Matt Dinniman
An A Perceptual Shift Book Review
There’s something remarkable about a book that makes you care this much about characters its own world treats as disposable.
At the risk of repeating myself, Matt Dinniman continues to take a patently absurd premise and make it emotionally convincing.
The circumstances are ridiculous.
The characters are often even more ridiculous.
And yet, four books into this series, my investment in Carl, Donut, and the people around them keeps deepening.
I care what happens to them. I care about the choices they make. And I find myself thinking about those choices after I’ve put the book down.
The Gate of the Feral Gods adds another layer to that investment through its non-player characters.
The NPCs.
A designation that almost tells you how much attention you’re supposed to give them.
They populate the world. They serve a purpose. They help or obstruct the people whose stories we’re actually following.
But this book makes it increasingly difficult to leave them in the background.
They contribute some of the emotional weight that stayed with me most.
Being assigned a supporting role doesn’t make a character’s existence insignificant.
There’s an ongoing tension here between how little individual lives appear to matter within the larger system and how necessary those same lives become to everything happening inside it.
Groups of people can be treated as expendable while remaining essential to someone else’s plans.
Their involvement matters.
Their suffering may receive considerably less attention.
And that’s where I started thinking about our own world.
We all move through lives populated by people whose stories we barely know.
The person answering the phone.
The coworker we only speak to when we need something.
The stranger whose brief involvement changes the course of our day.
From our perspective, they can seem like background characters. We encounter them through whatever role they occupy in our immediate experience, then move on.
But they have lives that continue after the interaction ends.
Responsibilities we don’t see.
Relationships we know nothing about.
Problems that have nothing to do with us.
Someone can be peripheral to our story and still be at the center of their own.
That’s part of what I appreciated about this book.
It made me think about how much consideration we give people when their needs complicate our plans. How much room we make for them in our decisions. Whether we recognize their humanity only when it becomes useful or convenient.
Those questions carry surprising weight inside a series this absurd.
The plotting deserves credit, too.
There’s an impressive amount of intricacy beneath everything happening here. Earlier events continue to matter. Separate threads connect. The world expands while retaining a sense that its history has consequences.
Four books in, I’m increasingly impressed by how much Dinniman is keeping in motion and how deliberately those pieces come together.
The humor and spectacle are easy to talk about.
The construction deserves just as much attention.
And the emotional investment may be what I appreciate most.
For all the ridiculous circumstances, the feelings these books evoke are real. So is the attachment I’ve developed to the people moving through them.
Even the ones I might initially have overlooked.
The Gate of the Feral Gods is intricate, absurd, and unexpectedly affecting.
Highly recommended.
And yes.
I can’t wait to read Book Five.
