Tragedy had reduced James to a nobody. Washed up and homeless in NYC, he thought his life was over.
Then a message appeared in his vision:
60,000 year countdown has ended
Nemesis 1 released
Please acknowledge
As the world falls apart, as billions die, as society collapses and all hope seems lost, James discovers a powerful truth: he was wrong to think himself a nobody. Summoning every ounce of grit and determination, he’ll help forge a resistance that will defy humanity’s near omnipotent enemy by taking the fight from the streets of NYC to the stars themselves.
And with the dawn of the Void, he’ll become the most important person to have ever lived.
As of writing this review, I’ve read all three books.
Dawn of the Void follows Phil’s prior approach of strong and realised characters who drive the conflict forward. In DotV, this is James, the ex-EMT, homeless man with a tragic backstory that underpins his character. Serenity, Jame’s main partner in crime, has her own past and her own issues, as does Jessica and every other character. Characterisation, as always, is deep and thoughtful.
I’ve also read through the reviews on Royal Road about this, and Phil’s certainly copped a lot of slack from armchair psychologists and (possible) military personnel for getting various details incorrect, whether it’s about trauma, military function, homelessness, etc, and this really frustrates me. I can’t speak to the accuracy of any of those comments, but like, damn, the genre is already filled with cardboard characters, can we not try to force authors to keep to one-dimensional empty characters by leaving a slew of bad reviews whenever a character has baggage?
Please?
I digress. The plot follows James (and Serenity) as they battle through the waves of Nemesis 1’s, then Nem2s, Nem3s, etc, in preparation for the pits of hell to open after ninety days. Society slowly collapses, people make plays for political power, and the world adapts to the class system introduced to them as the difficulty of the Nemesis demons ramps up incredibly quickly.
Phil’s chosen to wrap this series as a trilogy instead of a much longer series, and this happens by a rapid powerup of the main cast and subsequent release of all the remaining nemesis waves at once. While it could have been fun to go for another book or two, I do appreciate a series that doesn’t decide to add a thousand pages of filler and random arcs and instead takes the main plot, and wraps a bow on it and ties it up. On that note, the way the book ended was very nice, I didn’t see it coming, but it makes so much sense.
I really enjoyed this one.
