Surrender To The Will Of The Night by Glen Cook – review

“Surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away!” Yes, that’s right; I’m pandering in this review of Glen Cook’s latest (and third) entry in his Instrumentalities of the Night series, Surrender To The Will Of The Night, to that cross-section of our reading audience who are both Cheap Trick and science fiction/fantasy fans. I count on this blatant ploy to increase the amount of clicks to this review by at least 1.75 percent. It’s perhaps an overgenerous estimate, but I plan to account for up to .75 percent of this figure, so I feel it’s attainable.

What is Surrender To The Will Of The Night about, in ten words or less? I always reason, “Why use ten, when 1,000 has so many more zeros in it?” Also, is it worth buying? The answer to this question must also be a part of the ten words the over-all answer must be composed of, no more, no less. So, perhaps this review will be way shorter than I’d originally anticipated. The answers, second one first, are: “Yes, but….Piper’s knowledge endangers all…God Killer/Ask Oprah!”  ; )

How’d that damn emoticon get in there? Does that addition count as an eleventh word, thus screwing up my concise review?

In for a dime, in for a dollar–that’s another trade-marked saying I made up. Might as well avoid any further cliches, and go for broke, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and my ten-word answer into the circular file.

Piper Hecht again takes center stage in Surrender To The Will Of The Night. He has a closely guarded secret:  that he knows how to kill gods. This information is extremely valuable, and both his friends and foes would like to learn how, for their own self-interests. He serves the Empress and the Church, but he is also, to an extent, his own man, with his own agenda. Hecht’s secret is important enough that he has a retinue of bodyguards protecting him, called “lifeguards” in the novel.

That this novel, like the entire Intrumentalities of the Night series, is richly complex and that Piper Hecht has a crapload of friends and enemies are both pros and cons about the book. There are a lot of characters in the Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Indifferent categories to try to keep up with, and story lines a-plenty. As a Captain-General, the leader of multitudes of men that comprise a part of the Church’s fighting force, Hecht is a powerful enough figure, who puts down insurrections, combats religious factions, and whom the half-mad Empress Katrin wants to use to lead the armies of the Grail Empire eastward on a crusade into the Holy Lands against his fellow Pramans.

Then, there are the powers he has inherited, and the powers he has been taught. He is a part of Heris’s and his grandfather Cloven Februaren’s fight against the return of the dark god, Kharoulke the Windwalker. Heris and Cloven Februaren are two of the most appealing and interesting of the novel’s characters, other than Piper (AKA Pie or Pipe). The whole concept of having characters who are numbered and called the Unknowns, and who have the power to turn sideways and disappear and to instantaneously travel from place to place, is pretty cool.

Other plot elements include Bronte Doneto’s ascension to Patriarch; the emergence of secret documents declaring the heir to the End of Connec; and Indala al-Sul Halaladin’s attempt to unify the kaifates of al-Minphet and Qasr al-Zed in order to undertake his own crusade. I suppose that the many Middle Eastern-sounding names in the novel aid in making it more believable; but, on the other hand, they are somewhat hard to keep track of, and their system of religious beliefs is not the same as Muslims on our Earth. Oh, well–who’s to say what beliefs Muslims of some alt-universe might follow?

The world that Hecht and company live in is also pretty cool–in fact, it’s getting downright cold, as it’s entering into an ice age. The winters are getting longer, the oceans shallower, and the storms and raging ocean waves are getting more fierce. Few can survive in the colder climates, and revenants and Instrumentalities of the Night, or the Old & Evil Ones from pre-history, are at large in the land, working to steadily regain their power. The newer gods are being replaced with some of the older ones, who have once again found favor, when people realize that the newer gods have let them down.

Though Surrender To The Will Of The Night is a great read, I wouldn’t call it a “stand-alone” type of novel. Unlike some other books of a series that can be enjoyed by themselves, this one has little recapping of important background information. Names of place and people are mentioned on almost every page who have been in the first two novels of the series, and you either know what/who the author is referring to, or too bad for you. It’s easy to get a feeling of being lost with books like this, if the preceding ones haven’t been read, and this is one of the drawbacks to Surrender To The Will Of The Night.

Surrender To The Will Of The Night is a vast, sweeping epic fantasy novel. One could expect no less from Glen Cook, master of the genre, who deftly blends elements of fantasy and the ability to write very gritty and realistic accounts of military battles into fantasy series like this one. He’s the author of the Black Company, Dread Empire, and Garrett P.I. series, all of which have earned him legions of fans around the world. If you like reading large-scale fantasy epics, like George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire books, or Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, you should check out Glen Cook’s Surrender To The Will Of The Night and the first two books of his Intrumentalities of the Night series, The Tyranny of the Night and Lord of the Silent Kingdom. Like I said, it’s best to have read the first two books before reading Surrender To The Will Of The Night.