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thegrandhighmarysueI purchased 'A Terrible Fall of Angels' with one of my Audible credits and I'm going to give a general review of it here. If I'm feeling less scattered I might do a more thorough breakdown/snark of it later, but right now I'm not feeling well, so this will be the cliff notes version. Spoilers ahead, just in case any of you want to read the full thing. (Though I doubt many of you will.)
So, what's the same? The verbal tics for one. (I so didn't X or Y, bad guys, etc. There's even one puppy pile mention in here, though I'm a little more inclined to forgive it because it refers to a group of homesick seven-year-olds sleeping together in a room.) There's the usual disdain for blondes, and most of the women Zaniel finds attractive are brunettes who sound suspiciously like Anita, though at least his wife Reggie is 5'9" not 5'3". There's the usual cop/military/weapons porn. And, per the norm, the talk around rape is handled with all the finesse of a toddler wielding a meat cleaver. Victim blaming abounds. There's a completely unnecessary rape scene in the middle, though I will get to that later in this review. The chapters are short, sometimes bafflingly so. Oh, and God almost always answers Zaniel's prayers and approves of him, though it makes more sense when he's literally able to talk to angels.
On to the review. There is a lot of promising stuff here, but it's not explored, and the world isn't really fleshed out. There's a phenomenon that goes on in most of her books that my husband and I like to call bookending. Almost every AB and MG book starts off with an interesting premise, carries it through the first three chapters or so, and then promptly loses all semblance of plot until the end. The last few chapters hastily try to resolve the dangling plot threads and then the book is done. This book was...a little better about that. But only a little.
The book begins with Zaniel at a crime scene, examining the body of a woman who was raped and murdered. There are angel feathers at the scene and he can't figure out why. Angels (the ones still in the host) usually aren't real enough to manifest, and only a select few can see or interact with them in their spiritual forms and retain their sanity. It's stated that fallen angels are still angels and that there is a distinction between a fallen angel and a demon, but it isn't made clear. Our villain is a demon, which isn't much of a shock.
An angel shows up to give Zaniel a message that takes entirely too long to convey. There's a lot of clumsy exposition in between lines, which is why the dialogue takes so long. Instead of working it in organically, she pretty much has a messenger angel spacing off and attributes it to being too affected by the human world and starting to fall. This could be interesting if it had any bearing on the plot, but alas no. It tells him that the woman wasn't slated to die for many years and that something not entirely infernal or angelic caused the death, and it has enough power to shield itself from heaven's gaze. Zaniel is the only angel speaker to have left the College of Angels (which seems like a kind of juvenile name for it, but that's just me) and as a cop he's in a position to stop this thing. The stakes are supposed to be really high. If this thing continues to interfere with humanity, a war would start between heaven and hell, and the world gets caught in the crossfire.
So far, so good, even if the repetitious dialogue is tedious. One of the detectives sees the angel and faints, so he has to be taken to a hospital that deals with metaphysical injury. There's more tedious conversation with the doctor, which is clumsy exposition about the world. A psychic doctor doesn't know what it means to be "blissed" after seeing an angel for the first time. So, much like the AB world, most of the normies and even people who really should be in the know are clueless so the author can fill us in on worldbuilding stuff.
I get there's an element of that in a lot of fiction. You either need an audience viewpoint character to explain the world to, or you work it into the character's inner monologue. I prefer the latter, but there's plenty of examples of the former that I like. I'm a fan of the Dresden Files, and while it is not for everybody, I thought it was done better there with characters like Molly and Karrin who are new to the supernatural and need the guidance that Harry provides. I guess what I'm saying is that there's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and having the characters do "As you know, Bob," dialogue over and over bugs the crap out of me.
This hospital visit puts him in the right place at the right time to see the demon in its new host. This is also where the gratuitous rape scene occurs. A lot of reviewers who DNFed it did it around this point. We spend twenty-two of the forty-five chapters in the book in this hospital, mostly talking. I'd say that only five or so of the short chapters were dedicated to fighting the demon, and it's cast out of the hospital room when Zaniel calls on an angel to banish it. This is also how he defeats it in the end.
The rapist is a college incel turned sorcerer. Like she established the ABverse, a sorcerer is someone who gains their powers through bargaining with evil beings. The demon is inhabiting this host and both share power over the body. The bits about how the angel/demon stuff works is interesting and if it had been better paced and explored, it would have made for some cool worldbuilding, but it shouldn't have been something that Zaniel was contemplating during a fight scene.
