Scar Night (Deepgate Codex #1)

By Alan Campbell

I wasn’t too impressed with this one. I had high hopes, from the jacket text, but ultimately it was just too disjointed for me. I’m not even sure how to sum it up. There’s questions of mortality, the soul, angels, religion, warfare, etc… but it’s all kind of jumbled, and set in a really dark world, where even the inhabitants of the place view life as pointless. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with a dark setting in and of itself; but if the setting’s going to be that dark, then I really need to be able to connect to a character to get pulled into a book and care about what happens. That was not the case here. It may just be that since the characters didn’t really seem to care about their own lives or existence, I saw no reason to either. Well, I did like Dill with his color-changing eyes, but he never really DID anything. And the end was just odd. I don’t know. This one just didn’t do it for me. It was, however, very well written with some great imagery, so it has that going for it. I probably won’t be picking up the rest of the series, though.

I give it 2.5/5 stars.