The three of us, one of whom, let me remind you, is twelve, went out for dinner tonight, and somehow dinner for three at BW3s cost ninety fucking American dollars, so lemme channel some misplaced rage into some quick reviews. First, a video game, because since I’m not doing the YouTube thing any longer I need to put those here again.

Lies of P (Xbox Series X) is a surprisingly competent Soulslike for, like, eighty percent of its roughly 35-hour playtime, and while the plot line overlaps quite a bit with Steelrising, which came out earlier this year and occupies a lot of the same territory, it’s better put together. Combat is satisfying, it feels like a variety of builds would be viable (I went with a strength build, which is called Motivity in this game, and I found a pretty good whackin’ stick pretty quickly and stuck with it) and the difficulty level is on a pretty even keel for most of the game except for maybe one boss whose weak spot isn’t even really hinted at and who will wreck you mercilessly until you figure it out yourself.

Actually it’s worth it to take a second longer to discuss the weapons: each weapon in the game comes with a handle and a blade, and they can be mixed and matched to your heart’s content. The handles bring certain qualities of the overall weapon with them– the moveset mostly attaches to the handle, while upgrades apply to the blade– and they can affect how scaling affects your weapons, along with certain other items that can actually tune a weapon further toward the build you want. I ended up using the blade from a huge axe called the Live Puppet’s Axe, which is a literal axe made from puppet arms, and the handle from a bludgeoning weapon from much earlier in the game that sped the weapon up and cut the weight a lot. It was neat to play around with the different combinations and see what came from them.

It loses a point or two for the final act, which is a fucking slog unlike anything I’ve seen in a Soulslike in a while; there’s this tower you’re supposed to climb to the top of and Christ it just goes on forever and by the end of it I was just wanting the game to end, but the first, like, 30 hours or so were quality, and if I was more willing to take my time with the last section it might not have bothered me as much. I’ll call it an 8/10.

Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson, is Icelandic urban fantasy and was more or less a blind impulse buy from Barnes & Noble however long ago I picked it up. I finished it in a few big gulps over a few days and it’s on my shortlist for the end of the year, mostly because of the atmosphere and how it handles magic. The book throws a curveball at you early on, where one of the two main protagonists is getting kicked out of what more or less appears to equate to magic grad school because he won’t calm the fuck down and learn about magic in the safe and boring way that THE ESTABLISHMENT ™ wants him to. Every other book you’ve ever read in your life conditions you to immediately assume that the elder professors are Wrong and that the kid represents what will surely be a series of important breakthroughs in gjáldur research against the calcified Establishment. He will show them the way! They will be ashamed of themselves for not recognizing his greatness!

Hah. Spoiler alert: they were absolutely fucking right and he’s completely over his head and things do not go well. If anything the book’s big weakness is that this guy doesn’t get enough time on the page; there are overlapping different kinds of magic in this series and his is focused mostly on big, showy rituals and, well, demon summoning; at one point he murders a couple of people to steal a book from a library and maybe also touches off a magical pandemic along the way? The book drops it. I didn’t want it to turn into a police procedural or anything, but I wanted to know more about the consequences of his actions.

Toss in a political revolution and a bunch of other weirdness worthy of China Miéville at his best and, oh, a six-page glossary at the front of the book full of unpronounceable Icelandic words with letters I don’t know how to reproduce with my keyboard– this book isn’t going to hold your fucking hand for its vocabulary, I’ll tell you that– and you’ve got something I really liked. It’s not perfect but I ordered the sequel before even finishing it and I’ll likely be getting to it sooner rather than later.

Adam Nevill’s The Ritual is the worst book I’ve read this year, and it’s not close. It is divided into two parts. The first part is about a bunch of Goddamn idiots who get lost in the woods on a hike. Two of them have no business at all being on a fucking three-day wilderness hike in Sweden, of all fucking places, and one of the less realistic parts of this very unrealistic book is these two dudes agreeing to go on a multi-day nature hike in the first place. Two of them get injured– one hurts his knee, and the other has really bad blisters on his feet– and they decide to cut through the forest as a “shortcut,” rather than go on a longer, established path, and, well, I’d say they get what they deserve except there’s also Something in the Woods and occasionally it eats one of them. The first part is entertainingly bad. It’s overwritten and repetitive(*) but it’s hard to fuck up being lost in the woods, chased by something scary, and slowly running out of food.

Then one of them gets kidnapped by a teenage death metal band– that’s not a fucking typo, that’s what happens– and held hostage, and what was once entertainingly bad becomes mortally shit impressively quickly. The last book I read that shot itself in the dick this effectively was Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, and this was very much Not a Neal Stephenson Book in terms of quality before going to shit. It becomes very clear very quickly that Adam Nevill hates fat people and Adam Nevill also isn’t very fond of women, and Adam Nevill really, really hates fat women, and the book became fucking unreadable with a fucking quickness. Reading the one-star reviews on Goodreads is more entertaining than the book was, and the number of people who closed the book and put it down at the exact point that I did is impressive.

It is worth pointing out that this book was turned into a movie, although I think it strains credulity to call it a “major motion picture,” but the fact that the movie completely jettisoned the plot of the back half of the book should tell you something.

(*) This is the first sentence of Chapter Eighteen: “The very thought of which was exactly why Hutch could not prevent the unnaturally vivid images of the dream from recurring as he walked slowly away from the hovel, with one of Dom’s arms around his shoulders.” Thought of what? I have absolutely no fucking clue, and this sentence disappears up its own ass, never to be understood again. It’s not a reference to the last sentence of the previous chapter. It starts a chapter all by itself. I cannot explain it.