spent most of that book either catatonic or brainwashed, that’s an incredibly low bar to clear. Unlike Tristan, she actually gets the chance to spend much of the book learning how to use her powers, which is a plus… but in the end, the only contribution she’s really allowed to make isn’t nearly as much as what she could have. Seriously, we go out of our way to establish she can control the hatchlings… and then the final plan involves her controlling only one hatchling, which was already broken? It’s just a letdown. Beyond that, she’s one of the only characters to show a level of basic human decency, which is good on her, but not really enough to elevate her when her author seems determined to keep her on the sideline as little more than a backup for her brother. Baby Morganna on the other hand… is a baby, and she’s rather adorable, and I have absolutely nothing further to add.
Wigg and Faegan: In one of the few interviews I’ve read of Newcomb’s, he said he deliberately wanted Wigg and Faegan to contrast and play off of each other, with Wigg being grumpy and serious, and Faegan whimsical and playful. It doesn’t really work out that way, mostly because the two characters are joined at the hip in this book and might as well be one person for how they behave, and that combined person is awful. Wigg continues to be dour, self-righteous, and responsible for more of the conflict than he ought to be, while Faegan alternates between obnoxious smugness and near-Fair-Folk levels of cheerfully amoral sociopathy, but ultimately, both of them are here to deliver lots and lots and lots of exposition in a droning and condescending manner. Even Wigg’s blindness ends up adding absolutely nothing to the plot (beyond giving him an excuse to try to read Nicholas’s blood signature by touch – and Newcomb could’ve come up with any number of other reasons for that) and is casually cured off-page with no lasting consequences. Worse is that neither wizard really grapples with the fact that their mistakes, between them, were responsible for causing almost all of this mess – nor does the author (who will occasionally acknowledge the wizards have messed up, but then never have them learn from it or change their behavior) give any indication he’s aware it’s something that needs to be dealt with!
Celeste: She’s basically just a rehash of Narrissa from the last book – a pure, tortured woobie who exists to suffer nobly and be saved by Tristan so she can swoon into his arms. Alas, that doesn’t leave room for much of an interesting character, despite her connection to two of the book’s main villains. The narrative occasionally allows her to have lasting trauma from her centuries of abuse, but it seems to go away the moment it would inconvenience the “romance” with Tristan; her relationship with her father goes underdeveloped, and her desire for revenge on Ragnar amounts to exactly nothing. Really, she just feels like a hollow waste of a character, but at least she gets to live… for now…
Geldon and the Gnomes: In Fifth Sorceress, I found Geldon to be one of the only more-or-less sympathetic characters in the whole book. That’s still largely the case here, but he’s sadly out of focus, having very little to do but show up periodically to run errands for the wizards; the gnomes are in the same boat. Ultimately, their existence just serves to reinforce the protagonist-centered morality of the series – they serve the wizards and are therefore Good. The fact that the gnomes in particular get a very… patronizing… depiction only makes it that much worse.
Martha: Martha also comes off as one of the more decent people in the story, displaying genuine loyalty and protectiveness to the students under her charge. Unfortunately, once she’s dropped off at the Redoubt to deliver Scrounge’s message, she’s mostly shoved into the background and forgotten beyond a few domestic scenes, because she’s a woman in a Newcomb book and not a main character, and so that is her sad fate.
Traax: Traax as a character basically seems to exist to embody the Minions, and as such the narrative can’t quite seem to decide what to do with him. On the one hand, he can display shocking brutality and represents the narrative’s continued love-affair with the grimdarks. On the other hand, once Tristan has met with him, he forgets all that and immediately turns into a loyal, honorable warrior whose courage and devotion are beyond question and whose defining characteristic is his sense of duty. It’s kind of baffling, and makes it feel a bit like Newcomb wasn’t willing to grapple with what he’d actually written about the Minions, and so he brushed it all under a rug and flipped a switch to make them the good guys now, with Traax being the chief representative of that.
Ox: Ox is another character who seems more-or-less decent and escapes the worst of the baggage the Minions in general carry by having not been involved in their worst atrocities. Unfortunately, Newcomb mostly ignores that in favor of seeming to want us to laugh at him for being stupid, including having him speak in broken English in a way no one else does to hammer it home. On the other hand, in terms of his actual behavior he doesn’t really seem any dumber than anyone else, which seems quite telling…
Nicholas: Nicholas II is our big bad for the book, and what really hits me is how much wasted potential he had. He was essentially a tykebomb, having his head crammed full of knowledge by the Heretics and aged to adulthood to carry out their plans, and never really given a chance to be anything else. There’s material for a really interesting tragic villain there. Alas, Newcomb can’t manage it, and everyone generally treats Nicholas as if he was evil by choice and beyond redemption, while any sense of depth he might have in himself is buried beneath his tendency to speak in nothing but pretentious Heretic propaganda. Even his death, in the end, is hollow, because it comes out of nowhere with no buildup and requiring no one else to do anything to defeat him, making it feel like his entire story was a pointless detour that did nothing but waste our collective time.
