Anyone read this or start this series?

I just read the first book, Empire of Silence, and holy s*** this is amazing so far. It does pay homage to other series like Dune, for example, but wow the first book was amazing.

According to other readers, the first is the weakest one and it goes up like crazy from book 2

@0ddJay

I've got about 120 pages in Howling Dark so let me come back in a day or 2 to write up a final review, but I've been loving it and think it's a great step up from Empire of Silence. I gave EoS a 3.5/5 and thought it was good with some shortcomings such as weak supporting cast and meandering plot. I don't think Howling Dark solved ALL my criticisms of EoS, but it's a huge step up in quality and I've enjoyed my time with it a lot more than EoS.

My brother if you thought EoS was amazing you are in for the ride of your life. EoS was kind of a drag for me at times, although I did like it a lot. But Howling Dark onward is sci-fi at its absolute apex!

I just started book 5 today after a month break from the series cause book 4 was brutally devastating.

How’d you end up liking Howling Dark? Kharn Sagara is one of my favorite fictional characters oat

Damn ahaha glad to hear that. I’ll be starting Howling Dark tonight

Man that s*** was SO good. I gave it 4.5/5 stars - I thought it improved in basically every aspect of EoS.

I had a couple minor gripes - I didn’t mind the time skip but it made some of the characters introduced at the start of the book hard for me to connect with. Like I didn’t care about Jinan and Hadrian’s relationship at all tbh. And I thought some parts of the middle were a liiiittle slow but these are minor gripes and everything else was basically perfect

I thought every single antagonistic character - Kharn, Bretherin, Bassander, Painted Man, and the Cielcen prince, were all basically perfect characters. I loved the negotiation scenes and the detail Ruocchio created in the intricacies of the two languages and how Hadrian slowly realized peace wasn’t possible. And his breakdown in his innocent idealism and his slow acceptance of war’s inevitability and deciding to fight for humanity. The world building details were so good and I loved all the cyberpunk vibes at the start of the book. The bread crumbing of the Quiet lore was great too. Even the Deus Ex Machina of his death I thought was really well done and didn’t feel unfair

I’m starting Demon in White tonight and have a feeling I’m gonna fly through

Great series, up to date on all the books, and novellas. Hadrian Marlowe is one helluva of character

Just finished Ashes of Man and trying to stop myself from jumping right into Disquiet Gods Chris Ruocchio is a terrorist

About 400 pages into Demon in White

Just finished the colosso battle between Hadrian and Irshan. I can’t formulate coherent thoughts atm. Holy. F\*\*\*ing. S\*\*\*.

This s*** is so peak. This might go down as my all time favorite sci fi book if the second half sticks the landing after everything that’s happened so far

f***ing PEAKK

I wouldn’t stfu about this for like 2 weeks

Finished Disquiet Gods the other day and my mind is still blown!!!!

It’s like all the best things about Howling Dark + the best things about Demon In White mixed together.

Might be his magnum opus tbh

Need book 7 ASAPPPP

I've fr been thinking about it every day since I read it man

Finish Demon in White this morning ... man ...

That was literary greatness. I feel like that s*** deserves to go down as a future sci fi classic. I loved Howling Dark but I think DiW may be my favorite sci fi book EVER.

Great action scenes, political intrigue, intergalactic exploration, lovecraftian type horror .. the plot of this book had EVERYTHING. And it was perfectly paced too. I felt like there really wasn't any filler regardless of how quickly events were happening. Every chapter felt important.

So much great worldbuilding happened in this book too. I loved the connections to pre-Sollan Empire history. And it felt great to finally have a couple questions set up in the first two books answered. Some of the answers had me even retconning some of my thoughts on Howling Dark.

I went out and bought the next 3 books today and plan to start Kingdoms of Death tonight. But man it's hard to imagine the series peaking higher than this book. Any criticism I can think of for this book feels so petty - this is a definite 5 star read for me.

Man I’m on Howling Dark and now I can’t wait for Demon in White.

