AT is stuck with her father – it’s where she belongs and no
matter how much she hates him, where else would she go? She already ruined her
one chance to escape and betrayed where she truly belonged
Until the demon Tia pulls her into a new quest – the Wild
Hunt is free and hunting souls. Long since corrupted from its original goal,
the hunt will not hunt and destroy any free soul it finds – and with the
breaking of the chains that held the fae captive, the hunt is also free to roam
– or will be after Hallowe’en
AT has a short time and a few allies she daren’t let
herself trust to try and remove the hunt before it’s too late. This is
something she can’t do alone – but can she bring herself to work with others?ss
The world of this series has always been fantastical. The
other world quite literally a realm of imagination and dreams where anything
goes; this always creates this wonderful surreal feeling that has really made
the whole series to date. The non-humans aren’t just people with fangs or claws
or magic – they’re truly alien and strange beings, they don’t think like us,
they don’t resemble us in any fundamental fashion, they can be anything we can
imagine and more. I don’t think I’ve come across many books that have carried
off this sense of the alien nearly half so well
And for most of the series – certainly for the past two books – it has really worked. And it works in this one as well… but the characters also spend the majority of their time in the Otherworld in this book with nearly everyone being something completely alien to any real reference points. AT with her hounds, her shadow and her parentage, Brynn with the shadows on her arm and Yejuen with his alien, unknown magic that confuses even them are all outside of any frame of reference I have – throw in the completely unknown Cat, the odd Jen and the truly alien and unexplained Fiddler all combine to throw in a lot of alien and a lot of confusing. Even Tia, Alastor and Hunter confuse me because I’m not sure where the distinctions lie between them, what this distinctions are and what they mean
In previous books we looked at the alien or focused on part of the alien. Here we’re plunged into the middle of many many kinds of alien and I felt a little lost. I fell through the Looking Glass and didn’t even have a Cheshire Cat as a guide so I was left with a truly powerful sense of the surreal that has permeate this series, more than ever before, but I was also more last than I care to be. I wanted some explanatory notes or for my surreal, mystical confusion to be rationed to a smaller quota.
