So I was a huge fan of the first two Tensorate novellas, but JY Yang’s The Descent of Monsters worked less well for me.
The main culprit is, I think, the structure. It’s told largely in reports and letters, and is mostly looking back at solving a mystery about what happened in a recent-ish event. But and so, having only a vague memory of the ending of the previous story (yes, I know I read it only a month ago), I could tell that this involved the same characters who were featuring in that story, and since it seemed to me like they had already solved the mystery being investigated here—that was the end of the second story, right?—I was distractedly trying to figure out how much of what I was getting was recap and how much was new.
But it turns out this is investigating a different aspect of that same mystery, and so a bunch of it was new, much more than I was thinking. Oops.
But then also because of the structure of the story, it wasn’t very tense or narratively propelled. “Something happened a while ago, and we’re trying to figure out what” is a calm, laidback story where all the tension has already been resolved. And the usual way to address that is to put the investigator into danger—which Yang does—but the investigator takes so little active action, and has so little meaningful interaction with the other characters we know, that their danger just didn’t have a really strong impact.
When I got to the end of this one, my general feeling was: “That’s it?” I know these are only novellas, but the previous two felt like short novels; this felt like a long short story. It’s not bad, and if you can actually remember what happened in the previous book before reading this one, you’ll avoid my confusion; but it feels like the prologue to a longer novel, or a light palate cleanser. I’m still looking forward to the next one, but maybe keep your expectations in check before reading this one.
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