I’ll be the first to admit when I am wrong about something. For the longest time, I avoided The Sun Eater series because of its seemingly derivative nature. I continued my plunge into the series by picking up Demon in White by Christopher Ruocchio. I naively expected that I might buy in at this juncture, carried away by the series’ agreed-upon best book. Unfortunately, I always carry a fresh monkey’s paw in my back pocket, and when I wished for a grand slam in my review of Howling Dark, every single finger curled at once and punched me straight in the mouth. I now feel a sickening vocation to read as much of the series as possible before I go sweetly into that good night.
Forewarning: Spoilers for Howling Dark and Demon in White are going to suffuse this review. Also, this is an incredibly long one, despite reigning in personal nitpicks.
Demon in White picks up decades after Howling Dark. Hadrian is continuing to forge his legend through the empire as one of the Emperor’s knights. He is under constant pressure to perform as his more established “betters” within the Eternal City send him on the shittiest missions with the lowest success rates. His title of half-mortal spreads through the imperium, forcing everyone who interacts with him to ask, “Did you really die in Vorgossos?”. His relationship with Valka continues to evolve, creating a bit of scandal as she is not a member of the Imperium. On top of all this, the Cielcin Prince is starting to unite the clans and present a military threat to the domains of men.
Needless to say, I had a really mixed relationship with Demon In White. It has just the right amount of deep lore nestled within it that I had to track down every weird influence that reared its modern head. But at the same time, I was struggling with the direction of the story. It kept me in a vicious cycle of reading just to understand what Ruocchio was trying to accomplish while loathing the steps Hadrian had to walk in order to get there. I praised Howling Dark because it moved beyond the stochastic storytelling of Empire of Silence, offering a more linear experience centered on a specific quest in Hadrian’s life. Demon in White discarded that perceived progress, favoring long time jumps in between its five or so novellas plastered together. Yes, Hadrian does take the off moments to connect the threads as he neatly slides into the next part of the story, but the narrative tension was off. Instead of a few fits and starts with some drags bookended by exciting set pieces, it just felt like an endless slog.
This is mostly compounded by the fact that each section of the overall book feels like a separate type of story. There is the horror of battle story, the political intrigue story, the research story, the plot reveal story, and the epic big battle. I’m sure I’m forgetting one or two sections, but I think that’s more due to the sheer amount of stuff that is packed into this book. It feels like a hoarder’s collection of ideas that are only related by the nature of being between the same two covers. Hadrian never misses an opportunity to think on a previous action, or foreshadow something, or explain a little-known fact that contributes to the context of the universe within the series. While I’m not really one to go for that kind of thing, I generally find “lore” as a concept tedious. Sun Eater scratches that weird itch that makes these little lore niblets into full-on meals for my brain. I found myself googling random things that felt like they were references to real-world things, and lo and behold, there is a lot of weird history shoved into this story. It’s the kind of book that feels like you can seemingly reveal a lot about an author through psychoanalytic speculation, something I want to try to refrain from putting in a public piece.
One of the bits that I really caught onto in the series is Hadrian’s explorations of his own identity. In Howling Dark, Hadrian is comparing himself with the ship of Theseus, wondering how much of his identity can be replaced before he is no longer Hadrian Marlowe, but some other thing, or if the ship is a natural progression of what it means to grow. Demon in White has his mentor, Gibson, refute that argument in favor of the idea that as you live longer, and make more decisions, more of your essential nature is “revealed,” a sort of molting process that sloughs off the socially taught humanity in favor of the realized individual. I don’t think this is an inherently bad take, but the immediacy with which Hadrian adopts this framing is a little alarming. It’s not a conversation between the two of them. Gibson is Hadrian’s mentor and acted as a spiritual guide in Hadrian’s mind during his darkest moments. I think it would have been interesting to see a conversation, or a dissonance within Hadrian himself, as he tries to find reconciliation between the two ways of viewing himself. Instead, it neatly slots into how Hadrian already sees himself in hindsight, destined to become a monstrous savior of humanity because no one else is willing to get their hands dirty to “save humanity”.