Why the f*** did I not know about this series before? Lmao it’s apparently getting popular now

Enjoy HD bro. It’s great in its own way - I still gave it a 4.5/5 when I read it, I really loved its whole vibe

Yeah it seems like a lot of social media accounts who post book reviews and stuff hit on it in the last year and have been slowly getting it blown up. I’ve seen YouTube reviews as old as like 3 years back but it seems to really be getting a ton of attention since the last book is coming in November

Believe it or not I think Disquiet Gods slightly edges out DiW

My mind was thoroughly blown almost the entire time with the amount of payoff. It almost feels like a final book. It really felt like I was learning cosmic secrets 😭

Randomly started this today lmao glad to see yall love it.

I’ve been seeing a lot more discussion about DG recently - I’m assuming because more people are getting caught up for SuT in November. I see it seems to be a pretty consistent top 3, so I’m excited to get to it now! I was thinking the series might tail off a bit after KoD but doesn’t seem to be the case

I’m slightly past the halfway mark in KoD as of last night (I think I made it to chapter 31 last night). Man, this read is heavy lol. I’m usually not one to be very affected by gore/torture type scenes but there is some straight up gruesome s*** happening here Ruocchio is a madman

KoD is every sicko’s favorite book 😭 (I’m a sicko)

Lmao but nah that book is so good and pushes literary violence and gore to its limit in such a great way

Howling Dark… I’m almost halfway in and holy s*** Empire of Silence was not even close to this.

EOS was a great opener to Marlowe and the world… the second half of it was amazing but Howling Dark takes off right away and hasn’t stopped at all.

I do kind of wish that we could catch the first 25 years after EOS but this is very good so far

I finished KoD on Thursday. That was a brutal, heavy read the entire way through LMAO holy s***.

I feel like this book simultaneously amplified aspects of the series I do like and some that I don't lmao. Idk how much I can say without spoilers.

Like this series probably had some of the best character work with Hadrian and Valka. Watching Hadrian get broken down and continuously traumatized throughout this book and watching him grapple with what feels like inevitable death was gut wrenching. And then to watch him and Valka reconnect at the end and work together as he processed what happened to him ... probably my favorite part of the book. It was so unexpected but genius to have such a quiet ending after everything that happened in this book. And I was NOT expecting to see Gibson a second time. I thought we would be done with him after DiW. But I was glad to see him, because I thought those last 4 chapters were a worthy send off for him. However, I feel like most of the other side characters' deaths really amplified my gripe with this whole series regarding how weak a lot of the side characters are. I really struggled to feel that emotional about most of the characters' deaths. Elara and Ilex's deaths didn't really do anything for me. Crim was 50/50\. Pallino and Otavia were really the only ones that kind of got me because I feel like they're really the only ones who had a connection with Hadrian that had any depth to it (and even then I don't know if I would call them very deep). When Pallino said "I would've gone with you to the end" and when Hadrian realizes Otavia tricked him ... :crazy: I did appreciate the more condensed plot arcs in this story compared to how big DiW and HD's scopes were. While the middle arc where Hadrian is getting tortured is slow, I thought it did a great job of letting us really feel how agonizing those 7 years were. My only complaint is in the Lothrian arc. I liked the plot of the arc as a whole, but I did just feel like it was very shallow critiques of Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China/1984 style authoritarian regimes. I just felt like there wasn't really anything interesting happening here as far as commentary and felt like critiques I've read before. And while it didn't derail my enjoyment of the book, I thought the Christian imagery was the most overt in the series so far. I'm hoping it doesn't go too overboard in the last 3 here

Reading that wall of text back feels like I'm presenting like I didn't enjoy this book lol. But I really did! I really appreciated what he accomplished here, and I'm glad that he split the original book into this one and Ashes of Man because I feel like the ending was PERFECT.

I give it 4/5. My current series order is DiW > HD > KoD > EoS. But I'll be diving right into AoM next and hopefully can finish it before the end of the month so I can do DG in October and be ready for SuT in November

Just finished AoM tonight … are you f***ing kidding me …

Grief truly is deep water

I saw it coming and I was in crazy denial about it 😭😭😭

On the bright side Disquiet Gods is next (the most mind blowing imo)