Looking For a Good Book

Whereas I enjoyed Shanna Germain’s The Poison Eater … also a Numenera novel … The Night Clave, by Germain and Monte Cook just doesn’t engage at all. It reads like a story that’s from a different medium … oh, wait…that’s exactly what this is – this is an RPG and PC-game series.

Normally I’d give you a brief, one-paragraph rundown of the plot, but I’m honestly not sure that I can.  This book mostly gives us the background of something – I presume the video game series, but since I don’t play video games, I’m not entirely sure. It seems as though a group of people – a religious order – understand a long-forgotten technology.  They use this knowledge to force their followers to continue to follow them.  But a another group of individuals is trying to stop the corruption.  That’s a pretty generic description, but there you have it.

The biggest problem here is that authors Germain and Cook seem to understand that they are writing to an audience (they hope) wider than those who are already familiar with the gaming series and so they dump a lot of background information on us.  A lot.

But because there is so much constant info-dumping, the story gets lost behind all the information we are getting.

There’s always a chance that this could all be redeemed by strong characters that keep us interested, but even here we are left with very little. We are not pulled in by these characters, who we are told do some things (in rather chaotic sentences that are supposed to generate a sense of action but actually slow us down), in a world that we get a lot of info about, but it’s too late … we don’t care.

Looking for a good book? The Night Clave by Monte Cook and Shanna Germain is a volume in the Numenera series and is just not worth the effort to read.

I receive a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Night Clave

authors: Monte Cook and Shanna Germain

series: Numenera

publisher: Angry Robot

ISBN: 0857667203

paperback, 361 pages