Ragnar: Ragnar, like Nicholas, had the seeds of a good tragic villain in him – a man partially turned into a monster, driven mad by Wigg’s botched attempt to “cure” him, driven to seek revenge on everyone who he perceives as having wronged him (which is, well, everyone). But Newcomb can’t let us have that, so he deliberately sets out to make Ragnar as thoroughly repulsive as possible – he’s a sadist, he’s a rapist, and he’s just plain gross, with elements like his addiction to his own brain fluid that seem designed purely to be squicky. In the end, even though two of our heroes have very personal beefs with him – to Celeste, he was her tormenter for centuries; to Wigg, he represents his mistakes come back to roost – he doesn’t even manage a final confrontation with them, instead dying to his own master after he’s outlived his usefulness. In the end, I don’t think even Newcomb wanted him around. Also, his name is stereotypically Viking, to a distracting degree because of how that doesn’t really suit the character; if Norse names were a theme in the setting, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but since they’re not… yeah, it just sticks out awkwardly.
Scrounge: The final member of our villainous triumvirate is perhaps the worst assassin ever. He’s billed as a cold-blooded, professional killer, but Newcomb characterizes him with what feel more like serial killer tropes than assassin tropes, with him obsessing over particular “worthy” targets, leaving taunting messages, and so on. The result is that sends very mixed messages that end up making him feel less like a deadly assassin and more like a bloodthirsty idiot who’s constantly undermining himself – and indeed, his final confrontation with Tristan basically involves him setting himself up to fail out of misplaced pride and cruelty. For that matter, even having that confrontation happen required some serious contrivances – was there any reason Scrounge couldn’t have just died in the final battle? It wouldn’t have changed anything meaningful that I can tell. Also, his poetry is very bad, and he should feel bad about it.
Joshua: Poor Joshua; you seemed like a decent man trying to do what was right, a rarity in these books, and then it suddenly turned out, with minimal foreshadowing, that you were a traitor, you turned into a cackling melodrama villain, and you got killed immediately afterwards, seemingly because Newcomb can’t abide to write an actually interesting character in these books. In fact, like Natasha last book, killing off characters as soon as they become interesting seems to be a trend of Newcomb’s, one that will be continuing… hmmm…
The Heretics: They’re boring. Seriously, they’re a bunch of undead uberwizards, but they exist at arms’ length from the story, communicate only in faux-meaningful pretentious ramblings to Nicholas, show up in person in one scene when they’re summoned, and vanish just as quickly when Nicholas dies. Despite being the big bads of the whole saga, they’re very underwhelming here, and are some of the least interesting, most generic ancient evils I’ve run across in all my years reading epic fantasy (which is saying something). They also have nothing to do with how the Heretics are presented in the later books, but considering how dull they are here, part of me can’t blame Newcomb for deciding to retcon them into something else (though he really, really should have handled it more gracefully!).
Plot and Setting
Doing these together. Setting wise, we’re still in Eutracia (and a bit in Parthalon) with the same issues regarding the small size of the world and the thinness of these two places as the previous book had. This book introduces a new problem, though, regarding how absolutely empty Eutracia seems. We have a brief sequence in Tammerland near the beginning of the book, and then we have another city get wiped out by Nicholas later on… but beyond that, so far as the book is concerned, Eutracia’s population might as well consist of Team Tristan, Team Nicholas, their associates, and no one else. The countryside is staggeringly empty, and it almost leaves it feeling like the characters are fighting over the shell of an already post-apocalyptic world, which makes the threat of the Heretics ending the world feel rather hollow.