A patient at the hospital ended up trapped in a room with the demon, and couldn't force her way through the opening in the partially blocked door. Zaniel held onto her hand, and she told him not to let go even if it ripped her arm off. She said she'd rather die quickly of blood loss than live through what it would do to her if he let go. He decides to let go rather than let her arm come off, despite her wishes and she's raped by the demon. The screams are described in sickening detail and while she's rescued shortly after, it really seems stuck in there for shock value and to make the villain seem especially evil.
Worse, the character is only brought up in the narrative to either elicit sympathy for ZANIEL because he failed to save her, when it was less likely to happen if he hadn't let her go. Not even an hour after this happens, he flirts with an older nurse named Hazel who warns him that Kate (the rape victim) is going to try to install him as her white knight and will be romantically attracted to him because he saved her. She pretty much says that he can't let someone needy into his life or he'll be taking care of her all his life. She basically says go in there and convince her to let us do a rape kit, and then let her down easy.
Fuck. That. Shit. This book was boring on the whole, but this was rage-making. I've never been sexually assaulted, but I know people who have been. The way people react to trauma doesn't always make sense, and people can and should be allowed to deal with it in their own way, so long as they aren't at risk of hurting themselves or others. Maybe someone could react the way Hazel expects, but from what I've seen most women and men feel like shit after the assault and sex/romance is the last thing on their minds. They've been traumatized, their body violated, and even the thought of sex with a partner they trust can be triggering.
So Zaniel goes in to talk to Kate, who confesses that she's the great-great-granddaughter to the Baba Yaga (which is a really cool concept that's never explored.) She came to the clinic to have her iron teeth and nails made more human so she could live a normal life. She victim blames herself for wanting this, saying that if she had claws and iron teeth she could have fought the demon off. I think this makes sense as a victim just after the fact. Victims of assault can internalize society's views of rape, that they were somehow at fault and while it's not true, it can be hard to shake. I don't blame her for writing it that way, because I think it's fairly realistic.
What I do blame her for? ZANIEL DOESN'T CONTRADICT HER. He sort of passively agrees with the sentiment in that chapter and then later explicitly says it when he's healing a team member and can't completely get rid of the non-human attributes she now has. I get the impression this is more of the 'changing your appearance to something that makes you more comfortable is vanity' thing that we get in Anita Blake. It also has a little bit of the 'being human is stupid and boring.' Kate's rape is only in this book for shock value and to get in more of LKH's abysmal views on sexual assault. Her fate is never brought up in the summary chapter at the end. It reminds me a lot of the epilogue in Crimson Death, where Nathaniel's hair is brought up but Domino's death and how it affects Jade is left out.
Well shortly after this disgusting scene they stand around in the hallway for a while talking about Zaniel's gym routine, the couples therapy he's in with his wife who has all but divorced him. We meet the rest of the team, most of whom have been divorced as well. The bisexual detective (Lila Bridges) and lesbian detective (Athena Ravensong) I actually like, but both have to flirt with Zaniel, even though they aren't interested in him romantically. There's inane chatter about nicknames and whatnot, and it goes on in the hallway, not far from the rape victim that Zaniel found it too exhausting to be around for long.
The narrative takes a big long break to talk about his love life. He goes to a therapy session with his wife Regina, who is tempted to end their relationship because of his job. She just can't handle that he puts himself in danger. We learn that this is his second marriage and that he married a stripper the first time around because he'd been indoctrinated as a child to believe you had to marry the first person you had sex with. (Which admittedly does happen in hardcore Christian households. My sister was pressured into her first marriage by everyone around her.) The unnamed stripper married him because he was military and she wanted to take all his money in the divorce. This is an almost identical setup to Edward's backstory as revealed by Serpentine.
Eventually, the narrative gets back on track and they go to the perp's family home to examine an artifact. We waste a chapter and a half where LKH tries to write a neurodivergent character. I'm not sure how to feel about it, really. My husband is on the spectrum, so I like the portrayal of ASD when it's done well. Because it is a spectrum, every case is different so I can't judge this by what my husband's case looks like. All I can say is that it feels by the numbers and sort of tacked on. It serves no purpose except to let LKH play matchmaker with the secondary characters. That happens all the time in AB, and I think its even worse here because we know jack all about these people.
