*Godblind* came up in a few lists of recommendations for people who had enjoyed Joe Abercrombie's work or for fans of grimdark fantasy in general, so I decided to give it a go without knowing much more about it. Unfortunately now that I've finished it I wish I hadn't bothered. The only reason that I didn't DNF it is because I've abandoned the last two novels I picked up and I didn't want to make it three in a row, but now I'm frustrated that my year might be about to end on such a sour note.

In my mind grimdark fantasy is very much a response to "traditional" epic fantasy in the mould of *Lord Of The Rings* and *The Wheel of Time* - those tales of good versus evil, with very defined morality where the massing forces of evil rise up and attempt to overthrow the world. I go into books in this genre expecting shades of grey, expecting antiheroes and characters who do bad things for what they believe to be the right reasons, where the "bad guys" believe themselves to be just and the "good guys" make us question what it actually means to be good. 

That's not what *Godblind* is, and it's very much operating in the same sort of territory as *Wheel of Time*. The villains here are worshippers of objectively evil gods who have been sealed away from the world. Their plan is to convert enough people to their cause - by deceit if need be - and to bathe the world in enough blood that they can tear down the veil keeping the gods out of the real world and let them walk the land again, creating chaos and destruction and a lot of death. The only reason for this that I can see is that these people are also evil through and through, and in many cases they resemble cartoon villains more than they resemble characters with any depth beyond being capital-b Bad.

The poor characterisation on display here doesn't stop with the villains, either. Our "good guys" are just as one dimensional - in fact they're perhaps even flimsier than the villains, who at least have motivations we can understand. The main characters just seem to stumble from one situations to another with no rhyme or reason. I couldn't tell you who they are, what they want (beyond "stop the bad guys"), what they care about. They're collections of physical traits - mismatched eyes, feisty redhead, former slave, prophet who has seizures - with no real character attached.

A bit reason for the lack of good characterisation is in the pacing. The chapters are incredibly short, often only 3 or 4 pages long, and they leap from plot point to plot point at full steam ahead without ever slowing down to let us get to know the characters or to show us any connective tissue. The result is that very important events happen off page. Crys' relationship with Prince Rivil is formed in a card game that we don't see; his escape after the reveal of Rivil's treachery is narrated after it's happened, at the same time as the nature of the treachery is revealed; a tense journey through enemy territory to try and get a warning to the forces of good takes five days, none of which we see. Crys goes from being a homophobic bigot to happily and hornily gay in the click of a finger.

It's a shame because I think there's some interesting stuff going on here, but we're never given a chance to see it. A sequence towards the end where characters are diverted into some underground tunnels that the villains attempt to flood could be tense and horrifying, but it's so disjointed and fast that it's a mess. There's a whole web of plotting and scheming going on in the background of the book that the plot hinges on that could be fascinating, but our only exposure to it is in characters monologuing their plans (in one case while literally twirling their moustache) before we jump to a point where they've achieved exactly what they wanted without any real effort. Characters say exactly what they're thinking at all times, with absolutely no subtext or subtlety.

This was a big disappointment, and I won't be reading the rest of the series.