I liked the mystery of what truly happened, and I liked the alternative memory around the time in the first house. Seeing that alternative and opposite version of events was neat, and then having that actually be even more impactful when it become clear what’s going on was great. The bits with True Ortis being actually really emotional at the end were good. I was onboard up until that.

I was quite happy until we all confront John at the end, because this is where it’s going to coming together. There’s a few things I remember disliking here. The first thing, and most trivial, is that John says a few things here that feel like very now memes, and that took me way out of the tone the chapters otherwise were in. I think one was a “hi blank I’m dad” line or something. I get it, he’s not very Godly, and later it seems like he’s even alive during our present day. But I still feel like that format is a bit tired already, and this is ten thousand years from now. I think the other was a reference to a song that was all the rage in, like, 2005 or something. Which again, I don’t feel like even the youth of today would pull that reference, so John is I guess exactly my age. And ten thousand years from now is quoting a thing that no one else in the room would get; that’s meaningless to the person he’s talking to, but also his other lyctors. I dunno, it just felt like John was talking to me, the reader, and it felt very cheap. So that kinda put me in a mood already.

The second thing that bothered me is the revelations at that point are all a bunch of things all the lyctors think are big news, but that our protagonist, and thus we, don’t know anything about. Like being a kid at a family reunion and listening to the adults talk, they’re having their minds blown talking about schemes and plans and shit that we don’t know anything about. I’m not saying the answers had to be handed to me necessarily, but it just felt like all the meat was coming fully out of left field, and there’s no way any of the things I’ve learned so far this book could possibly have lead me to these discoveries. Isn’t this, like, a mystery book? You don’t want to find out at the end that the murder was actually committed by Richard the repairman we didn’t introduce to you, but anyway let me tell you how this guy you’ve never heard of did the thing you’ve been wondering about.

Which leads me into the third and biggest thing I didn’t like, which was that throughout the entire climax of the story, our protagonist is passive bordering on insignificant. Gideon wakes up and fights her way to the exposition room, Harrow (our protagonist up until this) is obviously gone. So that’s a bit weird, but we love Gideon so it’s okay. So what does our protagonist do? They hide behind a door and listen to the grown ups talk at each other. Just spilling answers and tying up ends, and having revelations. And our protagonist isn’t even in the room, they’re not talking to her. They’re just chatting amongst themselves, unaware we’re even listening, while they wrap everything up for us. Then even when our protagonist does enter the room, she still just stands there while people talk around her and about her, but she does nothing.

And then finally Mercy puts her plan into action, John responds, Augustine responds, River, etc. But here’s the thing; this plan is, like, a hundred years old or whatever. The plan was hatched before either of our protagonists were born, and doesn’t involve them at all. Nothing we’re been party to in either book has anything to do with Mercy’s plan, John’s response, Augustine, etc. None of it. It happens around Gideon, but if Gideon and Harrow had never gone to the first house, and none of these books had happened, the plan would have gone exactly the same way. Mercy would have taken her shot. John would have survived. Augustine would have taken his shot. Ianthe changed history by saving John, but Gideon watched that part while being trapped a long way away behind glass, and neither John nor Ianthe knew or cared we were even there. And Ianthe is close to us, but is not our protagonist. So basically nothing in either this book nor the first mattered at all to the big climax. Gideon was just confused, ineffectual, and out of the way for all of it. So that was kind of a let down.

The closest thing we had to being involved in the climax was that Gideon has John’s eyes. Mercy seems to say something that makes it seem like she was pretty sure anyway, so she was probably going to do her plan that she started before Gideon was conceived in either case, but it did give her confidence. But she even says something like “damn, if only I’d looked at the body’s eyes earlier” or something, making it clear that if she’d done that one thing, even Gideon’s eyes at the end wouldn’t have been a surprise or relevant.

So that was the biggest sin, in my opinion. But one more thing that annoyed me while I was annoyed anyway, was the stack of twists. Mercy kills God, holy shit! Nevermind, no she didn’t. He’s back. They’re talking. Now Mercy is dead. John wants Augustine to pledge to him. He seems like he might. Now Augustine tries to kill God. Oh, he seems like he’s going to do it. Nope, that didn’t happen either. Augustine is dead. In the end none of their long plan mattered in the slightest, and if they’d been killed by a beast a hundred years ago we’d be in nearly the same place. But the whiplash of attempts and failure back to back to back was just tiring when all my suspension of disbelief had already been spent by the last three issues. I was just like “please let someone kill God so we can move on”

So at this point I just felt like: given this outcome, what was the point of any of this? There was a plan constructed long before our protagonist was born that did not involve her at all. And we had various struggles. But then the culmination of this plan we didn’t know about has arrived, and it has nothing to do with us or our struggles we’ve just spent hours and hours reading about. And on top of that the plan doesn’t even work or accomplish much of anything. So this big long plan that we didn’t know about and doesn’t involve us also didn’t change the status quo from where it would have been had it not been hatched and executed.

Cool…that was… fulfilling…