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Title: God of Night
Series: God Fragments #4
Author: Tom Lloyd
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 421
Words: 145.5K
| Synopsis: |
When the Cards released the seals on Magic, not only did more magic enter the world, thus stirring up all the creatures that used and fed on magic, and not only did it make mages more powerful, but it also had the side effect of making the god fragments even more powerful. One of the Militant Orders has figured out that if they can bring enough god fragments of their particular deity together, it might just resurrect it. And with a resurrected god on their side, they’ll rule the Riven Kingdoms as undisputed masters.
Does anyone think the Cards are just going to sit back and let this happen? Of course not. When they discover that one of their mages of Tempest has the ability to destroy god fragments merely by touching them, they hatch a plan, a daring plan to capture as many of the god fragments as possible and destroy them. Doesn’t matter that most god fragments are housed in the Militant Orders most secure locations, nothing is going to stop the Cards.
Using double and triple dealing, backstabbing, betrayals and general kick assery, the Cards manage to destroy the majority of fragments from 3 of the 4 Orders. The last Order is the most powerful however, and it’s cache of fragments is located in a duegar stronghold underground and is currently being overrun by magical underground creatures.
Once they’ve gotten into the Stronghold, the Cards find out that the gods were using a chained creature of magic to siphon power from. Now that the gods fragments are being destroyed and the magic has been released back into the world, this elder god is awakening. The Cards must therefore defeat the final god fragments, which are reassembling into its god AND defeat a creature so powerful that it made gods from mere duegar hundreds of millennia ago.
Tons of people die, the Cards succeed and Lynx is elected the new leader of the Cards because Anatol was one of the people killed. There are still god fragments in the world and the warlord of his people is still alive, so Lynx figures their new mission will be to invade So-Han and kill the warlord. Thus the book and the series ends.
| My Thoughts: |
I really enjoyed this but by the end, with some realizations, was glad this was the end of the series.
The fights were awesome. Realizing what the Militant Orders were up to was even awesomer. Finding out there was an elder god involved and that the Cards were going to kill it was the awesomest of all! The final massive battle in the Duegar ruins between the Cards, the remaining Militant Order personnel, the magic monsters and the elder god was everything I could have asked for. Magic galore, flintlock fantasy bullets and grenades by the metric ton and a monster so huge and gruesome that it made the monster from the first book look like a teddy bear? How could I not like everything about that? Even the ending was good. Lots of the Cards die. Important Cards die, like Anatole. Lynx becoming the new Master of the Deck slotted in perfectly with the series.
Unfortunately, and this is ALL me, was that I was used to the god fragment bullets and the grenades and bombs, etc. They didn’t have the same impact on my as they did in the first book. I also realized, after finishing reading, that Lloyd had worked in some homosexual characters without playing it on a trumpet. I suspect if I were to go back and re-read the other books, I’d be finding more understated circumstances like this. Hence why I’ll be done with Lloyd from here on out.
In regards to the series overall, I really enjoyed my time reading each book and short story and thought it was about 100 times better than Lloyd’s Twilight Reign series. I’d recommend this wholeheartedly if mercenaries using dead god bodies to power their flintlock guns sounds like your kind of thing.
I’m not familiar enough with the genre to know, but is it unusual to have a gay subtext in a book like this?
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Yes. Usually, that type of thing is used to show how “diverse” the author is being and is trumpeted to the skies in the book. Or a character is shoehorned into that lifestyle and it is mentioned several times without having any bearing on the plot.
It tends to be a “check box” kind of item so that the mob of western social justice warriors will perhaps overlook the book and not try to destroy it or the author on twitter or other such meaningful platforms.
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Yup, I find that kind of virtue signaling to be tiresome. There’s no reason why any particular story should have to tick every box for diverse readerships.
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Of course, SFF has a lot of ties to modern culture and as culture has shifted, so has SFF. It is the main reason I don’t read nearly as much modern SFF as others and also why I tend to wait until a series is finished before checking it out. I consider this type of content to be a minefield and I’d rather avoid it than recover from it.
So depending on your viewpoint, this type of thing is either a natural progression of literature following culture, or of literature driving culture.
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To me, these things date a book very quickly. We’re living in a time of censorship by social media, and books written with that in mind will fade fast…
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And with more books being put out every year than ever before. I don’t know how the next generations are going to qualify what lasts and what doesn’t. With things like torrents and places like The Pirate Bay, even a hack, no good author can have their book stick around the internet for way longer than it ever should 😦
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Agreed. We’re on a slippery slope…
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Man, I think I remember this from a post you did a while back, probably Wednesday type post. Glad this one worked out for you . . . it seems . . .interesting.
Side note: just for giggles I set up a test bed, free .com wordpress site, imported the xml file and BAM conversations showing up like gold in the reader. Now, onto a couple of more hammering techniques . . .
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I did a currently reading and cover love last month sometime showcasing this.
And that is good news. Here’s to hoping things get working.
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Hm. I have nothing against non heterosexual people or characters in books, but these days, if you are, say, a lesbian author writing about queer people in space… publishers like Tor dot com will market the shit out of you. And writers take notice of that. Oh well, for me that doesn’t make a book more interesting to buy, the way it does for others, apparently. I’m only interested in whether it tells a good story.
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For me, as a Christian, content does matter. It would certainly be easier if I could take your laissez faire approach though 🙂
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You never know what an author may sneak up on you. 🙂 I guess the blurb didn’t mention it. Maybe that only happens when these things are front and center in the story?
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“””flintlock fantasy bullets and grenades by the metric ton”””
Sounds like a very BUSY story, indeed! 😀 😀
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Lloyd does know how to keep the action moving, that is for sure. Never a dull moment 🙂
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There’s something chaotically exciting about this series. A bit sad to hear that a reread might actually ruin this for you though…
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Chaos is a very good description 😀
And re-reads are definitely out. There are times that I don’t mind being oblivious and this was definitely one of them.
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