YMMV / The City of Never

• Catharsis Factor: The death of Lucia. After all the Consultant has done, seeing it lose control and put itself at risk out of sadistic rage only to be outmaneuvered and defeated by two teenage girls, left to die in hideous agony and fear? Is incredibly satisfying.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Michael references the Lovecraftian deities towards the end when discussing his newfound idealism even in a hopeless cosmos, also mentioning Nyarlathotep who "embodies loyalty to the Outer Gods" with 'perhaps' a bit of a sadistic drive. Due to the Never Mythos taking place in the same universe as The Kindness of Devils, the Lovecraftian deities all exist, especially Nyarlathotep. Who is not loyal to the Outer Gods anymore and there is no 'perhaps' about the rest.
• Iron Woobie: Eliza has lived centuries, isolated from most people, without even the comforts of friendship, trying to help as many Seers as she can. Many, many of them have been killed by the Consultant. Despite all the pain she's been through, Eliza steadfastly refuses to give in to despair.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Lucia is this on steroids. She's a sadistic, depraved beast who was cast out of her former position as a Daydreamer goddess because of that sadism, and has taken to blaming everyone but herself for it. Lucia serves Draynak with her own agenda and takes horrific joy in devising the most monstrous tortures she can think of, especially with horrific leeches that painfully suck the life from their victims. Lucia cannot be bargained with, swayed or reasoned with. If she wants you dead (and she will), she will do everything she can to make your demise as agonizing as she can think of. The way she torments Alessa after slaughtering her entire family, even inflicting every violation upon Alessa's sister imaginable, really stands out.
  • The City itself is just full of some pretty horrific beasties that can swoop in and devour everything you ever loved. And you'll never see them coming. Especially the Mollusc- a throbbing pile of flesh covered in sickening growths.
  • The Emperor of Ashen Rain is an Eldritch Abomination that is just pure malevolence. An expy of Lovecraft's Azathoth, but replace sheer mindlessness with utter spite and evil. The emperor traverses the cosmos, devouring and assimilating everything it finds. Want a way to stop it? You don't have one. Simply pray it never, ever notices you.
  • The fates Lucia inflicts on innocent people to make them potential hosts for Draynak...it involves rape on a spiritual level and utter violations of their physical beings, torturing them endlessly to make them a suitable hosts. What makes it even worse? Lucia is personally sabotaging it, doing this horrible torture for fun so she can double cross Draynak for the purpose of murdering all that lives for fun herself.
  • Faye turns out to be utterly terrifying...there's something frightening about a man who's a chaos-obsessed anarchist, hellbent on bringing about destruction and evil just for the sheer fun of it, and he'll do it all with a manic smile on his face. With all this in mind, any humor in Faye just compounds how insane and frightening he truly is.
• Tearjerker
  • The energetic Alessa collapsing into Broken Tears when her father dies
  • Eddie's entire story. A normal guy who saw everything he loved destroyed and murdered, with an innocent girl he befriended tortured to death by Lucia. And what does he get? Violently murdered by Lucia who treats it a bit like smacking a particularly insignificant mosquito.
  • Michael's rather painful backstory, thanks to his abusive father and the resulting traumas that have ended in him being an egotistical nihilist.
  • A broken Daniel begging Draynak for death. And Draynak obliging. After all he's suffered at that point, with the unbelievable trauma of losing his wife, and two of his kids, who can blame him?
  • The near death of the town of Onolo with so many lives wiped out so awfully.
  • Even Draynak evokes some pity. He's not malicious or overly cruel. He's just been horribly imprisoned and just wants to go home. It just so happens he's so far above normal beings that their concerns can barely even register to him, and he's genuinely sorry he ever trusted Lucia to help him by the end.
  • Eliza's life is a tearjerker all in itself. Eliza is a remarkably kind person subjected to horrendous loneliness who has devoted herself to saving Seers. Time and time again, Eliza has watched the Consultant arrived to rend apart everyone in the near vicinity, exterminating entire towns and massacring the people she wanted to protect. Elzia has been left with nothing, utterly isolated from the world at large and with nothing but the hope she can make a difference before the Consultant strikes first.
  • The deaths of Crystal and Mark Hopper. Crystal is violated body and soul by leeches, tortured in agony to become a vessel for Draynak. Mark is twisted and mutilated to become a horrific monstrosity, and with the mind of a baby, he can't understand what's happening to him. It's to the point his father has to euthanize him. And unlike Crystal, there's no pretext at a higher purpose. The Consultant did it entirely for fun.
• The Woobie: Oh, let's count the ways...
  • Katrina Summerwood is a timid teenager flung into a horrific situation. She's a gentle, shy little girl with a damaged leg and a speech impediment who finds herself at the heart of a horrific attack by eldritch nightmares. Katrina ends up traumatized, threatened and nearly sees her beloved best friend murdered by eldritch nightmares, and ends up separated from her mother, maybe forever.
  • The entire Hopper family. Let's start with Daniel. A kind, ordinary man who lost his wife and is raising three children himself. Over the course of the story, his home is torn apart, he's driven insane and attacks his eldest daughter, he learns his youngest daughter has been killed horrifically, has to euthanize his infant son and is so broken he begs an eldritch abomination for death at the end, thinking he's a failure as a father to his last daughter Alessa
  • Alessa is a spunky, energetic girl who has her mother murdered half a year ago, loses her family over the course of the novel and is forced to live with her father's despairing suicide by the end, despite her still being alive. Oh, and a sadistic fallen goddess singles her out for special torture treatment. At the end? Alessa has lost everything she ever had, except for Katrina, with nothing but an uncertain future ahead.
  • Crystal Hopper is a sickly, frail girl who relies entirely on her elder sister and father for support. In too short space a time, her mother is murdered by a serial killer, and her town is attacked. The Consultant then takes her to make her Draynak's host which involves raping her with leeches, and this being Lucia, she glories in Crystal's agony, ending in her painful death and becoming a host for the Mangled Seraph Draynak.