A Broken Darkness

This should be right up my street. It's a contemporary take on Lovecraftian cosmic horror, with guest appearances from our old friends Nyarlothotep and Azagthoth. There's some convincing evocations of those weird and eldritch dimensions just beneath our own, and epic battles against crawling tentacled horrors. The book also has interesting things to say about colonialism and empire, allied to Indiana Jones style globetrotting and adventure. So why aren't there five stars at the top of this review?

It's the lead characters, I'm afraid. One of them is just an awful awful person, and the other knows it but trails round after them like a little lovesick puppy dog. To make matters worse, while they are capable of talking to other characters like adults, the conversations between the two of them are smug self important banter full of lame humour and smart arsed oneupmanship that's more suited to minor showboating on Twitter than it is facing down alien threats to our very existence. It deflates any tension that's building, and frankly makes me want to punch the pair of them. I'd read the first book, so to be fair I knew this going in. I'd hoped that the revelations at the end of that one might have changed this dynamic, but they haven't really, not in any practical sense. It's probably just me. If you like Joss Whedonesque clever clever dialogue, and let's face it a lot of people do, you might well find it charming and fall in love with them, but it didn't work for me. It's unfortunate that the thing I didn't like is front and centre, because there's an awful lot otherwise that is good here, and I'll look out for more by this author.