A review by wordswritinstarlight
Mercy by Ian Haramaki

emotional medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

The concepts in here have potential. The execution is just…not good. The more you dig into any single element, the more things fall apart. Some highlights:

  • Straight up, I don’t understand why this was set in a fantasy world with a fantasy religion. Being able to work from an existing knowledge base by just saying “hey, you know the Catholic Church? They have magic now” would have saved a ton of time AND explained a lot of Ilya’s anxieties and issues that the author sort of treats as a given. It is Catholicism, it has confession, it has communion, it has cardinals and seminaries, the author just dressed it up in a sun/moon aesthetic (not that we ever hear anything about the moon half of things, but whatever). Every exorcism movie that’s ever been made just gave the Catholics magic and didn’t get into it. What are we FUCKING doing, the Vatican is going to sue this writer for copyright infringement or something.

  • The show/tell balance in this book is fucking bananas. Every thought or feeling one of the main characters has is laid out in detail, but we never actually see anything about the world or past events. On page 250 we find out vampires exist. We never get into it. Apparently other angels are knocking around. We never get into it. Moon priests exist. We never get into it. We see one or two massive incidents with the townsfolk and Ilya, but otherwise we barely see them interact. It’s like this book was written as a fanfic, by which I mean it acts like the reader should already be familiar with the setting to the extent that the book doesn’t need to get into it.
 
  • Ilya, the main character, probably spends 40% of the book in tears, and honestly the book never gets enough into the lore to explain what consequences he would face if he just up and left this town that literally wants him dead. He seems to believe that the Church would hunt him down and kill him for being gay (see above re: just making it Catholicism) or possibly for abandoning his post? But that argument loses a lot of weight when the book opens with the town saying “achieve this impossible task or die trying”. You’re dead anyway! Might as well leave! It’s the 1920’s, starting a new life is as simple as going two cities over and introducing yourself by a new name!

  • I liked Danya more than Ilya purely because he has somewhat more agency and spends less of the book just…letting things happen. On the other hand, this book has a severe case of “let tops have interiority,” because like…we never really see Danya feel his feelings or process anything that’s happened to him in any meaningful way. Also, the cover of this book and descriptions I heard led me to believe this book was going to have more than one paragraph of monstrous angel, possibly including some monster fucking, and I did not get it. The book doesn’t even really seem to have a firm idea of how powerful Danya is—does he have superhuman strength? Speed? 

  • The book claims to be set in the 1920s, and also uses the phrase “boob window” in the first couple chapters. The dialog in the sex scenes feels wildly dissonant with the dialog and characterization in the rest of the book. They barely have landlines, but apparently the church
    can build a cyborg angel that’s bigger and better than the original goods?
    I could go on, but you get the point.

  • Don’t talk to me about Nikolai, I don’t want to talk about Nikolai or Tatyana or
    the church’s whole bionic angel thing,
    none of it makes sense and none of it is set up and none of it is carried through. 

Honestly, if the first half of the book had ended with Danya and Ilya agreeing to leave town and start a new life somewhere else, roll credits, it would have been a perfectly nice novella. I think the author has some potential in coming up with interesting concepts and setting up relationships that might be compelling to get into, but this book simply doesn’t deliver.
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