YMMV / The Night's Dawn Trilogy

• Catharsis Factor: Seeing the Powel Manani release his Roaring Rampage of Revenge on the ivets can be satisfying, knowing what some of them had done.
  • And equally horrifying at the same time. Roger Chadwick’s perspective manages to be one of the most depressing moments in the entire trilogy for how cruel it is.
• Creepy Awesome: So many of the possessed.
• Cry for the Devil: The possessed. They may do some awful things, but it can be hard to feel happy when some of them are killed, knowing what awaits them on the other side.
  • To say nothing about their victims, as well.
• Complete Monster: Quinn Dexter is a Satanic cult leader who considers himself something of a God and likes nothing more than to inflict as much pain and spread as much suffering as possible. Through his sect he regularly performs human sacrifices to feed off the psychic energies derived from the victims' agonies of being tortured, raped and murdered. After he is possessed by an escaped soul from the Beyond, his will proves so strong that he regains control of his body and sets out to turn as many planets as possible into unlivable Hellworlds. He drops a meteorite on the Nyvan colony to wipe out all life on it, makes it it his mission to destroy every shred of human decency, and will devour the souls of all those he considers too weak to share the new Hell with him.
• Growing the Beard: The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God are regarded more warmly than The Reality Dysfunction, thanks to decreasing the amounts of Everyone Has Lots of Sex.
• It Was His Sled: Many discussions online will openly talk about the returning dead, even though the concept isn’t revealed until very late in The Reality Dysfunction.
• Just Here for Godzilla: For those that already knew about the dead, this can be a major draw.
• Nightmare Fuel: Possession. The Melange. The Beyond. Also, being a ghost. If you don't want to give up your mortal life, you spend an eternity in the Beyond, where 5 minutes feels like an eternity, all the other souls are screaming to get out, and when you do get out, the souls in the Beyond compel you to open up bodies for possession by souls from the Beyond.
  • The Beyond is a nightmarish void inhabited by the souls of the dead. The souls are reduced to powerless energy beings who can vaguely sense but never interact with the real world, and spend all their time digging through each others' memories because they can't do anything else. Incidentally, this same process causes them to perceive the passage of time at a slower rate, prolonging their already-eternal agony, and at least some have been there for tens of thousands of years.
  • Possession. From the first opening of a rift to the Beyond, they spread into living bodies. They can only possess a willing person, which they usually do by torturing the person until they have no choice but to accept or die. The body's original inhabitant is stuck inside, unable to even use their body's senses unless the possessor lets them. Their partial connection to the Beyond grants them the power to warp matter and energy; they can shapeshift, regenerate, shoot white fire from their hands, and reshape surrounding objects and creatures. One possessor, for instance, deals with the long-ago loss of her baby by finding a random wild animal and warping its body into the rough shape of an infant.
• Padding: When the first book alone has more pages than the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it’s fair to suggest some sections of Night's Dawn can be cut/shortened with minimal impact on the overall story.
• Woobie Species: The sayce.

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