YMMV / The Night Angel Trilogy

• Complete Monster: The trilogy features a trio of right monsters.
  • Hu Gibbet is widely considered the second best assassin in the land, but informing him he's second best will result in your own drawn out execution. Unlike the cold, business-like Durzo Bint, Gibbet is a sadistic monster who derives pleasure from his work, and while the former makes every effort to avoid collateral damage, Gibbet goes out of his way to butcher everyone in the vicinity on his jobs. He slaughters Logan's entire family and household and gruesomely strings up the corpses for everyone's viewing pleasure. His apprentice, Vi, fairs no better under him and has been the subject of verbal, physical and sexual abuse for her entire tenure as his student.
  • Roth, once known as Rat, is another. The son and Bastard Understudy of God King Garoth Ursuul, Rat was a sexual sadist who had raped children of both genders since he was young. In the present, Roth betrays his home kingdom to his father's soldiers, leading to many deaths, and is fond of killing peasants so he can eat them.
  • God King Garoth Ursuul presides over a legacy of rape, torture, murder and slavery. Garoth attempts to rape or force the submission of any woman he comes across and makes those hes tired of into furniture. Under his reign, widespread war crimes are common, and people are killed or raped at the drop of a hat, all of this For the Evulz.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Rat AKA Roth and Kylar. It's canon that Rat wanted to engage in hatesex with Kylar to show his dominance. Rat also kept hassling Kylar and attempting to get Kylar to become part of his harem. Kylar's first kiss was also with him (albeit all part of a plot to "seduce" Rat and kill him). Many years later, Rat tells Kylar that he never believed Kylar died, and he was constantly thinking of him and how he wished to get revenge on him.
• Fridge Brilliance: From Durzo's point of view, love is indeed a noose- to his loved ones.
• Narm: It's a little hard to take the unstoppable killing-machine super-assassins seriously when they are called "wetboys." Especially since they insist on being called that instead of something more dignified. The idea seems to be that they're so hardcore that they go by a flippant, sarcastic description instead of a more romantic term like "assassin," but the problem with that is, people who were really hardcore wouldn't care what people called them in the first place. The feeling you end up with is that wetboys are the kind of ironic posers who are incredibly concerned with showing how unconcerned they are, which clashes with their presentation as nightmarish hyper-competent sociopaths.
• Nightmare Fuel.
  • The book is about a killer and his master, what do you expect? In-book examples include the sight of Doll Girl, after being brutally battered and abused by Rat horrifying Azoth, a child hardened by violence and similar abuse towards other people in the Warrens, to vomit and panic and Khali sweeping through ranks of men, driving them to deaths induced simply by probing them mentally and attacking their weaknesses. Even Solon, who insists on taking Odysseus-like precautions to ensure his safety, falls victim to it.
  • The descriptions of the Ferali also:
    • Fearsome creatures created from the living bodies and souls of tortured people. Summoned together by Vir magic they are like mythical remote-control tanks that have gnashing mouths over every inch of their body that clings to anything they even briefly touch and then devours it (mostly people). It then assimilates their bones, tissue, and weapons and grows larger/stronger/spinier.
    • They shape-shift into whatever form they feel is best for the current situation (complete with descriptions of snapping and relocation of bones and muscle) and, while starting out fairly small (~10 feet tall depending on form) quickly grow with every new person they eat to become towering giants, even while walking on four legs.
    • Oh, also they instantly heal all physical wounds (shortly before devouring the inflicter of said wounds whole and turning them into an additional bicep) and magic bounces straight off of them. The only known thing that can damage them is the black ka'kari ("The Devourer", which can shear and destroy almost anything it touches), which can cut off an arm/leg/tendril/spikey-club-made-of-warrior-flesh.
    • But then they just right on eat the fallen limb up again and are complete once more.
    • Their only true weakness is getting as far away from them as possible. This is because they're primarily weapons of war due to their appetites (and the high supply of enemy soldiers on which to chow down on). They quickly starve and devour themselves to death if they cannot find something else to eat every few minutes.
    • They're made worse by the fact that it appears the people used in the creation of the Ferali have their souls tied to the creature until it dies (or at least the first person whom the Vir magic ceremony is performed upon to turn them into a Ferali). So while the Ferali appears as a mindless monster under the mild control of the Vir and an evil spirit summoned during the ceremony, the tortured person/people sacrificed to create the creature are still very much sentient and feel all it's pain and hunger, but are often too mad from the torture the transformation has had on their body to assert any form of control.
  • When Kylar and Vi find out what the Godking kept in his bedroom...
  • Some of the things Dorian does as Godking Wanhope. Raising krul, raping young girls, murdering unborn children...
• One-Scene Wonder: Viridiana in Book 1 only. She is mentioned a couple times and does briefly appear at the Jadwin's party. But she only gets one real scene which is probably the funniest in the book.
• Squick: The trilogy features two God-Kings and approximately 130 aspirants to that title. Every one of them runs on this.
  • Garoth's internal monologue sounds like he's ready to launch into a Villain Song any moment. Except that Garoth isn't a Disney villain; he rapes, tortures, and massacres with abandon. His bedchamber is decorated with the taxidermied corpses of women he's raped and murdered, worked into furniture in positions that hide the worst wounds.
  • Wanhope tries reform Khalador, but once the vir gets into him, Khalador reshapes him instead. He seems to be aware that he's Slowly Slipping Into Evil, sending his wife away before he commits a new atrocity like raping a 13-year-old girl in front of her father. By the end, he's mostly just embarrassed when she sees him doing something depraved in public.
  • Roth seems to be a genuine sociopath. He performs an experiment where he regularly sets out free food for the starving peasants of the Warrens, then fires a crossbow in a specific pattern to see if any of them figures them out. He's also a Serial Rapist.
  • The other Ethlings vary from vicious killers all the way up to a Dark Messiah. Keep in mind that some of them are as young as eight and already have kills to their name.

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