The League of Evil Should Stick to Mustache Twirling

Yay, a cover that looks NOTHING like the two before it!

The Golden City

by John Twelve Hawks

p. 2009
 


[There are a ton of spoilers in this review, to the extent that there was just no point in blacking them out, since the substance of this review primarily revolves around the events of the novel, so be warned.]



You can chart the evolution of the League of Evil with my reviews of:

• Book 1: The Traveler
• Book 2: The Dark River

Despite my lukewarm feelings about the first two books in John Twelve Hawks’ Fourth Realm Trilogy, I was eager to power through the final installment and find out what it all amounted to, to decide whether the story redeemed itself in its final act, to know that I hadn’t been wasting precious hours of my life investing myself in a story that goes nowhere...

... But some times, life disappoints.

I don’t know why I expected more; the complete lack of buzz surrounding this trilogy probably should have clued me in to its mediocrity. But I guess a small part of me hoped the trilogy would get better as it went along. The second book certainly hooked me better than the first, and there was a lot of potential, but in the end, the series just failed to satisfy on every level. The heroes never graduated beyond boring tropes delivering weary, wispy platitudes, the villains never emitted the remotest sense of true villainy (despite a great deal of proverbial mustache twirling), many of the plot points of the first two books (which had the potential to be interesting) are resolved with minimal payoff, if they’re resolved at all, and the whole thing ends on an open note that leaves you with far too many questions, the most important of which being WHY?

Why ANY of it?

I thought it was a great idea when Book 2, The Dark River, sent the heroes on an international romp. The first book took place entirely on the east and west coasts of the United States, the second took us abroad, to parts of Ireland, England, Italy, Ethiopia. It seemed appropriate then that The Golden City would take it one step further and spend most of the time exploring the notorious otherworldly realms [that form the whole basis for the trilogy and yet have barely been touched upon...] Twelve Hawks had made us wait long enough; it was time to figure out what the big deal was. Plus, at the end of The Dark River, our Harlequin heroine Maya had been left stranded in the first realm. Surely now was the time to reveal the secrets of the five other realms, only two of which we’d gotten a glimpse of.

Nope. Maya’s vacation was cut short without much fuss and yet we still inexplicably had to deal with some half-assed attempt at what I suppose was meant to be a PTSD storyline, wherein Maya has a hard time dealing with her experiences, withdraws, and reverts a bit back to her old stoicism. But none of that even made sense to me. Maya only went to the first realm to rescue Gabriel, who had been imprisoned and tortured there for days, if not weeks, and yet he came back relatively well-adjusted (and actually a bit 'enlightened'). Maya, on the other hand, despite being a rigidly-trained and highly capable warrior, capable of defending herself, seemed to suffer way more, for no apparent reason. And no one ever talks about their experiences nor are they relevant, so what was the point?!

Speaking of things that don’t have a point, we finally meet the fabled Corrigan patriarch and fellow Traveler, Matthew Corrigan, in what you would think would be a turning point for the series and our hero. Instead, Gabriel improbably gets over his daddy abandonment issues in about thirty seconds and Matthew dumps a lot of dimestore philosophy on Gabriel, who has already become a bit of a smug tool after play-acting at revolutionary leader for so long. After playing Yoda to Gabriel’s Luke Skywalker for awhile, Matthew promptly vanishes, never to be a plot contrivance again, and not really accomplishing anything at all. Seriously. Absolutely nothing learned in the super special sixth realm (the realm of the Gods and the 'Golden City' after which this novel is named) does anything at all to further the plot.

Also doing pointless things this time around is Gabriel’s ally, Hollis, who—in The Dark River—lost his girlfriend to an untimely, violent death at the hands of the evil Bretheren. Hollis spends almost the entire final book traveling to Japan, and leaving a few bodies in his wake, JUST to talk to the spirit of his dead girlfriend for two minutes so she can chearlead him on to giving up his vengeance and converting to Harlequinism, or whatever the fuck they call it. It was at this point that I had to refrain from chucking the book across the room and limited myself to a simple eye roll and a muttered “Are you kidding me?!” so that I could soldier on in the vain hope that the story was leading somewhere.

And then there was the bullshit non-ending, where Gabriel ‘defeats’ his brother/nemesis by... what, exactly? No, I’m seriously asking, because it’s a truly ambiguous copout defeat. Micheal Corrigan, power-hungry and a bit psychotic, confronts his brother in the Golden City and Gabriel refuses to back down but also refuses to definitively defeat his brother, leaving the pair at a stalemate in another realm. We know they aren’t dead, but we also know they probably won’t ever come back, leaving our Traveler in an eternal limbo while his friends and unborn soon-to-be-a-Traveler baby (of COURSE there was one of those in this story; had you ever any doubt?!) try to move on without him. I kept waiting for the part where it is revealed that Gabriel—who learned to Travel through legitimate and natural ways, versus his brother’s drug-induced cheatin’ ways—has the edge and lays the smackdown on Michael, but this never happened. So what was the point of all that buildup?

I could honestly go on and on; there is so much here to disappoint the reader. I could see it all coming when I got down to the last thirty pages and I realized there was no way all the open threads were going to be tied off in a satisfying way. But in spite of the torture, I had to see it through to the bitter end. I guess I could validate my reading experience by using the Fourth Realm Trilogy as an example of how not to write; it’s the best I can do to justify the time I wasted reading these books, since I certainly won’t be taking anything substantive away from the experience.