Review: Light Bringer

Light Bringer by Pierce Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

No spoilers for Light Bringer, but spoilers for previous Pierce Brown books will appear herein. You've been warned.

"Our sun floats in darkness attended by moons made of trash."

And with that, Darrow once again proves himself the Imperator of Opening Lines.

Four years ago, we all thought Pierce Brown was only going to give us one more book after Dark Age in the Red Rising Saga, but after that book proved to be such a "Frankensteinian" "mental twister" in Brown's words, it really shouldn't come as any surprise that Brown couldn't just wrap things up with one thousand-page brick to rival Brandon Sanderson. No, it really shouldn't come as any surprise to see that Comic-Con 2022 had Howler One finally announce after years of delays and trashings of manuscript pages by the hundreds, that there would be two big boy books coming down the pike - Light Bringer now, and Red God still to come.

And it definitely shouldn't come as any surprise, none whatsoever, that Howler One Pierce Brown is still the Apex Asshole, the most rockstarinest writer of them all, and even he couldn't help but cry at that one death.

This after he wrote the most unthinkable death of them all in Dark Age with the newborn Ulysses Barca.

But this time, it stings so much worse because this character was finally coming back from the brink, from the abyss...and along comes a certain punchable Hate Sink to ruin the whole thing.

You know what you did, Pierce Brown.

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU DID.

But seriously...Light Bringer may at times be a bit of Prolonged Prologue to Red God, but the same could be said of Iron Gold to Dark Age. Here we are once again back down to four POV characters after the untimely death of Ephraim in Dark Age - another death for the list that I'm still not willing to forgive Brown for, because Ephraim gave the greatest quote (like in Iron Gold when he's complaining that vapes, unlike burners, are "as satisfying as fucking through a tarpaulin sheet.") And so with Ephraim gone, now we're back to four POV's with Darrow, Lyria, Virginia...and Lysander.

All together now...

FUCK LYSANDER.

That little pricklick went from merely annoying in Iron Gold to craptastically tragic in Dark Age, and here, in Light Bringer, he forever validates the hatred so many fans have had for him all along.

If any character deserves every possible death this series has to offer come Red God - the Blood Eagle, blowing him out of an airlock, sticking him on the business end of Darrow's slingBlade...it's bloodydamn Lysander.

But enough of the pricklick.

So much of this book continues the mental twistery of its predecessor as Darrow, Lysander, Lyria, and Virginia stay largely separate from each other. Oh, Lyria does get into the thick of things with Darrow once again, and he and Lysander face off in a few unexpected ways, especially as Darrow fights other, literally bigger enemies too. And Virginia, though she gets the least POV time, gets some of the best "moves and countermoves" chapters bouncing off Lysander for a key campaign in the ongoing Solar War. But with the POV characters staying largely separate, and having been separate from a number of major allies all throughout this era of the saga, there's a great deal of dramatic irony involved. Some things Lyria may know, but Darrow - and, more importantly, Sevro - would not. Like the birth and death of Ulysses, a wound which Brown opens up in the most devastating way you can imagine.

(Speaking of Ulysses...in this book, he was never named with "au," only "Ulysses Barca," even in the dramatis personæ. A lot of Darrow's friends and allies, in fact, have dropped their Color honorifics - now we have Virginia Augustus, Sevro Barca, Victra Julii, Colloway Char, etc. etc. I don't remember this being made official before, but I never need an excuse to go back and reread the whole series again and again just to scour Brown's text and be sure.)

Brown's given us nearly 700 more of some of the best bloodydamn pages in the history of literature, and who knows how many he'll be able to give us for Red God. Here's hoping that he follows up this, his 30th birthday present to me, with a good thousand pages or more for Christmas 2024.

I'll still give it five stars on Red God, I'm pretty sure.

But one last time...FUCK LYSANDER.

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