The Night Angel Trilogy/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Author Appeal: An awful lot of the female characters in this series are prostitutes - and large chunks of the text are devoted to discussing their role, their lifestyles and what exactly they do for a living. Reaches cringe-worthy levels in the second book with hundreds of women queuing up at brothels to earn a living.
    • For what it's worth, when an interviewer asked Weeks which character he most identifies with, it was Momma K.
    • Justified in that because of how the city was set up, just about any non-Sakage endorsed female will end up raped at one point or another, you may as well get paid for it. Not to mention they needed the safety... It makes more sense in universe.
    • Considering his wife works/ed with them as a social worker of sorts, it could be that he's simply very familiar with the lifestyle. Write what you know, indeed
    • Prostitution is also not really portrayed as a 'good' thing either. It all makes sense in the context of the book. That said, all of the main female characters are described as attractive, even Elene once one can look past the scars.
  • Complete Monster: Hu Gibbet. If the murder of the whole Gyre family scene wasn't bad enough, he regularly takes to raping and beating his apprentice, as well as other women. Women Hu Gibbet gets bored of do not last long.
    • Roth also known as Rat. He gets off on torturing people and seeing the fear in their eyes. And just to confirm that he has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever, there is a section in the book where he shows off his wealth, and then proceeds to use an arbalest to shoot down starving peasants for game. He then proceeds to hint that he has them cooked and then eats them.
    • Roth's father Garoth Ursuul is several magnitudes worse, starting with the fact that he is easily the most prolific rapist on the planet and going downhill from there into a lifetime of lies, manipulation, warmongering, torture, and serial and mass murder. And then there is Khali, who is so evil even being in the same region as her can drive you insane. She engineers wars and catastrophes because she gains power from suffering- though in reality, she gains it from any strong emotion; suffering is just the easiest to generate, and she probably likes it.
  • Nightmare Fuel.
    • The book is about a killer and his master, what do you expect? In-book examples include the sight of Doll Girl, after being brutally battered and abused by Rat horrifying Azoth, a child hardened by violence and similar abuse towards other people in the Warrens, to vomit and panic and Khali sweeping through ranks of men, driving them to deaths induced simply by probing them mentally and attacking their weaknesses. Even Solon, who insists on taking Odysseus-like precautions to ensure his safety, falls victim to it.
    • The descriptions of the Ferali also:
      • Fearsome creatures created from the living bodies and souls of tortured people. Summoned together by Vir magic they are like mythical remote-control tanks that have gnashing mouths over every inch of their body that clings to anything they even briefly touch and then devours it (mostly people). It then assimilates their bones, tissue, and weapons and grows larger/stronger/spinier.
      • They shape-shift into whatever form they feel is best for the current situation (complete with descriptions of snapping and relocation of bones and muscle) and, while starting out fairly small (~10 feet tall depending on form) quickly grow with every new person they eat to become towering giants, even while walking on four legs.
      • Oh, also they instantly heal all physical wounds (shortly before devouring the inflicter of said wounds whole and turning them into an additional bicep) and magic bounces straight off of them. The only known thing that can damage them is the black ka'kari ("The Devourer", which can shear and destroy almost anything it touches), which can cut off an arm/leg/tendril/spikey-club-made-of-warrior-flesh.
      • But then they just right on eat the fallen limb up again and are complete once more.
      • Their only true weakness is getting the hell as far away from them as possible. This is because they're primarily weapons of war due to their appetites (and the high supply of enemy soldiers on which to chow down on). They quickly starve and devour themselves to death if they cannot find something else to eat every few minutes.
      • They're made worse by the fact that it appears the people used in the creation of the Ferali have their souls tied to the creature until it dies (or at least the first person whom the Vir magic ceremony is performed upon to turn them into a Ferali). So while the Ferali appears as a mindless monster under the mild control of the Vir and an evil spirit summoned during the ceremony, the tortured person/people sacrificed to create the creature are still very much sentient and feel all it's pain and hunger, but are often too mad from the torture the transformation has had on their body to assert any form of control.
    • When Kylar and Vi find out what the Godking kept in his bedroom...
  • Real Women Never Wear Dresses: Brent says in an interview one of his goals with Vi was to subvert this.
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