Okay, so we have finally, finally, FINALLY, finished the big-ass dragon book.
The morally bad guys die, the morally good guys live, the dragon is slain with a sword created by via tulpa of the friends we lost along the way. We have a brief moment that echoes the ending of The Giver, but with less ambiguity (is The Giver's ending ambiguous? Perhaps so, if you ignore the presence of its three follow-up novels).
Main Girl Gwen nearly dies in much the same way that NOS4A2's Vic actually dies. Which reminds me, really, of what I find so intriguing about this novel: it feels like it exists in perfect conversation with each of Hill's other novels- we have the black-scribble eyes of the dead from Heart-Shaped Box; we have the Surrealist's Glass from the early Horns drafts; King Sorrow and NOS4A2 both heavily explore the idea that reality is malleable, broken through one's will. The Fireman especially is a massive novel about a fungus (called Dragonscale) that literally sets its afflicted ablaze. Man's had dragons on his mind for decades.
I feel like this book was formatted solely with a television adaptation in mind. Looking at its divisions, "The Briars" stand-out for being a fairly compelling story on its own. We have an introduction of premise, we have stakes that rise and characters that rise to meet them, we have a plan set in motion and that plan is enacted, and then we have a climax and resolution. That could have been the entire book and I would have considered it a fine afternoon read. Everything afterwards feels a little too isolated from itself, like a monster-of-the-week show.
I think the ending's fine. I don't think it's nailed quite as well as Heart-Shaped Box or Horns, but it doesn't infuriate me like The Fireman does. Dragon's killed, Gwen and surviving company learn to live and love.
We end with the realization that someone else has managed to bring King Sorrow out of the Long Dark and is using him for destruction, including more recently, setting La Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris aflame. I guess we're blaming dragons for everything. But Gwen and Robin decide, fuck it, people can deal with their own dragons.
I kinda feel like most of the cast is so insufferably written, though, that I very much would have liked for the dragon to win. Well, we can keep Robin, we liked her.
(My desire to make a massive King Sorrow plush though, grows tremendously)