REVIEW: She Who Waits by Daniel Polansky
There’s a new drug in Low Town, and it’s creating horrors. After witnessing the all-too-familiar results of it, The Warden investigates in book three of the Low Town trilogy, She Who Waits. All the while his relationship with his best friend Adolphus continues to strain, heading towards a secret that could end twenty years of friendship, of war survival, of relying on each other in their own ways, and of brotherhood for better or worse. Wren has also breached the cusp of manhood, his powers growing and the risk to his freedom and safety with it. The end has arrived for our antiheroes, and it’s all going to fall apart.
The Warden has gone up against many things: the Black House, the Association, gangs, and nobles … and this time it’s the very worst of Rigus: the religious zealots of the Steps.
Key to She Who Waits–and The Warden’s humanity–is The Warden’s relationship with Wren, his adopted son. The son wants to stop being treated like a boy, like any 18-year old young man bursting from his father’s shadow does. The father wants better for his son other than being enslaved by the king in a military magic school or inheriting an illicit drug distribution business. Both lives would likely end in a violent and early death, and The Warden doesn’t know what else he can do for him other than ship him out of the empire. The two are at an empasse. However, that empasse and that relationship, as always, take second fiddle to The Warden’s selfishness and his obsession with getting back at The Old Man—Rigus’ top spy responsible for thousands of murders and more, and also the man who taught The Warden all he knows about manipulating and playing the brutal, ruthless smart hand.
She Who Waits is beautiful for it’s complexity beneath the brutality. It’s certainly one of those experiences where readers will pick up on the things that matter to them, running the full gamut from the cynical, snarky, self-depricating, violent Warden going about his brutal business story arc, to the at-times quite horrible and at-other-times quite touching and self-sacrificial relationship between The Warden and Wren, to exploring the damage between Adolphus and The Warden as we find the last threads of their relationship to reveal and unpick. If you can enjoy all three of those arcs, She Who Waits is simply un-put-downable.
Once again, Low Town and its surrounding areas are beautifully depicted. The people are desperate, the population a powder keg, the guard and gentry utterly useless and uncaring, and the big factions are winding up to take their swing for the fences. Long story arcs started in The Straight Razor Cure and built on in Tomorrow, The Killing are brought to beautiful, gritty conclusion, with scores settled, plays unveiled and countered, double crosses, and more all delivered at the kind of pace and addictiveness that makes you miss your bus stop.
She Who Waits is a magnificent ending to the Low Town trilogy. It’s brutal, morose, hopeless, and hopeful. It’s punching up as hard as you can when you’re pretty sure you’ll lose. It’s using other people’s horrible fallacies and manipulating mostly rubbish people and crushing their spirits to do what you think is right, and to do right by yours, no matter how wrong the layperson would say you are. It’s everything you want in a book as a grimdark fan, and more. Polansky is an absolute master of the dark stuff and I will read literally anything he releases until one of us goes to meet She Who Waits, clenching our fists until we can’t anymore.
Read She Who Waits by Daniel PolanskyThe post REVIEW: She Who Waits by Daniel Polansky appeared first on Grimdark Magazine.
