Galharrow has been monstrously changed by his time in the Misery; underneath the transformation, a desperate plan to make himself powerful enough to alter the future. And he’s not the only one. Time has passed and people are not who he remembers them to be. Everyone has their own hopes, their own schemes, their own… betrayals? The Deep Kings are coming. And now a new weapon has been found, strong enough to crack open the skies once again. But who in this world can be trusted to use it? ‘[I] still had a pistol left, and so long as you have a whisky and a gun, how bad can your luck be?’ Answer: pretty bad. This is a book of last chances and Galharrow has had more than his fair share. Meeting him again is a blow, for the Misery is nestled bone deep and his outlook turned bleak enough to chill the heart. In every sense, this feels like the end of the road. He’s a scavenger, a loner, lost to himself in ways that make him almost lost to the reader. The madness of the last book is here tenfold, his life a surreal dreamscape that comes close to making him too alien to feel. I struggled with his choices in ways I have never done before, asking questions of him as his friends do. We cross our fingers and hope that he will hold on, that we can trust him as we always have. Because there is a plan, of a sort. Or at least, there is his plan. As characters converge, old faces and new enemies, the labyrinthine plots of the Nameless become ever clearer, each manoeuvre pushing their human pieces into whatever endgame they have planned. There is one last chance to save the world, to prevent the Deep Kings from turning everyone into drudge, but it seems like the side most people are on is their own. To say it provides an unproductive working environment is the understatement of the century, but of course it’s all fun and games and sly words and tension until someone gets stabbed in the back. Actually, if you make that multiple someones and a whole bucket load of inventive ways to die, then you have some idea of how this all goes… Especially because so much of the action is set in the Misery. Which, for me, is the absolute best part of the whole series. Talk about a character arc with some serious surprises. I’ve loved every second spent in her twisted landscape and this book was no exception. It’s a place of ghosts and monsters, an ever changing terrain where you can both lose and find yourself. As Galharrow has done, in so many different ways. Yet it’s so much more than that, it’s a massacre, a memory, a trial, an ending… The Misery is Ed McDonald’s masterwork and what he does with it here is so far beyond perfection I don’t even have the words to describe it, even if it wasn’t way too spoilery for this kind of review in any case. I have never wanted to see a place so much while at the same time never, ever wanting to go there. But I have to be honest, there were some issues with the ending. One classic move had been signalled pretty heavily right from the outset and I was getting a bit annoyed at Galharrow not getting it. He clearly hasn’t been reading the same fantasy books I have or he’d known what he was supposed to do, it’s been done before. A lot. It was all a little too pat, a little too offscreen. Of course, the way things end is always the most divisive part of any series and this is something you have to decide for yourself. Either way, this series is a MUST-READ. It’s clever, creative, and such an intense mix of real/unreal that it burns fire bright in your mind. I hope this is not the last time I get to visit. ARC via Netgalley