Plot-wise, the book is pretty straightforward – Nicholas wants to activate the Gates of Dawn and summon the Heretics back, and Our Heroes want to stop him. Perhaps it’s a bit too simple; this is one of the shortest books in the overall Blood and Stone series, but it still feels like it doesn’t have nearly enough plot to fill itself with. I have a higher tolerance for “slow burn” type books than a lot of people do, but a slow burn is taking its time because it’s developing the setting, the themes, the characters etc. In these books, the characters are paper-thin, the setting is worse, and the themes are both straightforward and pretty terrible… The Gates of Dawn is not a slow burn, it’s just slow. The book is packed with filler. People sit around and talk and talk and talk, mostly about things they, or at least the reader, already knew, and hardly ever do anything about it. Even when they do take action, it’s often needlessly convoluted- ie, Nicholas going out of his way to hide his existence and make Tristan and Wigg think Ragnar is the one in charge of their enemies, only for them to quickly figure it out, and then for him to reveal himself to Tristan a few chapters later anyway. It takes two separate missions to Parthalon to ascertain the Minions’ loyalty, both hitting more-or-less the same beats. Speaking of the Minions, we have a whole rigmarole about whether they can be trusted and how cruel and brutal they are – and then as soon as they raise the Galland flag, that’s swept under the rug, and they become perfectly noble, loyal warriors for the remainder of the story. The wizards and Shailiha don’t tell Tristan their plan for no reason other than to create and draw out artificial tension. It’s all just padding, and it adds nothing to the story beyond making it several hundred pages longer than it needed to be.
For that matter, much of the plot feels… familiar. The main villains are Vagaries users who are trying to pull off a ritual that will end the world as we know it. Said villains are even familiar archetypes – we have the mastermind (Failee, Nicholas) a depraved sadist and hedonist (Succiu, Ragnar – albeit that since Ragnar is a dude, he gets to be gross rather than sexy) a non-magical warrior who becomes Tristan’s rival (Kluge, Scrounge) and even a potentially interesting double agent who gets killed off suddenly and anticlimactically once revealed (Natasha, Joshua). We have the post-climax confrontation with the rival character. We have the last-minute sequel hook in the epilogue. And so on. Beyond that, in order to make the plot work, the characters on all sides have to consistently make terrible decisions for no adequately explained reasons. Seriously, my “Plot-Induced Stupidity” and “Contrivances and Coincidences” counters both ended up higher than the first book, despite this one being shorter, because characters keep doing dumb or inexplicable things to grease the wheels of the plot. And sure, you can argue that of course, all characters do what they do because the plot and author requires it – but Newcomb makes the strings really obvious in this book. And then the ending, with the conflict resolving itself without any need for intervention from our protagonists, just renders the whole rest of the story even more pointless than it already was.
Theme and Tone
This section is easy, because this book has the exact same problems on this front as its predecessor. Tonally, it still has the distinct sort of immaturity that comes when an author mistakes lots of darkness, gore and sexual violence for maturity and slathers it on too thickly. In terms of themes, we’re still hung up on blood, with everyone waxing poetic about blood at every opportunity and making it clear that a person’s value is based entirely on the quality of their blood (though Newcomb seems to have at least quietly phased out the idea of Tristan’s blood literally talking to him) – this is also where we’re introduced to the idea of blood signatures, which will continue to be a thing across the rest of the series, and will get even creepier as we find out more about what they do. Even though the gender war plot is over and done with the Coven wiped out in the previous book, the sexism never goes away, with the women being consistently sidelined and deemphasized compared to the male characters. Newcomb does try to start walking back some of the rank misogyny with the (I strongly suspect retconned) introduction of the Acolytes and Fledgling House, but it’s far too little, too late. Finally, we also have the unspoken theme that Wigg and Faegan are always right, and should always be listened to, no matter how they’re acting or how little sense they seem to be making.
How Would I Fix It?
Like Fifth Sorceress, I can think of a lot of individual aspects of the story I might fix, but the whole thing is such a mess the best option would probably be to chuck it all and start over. One idea which has occurred to me that I think would drastically improve matters is this – make Celeste and Scrounge the same character. Celeste is Ragnar’s assassin, raised and trained by him (he’s still abusive in this scenario, but in a more subtle and insidious way than the brutish rapist Newcomb wrote him as) specifically for the purpose of killing Wigg. In Ragnar’s mind, killing his enemy using his enemy’s daughter as his tool is perfect poetic justice (naturally, in this rewrite we should also make Wigg a somewhat decent person, so we can buy that his death would be a bad thing). This is hardly the most original backstory in the world (hells, it’s basically the backstory of Grianne Ohmsford/the Ilse Witch from the later Shannara novels, and nobody would ever call Terry Brooks a paragon of originality!) but it’s better than what Newcomb gave us! For this version, I’m assuming the only reason Ragnar hadn’t set Celeste on Wigg already was he had orders from Failee to lie low and keep her alive and was only set free of them after she died. In this case, instead of Celeste just falling for Tristan after he interrupts her suicide, she would have a growing realization that her mentor is cruelly using her and doesn’t have her best interests at heart, and his enemies aren’t what he’s told her they are. Honestly, you could even keep the bad poetry, but do it on purpose as a humanizing touch, in that there’s something this seemingly terrifying magical assassin just genuinely sucks at.
