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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9686754" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Egad. The middle of Kingdoms of Death, book #4 of the Sun Eater, has one of the most grueling passages I’ve read outside of horror fiction and non-fiction accounts of particularly brutal wars. I mean, it is about a war and being taken prisoner by very unpleasant aliens. But wow it takes a toll on the characters. There’s very little explicit grue in it, but Ruocchio is very good at capturing the emotional consequences. Knowing the narrator survives was sometimes a slender reed; I was reminded sometimes of the second half of Adam Nevill’s The Ritual, book and movie. Very much worth the effort, for me, but it was effort in a way the rest of the series so far hasn’t been. Now I’m past it and glad to be on to other things.ETA: For someone who’s bought as many thousand books as I have, and read so many more thanks to public and academic libraries, I have surprising few strong opinions about shelving. Mostly I want good clear signs explaining how things are done in whatever place I’m currently in.Son of ETA: that brutal sequence is followed by something as marvelous as the eucatastrophe in Demon in White. I remain satisfied.</blockquote>