They discover an artifact that remains unexplained, even at the end of the book. It ends up attacking them metaphysically and transforming Detective Ravensong's hand into a demon appendage. With the help of an old associate from the college (Suriel), Zaniel makes it proportional with the rest of her body (it was kind of Hellboy looking before) and we get the aforementioned crack at Kate for wanting to look human.
There's a bit of intrigue when Suriel tells him that she thinks something sinister is going on. The guardians that are supposed to be protecting the college are roaming and seem to be rounding up the people who failed to complete their training. They also seem to be recruiting people who weren't admitted to the college at a young age. We don't get much about this, but it looks like a tease for future plotlines.
I like pretty much everything having to do with the COA. Angels are supposed to be a force for good, but their intermediary seems to be corrupt. During the healing Suriel tries to take Ravensong's totems from her so she's entirely reliant on her guardian angel (everyone has one no matter what their faith.) The college teaches their angel speakers that all other faiths are either evil or lesser than the Christian faith. While I am a Christian myself, I don't mind this at all. It's drawing some clear parallels with the Catholic church and I don't mind the setup that God is good but man is fallible. This really should have been the plot we stuck with, in my opinion.
The worldbuilding around how angels and demons manifest is interesting. Pretty much any human will or perception imposed on them will change their forms and make them more capable of interacting with our realm. I think it makes them a little weaksauce, but YMMV. I'll admit I'm a little peeved about it because I have a concept like that in my own writing, though I'm mostly deriving the 'gods change based on perception' from the Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian series.'
It's revealed here that Zaniel almost caused an angel to fall when he was a teenager because they fell in love with each other. No word yet on whether she became fleshy enough to bone him. Almost every woman and several men decide that Zaniel is so damn irresistible (sound familiar?) so this doesn't surprise me.
The weird thing is that there's considerably less sexism (or at least less vitriol) in this one than in most AB novels. Some women like Kate get the shaft, but they're described more flatteringly, allowed to have some faults and there are not as many guys do this/girls do that. Older women are described as pretty or dignified, and the only character derided for his appearance is an overweight male detective. If I were to delve into some armchair psychology I'd say that because the character is male, the author doesn't feel like she has to make the character as try-hard and Not Like Other Girls, which is more vicious and petty than what we get in ATFOA. Zaniel still exudes a measure of nice guy energy, because every time a woman complains about men he apologizes about his gender and panders to that woman's ego. I guess it's a Not Like Other Guys?
Back into the plot, such as it is. Zaniel gets into a fight with another angel speaker and wins (of course.) The angel speakers retreat to the COA with their tails between their legs and are not heard from again. Zaniel gets home and we meet Jamie, a character who was kicked out of the College for not passing the tests. He ended up going crazy and becoming homeless after he couldn't shut out the music of the spheres. He wasn't healed, and was instead given the boot. He's now sane again thanks to the efforts of a group of witches.
It's revealed that upon entering the college the senior angel speakers will remove any protections that the kids hand beforehand, like totems, personal guides, spirits from a past life, etc. This reminds me a little of the daemons in His Dark Materials, but I don't mind it. Jamie has his totem back, so he's regained his sanity and ability to talk to the angels. I really like the corruption in the COA angle she introduces, but it comes too little too late. The plot has to be wrapped up in the next three chapters.
The college student and the demon possessing him have tracked down another of the girls he was stalking and plan to rape and kill her. Zaniel is nearby and should really be trying to catch up to her, but stops to make out with a short, busty brunette first. He goes into a jewelry store to catch up with Shelby (the potential victim) and there's time spent talking about how Shelby looks speculatively at both the villain and Zaniel. Because she's a bottle blonde she has to be a hussy. Zaniel ends up killing the demon with holy fire, and that's that. Not much of a fight. One bit character dies. His wife decides their separation should be over, and it's implied that they have sex that night. The end.
It feels like there are a couple of good stories in this one, but they're strung together into an awkward patchwork. It seems like the editor was really trying their best with this, and Hamiltonisms are at a minimum, but they are still there. The world is shallow and underdeveloped and it needed more workshopping before being released. It's incredibly frustrating to see something that could be great become such a humdrum mess. But third verse the same as the first, right?
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