Otherwise… I think playing up Nicholas’s tragic villain status should also be important. He was never given a choice in any of this, from his conception onwards – and, when the chips are down, who even is Nicholas when he’s not being the Heretics’ agent? His “upbringing,” if you can call it that, has denied him any normal human contact or interactions. You could even play up the parallels between Tristan, Nicholas, and Celeste in this version, all of them walking paths others have set for them, all of them trying to figure out who they are and what they want – and Shailiha, for that matter, only just escaped becoming someone else’s pawn! And the Minions are trying to figure out who they are as a people, now that their creators are dead! There’s a theme here, if you have an author willing to engage with it… Another possible, related theme lies in the fallibility of authority figures. The Sorceresses thought they were powerful… now they’re dead. The wizards’ mistakes cost them everything, and in a better story, they’d need to grapple with that. Ragnar is a hypocrite who just wants to burn the world down out of spite, but in my version would at least try to present himself as someone who perceives himself as having legitimate grievances (and, to be fair, he’s not entirely wrong). And this is also where we could start working in some actual foreshadowing that the Heretics may not actually be what they present themselves as being…
None of these ideas would save the story from the rotten foundation it’s built on, but I do think it’s telling the number of ways to improve it that can be thrown out even casually like this.
Conclusion
First off, it seems helpful here to compare my final counts from this book and the previous one. Blood Matters is slightly higher in this book, but similar; not surprising, considering the series’ general fixation on magical blood. Dastardly Deeds was noticeably lower here, but still prevalent, which I’m attributing mostly to the villains being less proactive, though still pretty vile, especially Ragnar and Scrounge. Gender Wars is also much lower, with the Coven out of the picture, but still up there, because the basic sexism of the series hasn’t gone away. Gratuitous Grimdark is also a bit lower this time around, for much the same reason as Dastardly Deeds. Exposition Intrusion is slightly higher, which I think is telling – for all that this is a shorter book than Fifth Sorceress and with less going on, characters sure do love to sit around in it and talk a lot! But Contrivances and Coincidences is noticeably higher, and Plot-Induced Stupidity is more than twice as high, which should tell you something about some of the absolutely baffling decisions and plot elements that went into this story!
Overall, The Gates of Dawn just feels like a hollow mess, full of padding to make it longer than it needs to be, and therefore feeling more bloated than a book of its length has any right to be! Even though in theory it’s supposed to be the bridge between Fifth Sorceress and the rest of the series, it doesn’t really manage that, since so much of the lore it introduces is going to end up getting retconned into something quite different, and so many of its plot elements end up fizzling without satisfying resolutions. Stylistically, it has a lot of the same problems as Fifth Sorceress in terms of the writing being bland and clunky and generally failing at conveying the emotions it’s supposed to, though I’ve certainly seen worse (and Newcomb retains the habit of overusing odd words or turns of phrase – for this book, the most obvious being “dynamism”). Compared to the other books in the series, it’s not as foul as Fifth Sorceress, and it’s not as outright bonkers as some of the later books get, but it may be the most utterly pointless book in the series, which is saying something. If Nicholas stayed dead at the end of the last book, and Krassus discovered the existence of the Heretics and the Scrolls through his own research, devised his plans on his own, and turned the Consuls to his side without help… we’d be pretty much exactly where we are now, and the next book would be set up just as well, just with a less convoluted path to get there.
I’ve mentioned before that I intended to spork up at least through The Scrolls of the Ancients, which is the next book and the end of the Chronicles of Blood and Stone trilogy (though as we’ll see, it’s… not much of an end). I still intend to do that, though I’m not planning to do so right away. This time, I want to take a break from Newcomb for a bit, so I’m going to first focus on wrapping up The Last Ringbearer over the next few weeks. After that, I have something else planned to spork over the summer as a palate cleanser, something quite different from anything I’ve sporked before, but is much more in a “so bad its good” vein. I’m looking forward to this one, not going to lie! After that, I should be ready to start my spork of The Scrolls of the Ancients in mid-September! After I’m done with that – which will take a while, as Scrolls is one of the longer books in the series – I’ll see how burned out I am and if I want to do the second Blood and Stone trilogy or not (and even if I don’t do full sporkings, I’ll still probably post shorter reviews, just because there’s some stuff in those that deserves to be seen). Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone who’s followed us along on this strange and often disturbing journey, and hopefully I’ll see you again on one or more of my upcoming projects! Thank you all!