Firestones

This book short story left me feeling manipulated rather than emotional. The writing style fits a historical fantasy well, but it doesn't get far enough into the main character's head to feel authentic. There's more telling than showing - even when the main character is being magically forced to torture himself - and the emotions ring hollow, as if they're the gussied-up titles of clickbait articles, designed specifically to elicit a certain reaction. But I never felt that reaction.

Instead of being angry at the evil masters of the main character - Brand, though he spends a vast majority of the book being dehumanized as ‘the creature' for plot-relevant reasons - I just found myself slipping into a frustrating thought spiral about the real world. It's too realistic, especially in the current state of the world, to hear about disgusting monsters buying the servitude of children (thankfully nothing explicit is mentioned, but there's one part where a little girl is very much hinted to have been working as a prostitute), the disabled being treated as worthless, and people being assigned value based on how hard they can work for their capitalistic overlords. Instead of feeling sadness for Brand, I just felt frustrated that every manipulative plot beat was being hit rapid-fire. Oh, look, he's suffering. Oh, look, he's being mocked for his disability. Oh, look, he hates himself. Oh, look, he's been captured by someone even more evil than the last person. Oh, look, he's being tortured. Oh, look, he hurt someone who was abusing him and now he thinks he's a monster for being capable of that... Far too many attempts to elicit a certain emotional reaction, without putting in the effort to dive into the character's mind and show the readers that anguish, that conflict, that emotion.

And then it's all wrapped up in a neat, little bow with an ending that barely takes a couple of pages compared to the intensely long slog of bleak torture porn (not of the literal pornographic variety, thankfully) it took to get there. There's no happy ending, but there's also no sad ending. There's just... an ending. It seems written in a way intended to imply future happiness, but it's too cliche and too over-the-top to come across as anything other than trying to rush through to an obligatory ray of hope in an otherwise overbearingly depressing world.

Unfortunately, for me, this book failed regardless of its intentions. Was it intended to be a dark, gloomy tale? Then the inability to connect with the main character's emotions ruined that. Was it intended to show that there's always a ray of hope even in the darkest of times? Then the extreme fixation on the dark elements and disjointed introduction of the hopeful bits ruined that. Was it supposed to be about the power of unconditional, eternal love? If so, knowing nothing other than second-hand knowledge about Brand's alleged lover until the very end - and then seeing he completely lacks a personality in that ending other than “extremely supportive to unbelievable proportions” - ruined that. Whatever it wanted to be, it just wasn't, at least for me.