Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsBetter than the previous book. Not the praise it sounds like.
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2018
Note: This review is as much about the book as it relates to the Adversary Cycle series as about the book itself. Spoilers may occur.
The good news is that it's better than the previous book in the series. The bad news is that it's not by a real wide margin. But hey, we FINALLY get a book that actually feels like an Adversary Cycle book instead of a story roped into Wilson's literary universe. We kinda sorta have a Rosemary's Baby situation here, with our Keep nemesis making a comeback through a somewhat convoluted way that involves cloning because cloning is... unnatural? Sorry, that's just dumb. Might as well have come up with a purely supernatural reason rather than expose bad science. In any case, we also have a group of folks starting to come to the conclusion that an Anti-Christ type is about to born and set out to stop it (three guesses how well that goes). We also have a familiar hero return, knowing world events are heading into dark territory again but not exactly capable, or even willing, to do much about it... yet.
One major problem that plagues the last book, this book, and the next book, is Wilson's tendency to drag the story out too long before getting to the real good supernatural stuff. Once he gets there, his stories get good. The Keep didn't have this problem, and I know that his final book in the series doesn't have it either. At least I came out of this book willing to continue the series, so there's that. But he might have condensed this book and the next one into one novel, cutting out a lot of the fluff that will ultimately prove pointless in the scheme of things.