Where this also gets a little frustrating is that the story evolves into a set of grievances against individuals within the Empire that contribute to Hadrian’s circumstances. The Empire, as it is set up, doesn’t become the subject of investigation; only those who live to make Hadrian’s existence feel “unfair” at certain junctures. I understand that he cannot openly question the Emperor, but even in his musings, that is not investigated. He can bomb political rivals, giving coy answers to those around him, suggesting divine intervention while he bemoans their petty nature. He can fight tooth and nail against those who stand in his way, griping the whole time about how if they could just see the bigger picture, they’d let him do what he wants, and face the threat of the Cielcin on his terms.
This tendency also extends into his relationship with Valka and other humans who aren’t a part of the Imperium. He is unorthodox in that he sees them as human, despite their various sins against nature. But he still considers their existence as somewhat inhuman, and it’s upon him to find ways to bring them into the fold or change who they are so they can become human. This isn’t necessarily stated in his ramblings, but you can pick it up through his relationship with Valka, which becomes incredibly complicated – not in terms of story, but in how it’s portrayed. Valka has the potential to be an incredibly interesting character in relation to Hadrian, but we only see her through his eyes, a sort of two-dimensional being of extreme intellect and attractiveness through personality (though it seems she is physically attractive too). She is from a very technology-integrated society that values individual freedom to the point of severe atomization, where children are raised by “someone”. She does not desire children herself because of her social upbringing, and this has become a huge sticking point for Hadrian. How can she be truly devoted to him without that expression of love, bearing his children? I say this could be an interesting dynamic because Hadrian himself is processing his life as an individual separate from his own culture, but in service to it. What could have been interesting conversations reconciling their differences amount to Hadrian sheepishly whining about it to Valka, before she gives him the assurance that had she wanted kids, he would be the father, before she is fridge’d in the final battle with the implication from Hadrian that she might not return. This is also all after she determines that her life’s work has been meaningless after Hadrian’s discovery that the language she’s been studying her whole life isn’t a language. And that’s a whole other can of worms I’ll let ferment.
I think where I really began to sour on the project, though, is the reveal that Hadrian is a chosen warrior of The Quiet, the being Valka has spent her life studying. There is a lot of time bullshit associated with their civilization, and while I find it interesting, it’s also opaque as balls and confusing as shit. But suffice it to say, Hadrian is the shortest path to make sure that the forces of good can conquer the forces of evil and entropy (the Cielcin being a manifestation of the opposing side). In this reveal, Hadrian adopts some pretty neat superpowers, and by neat, I mean I wanted to just quit reading the book and touch grass. Since I was already touching grass, though, I powered through Hadrian time shifting his reality so that he could remain immortal while orbital lasers missed him by hair lengths in the final battle. He can’t really manipulate time on the whole, but he can, from my understanding, side-step realities, narrowly missing death. I can understand that if you see yourself in Hadrian, this is a pretty exciting development. A chosen warrior that cannot die, surrounded by death, ordained to spread the light of consciousness through the universe. There is a whole lot more to it, but really, the main draw is the ending sequence, which I just really found boring and at times annoying.
Is this a bad ending? I don’t think it’s inherently bad. It just feels like a slap in the face after so much build-up. It’s incredibly fitting in hindsight, as the story is focused on Hadrian and setting the record straight. But like other books with this framing, I find the ones that peel away the legend to reveal a man more compelling than those that reveal a god walking amongst men. Granted, this is all subject to change. There are four more books, and this was the point in time where the author mentioned he was beginning to be influenced by Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which plays with this sort of framing in confusing and enlightening ways. But where it rubs me the wrong way is that up until this point, this book has been a list of grievances, reveals, and the wishbone breaking just right for Hadrian over and over again for 784 pages. And now he has this power? Obviously, it’s not a world-ending, game-changing power, but it is one that grants him an immense amount of plot armor. And yes, I understand “Alex, he’s telling it from the future, you know he survives”. True, but because he’s fucking chosen? Bleh.
Anyway, I have a lot more I would love to discuss, but I want to break it down somewhere else so that this doesn’t just become a list of grievances to write off. I know it’s sort of hitting that threshold already, but you can find a review of “this book is amazing,” or “this book sucks,” anywhere else. I haven’t seen a really gritty breakdown of the series, and I want to make sure someone does it. I imagine this series will be talked about for a little while after its final release, but who knows what kind of staying power it will have. All I can do is be resilient and let the brain worms fester as I throw myself into the breach again and again. Something I want to leave you readers with, though, is this question: what is it all for?
Rating: Demon In White – I got lost at the crossroads and missed out the deal of a lifetime.
-Alex
