Happy Tuesday, bibliophiles!
I read a handful of Rin Chupeco’s books in high school. I liked them for the most part, but I think I just lost interest eventually. Fast forward a few years, and I found out that they’d written another series for adults, and the premise hooked me. However, it seems like Chupeco’s writing doesn’t hold up now that I’m older. Silver Under Nightfall was just ridiculous in all the wrong ways.
Enjoy this week’s review!
Silver Under Nightfall (Silver Under Nightfall, #1) – Rin Chupeco
Remington Prendergast is a Reaper—a highly-trained bounty hunter who specializes in the most dangerous quarry: vampires. Even with his talents, the rumors surrounding his possibly vampire heritage have alienated him from his colleagues. His father, the Duke of Valenbonne, has been desperate to make his powers so great that they overshadow the rumors, but he’s failed. But when strange, deadly vampires, the likes of which the kingdom has never seen, begin to spread across the kingdom, Remy’s only choice is to turn to a pair of enigmatic vampires to solve the case—and risk being drawn into their seductive web.
TW/CW: blood, gore, sexual content, loss of loved ones, pedophilia, vomit, emotional abuse
I haven’t read a Rin Chupeco book since I was about 17. I really should’ve kept it that way. Silver Under Nightfall sounded fun and gothic enough from the premise, but this novel was bordered on being a disaster. It genuinely boggles my mind that this book has such a positive average rating on both Goodreads and The Storygraph. I endured 500 pages of this (probably should’ve DNF’d it), but now I have the evidence to hate from an educated stance…
Before I get into all my gripes, I’ll give Chupeco credit for the handful of things that they did well. Though it didn’t go in the direction I would’ve liked it to go, I loved the vampire murder mystery/thriller plot, and the genetically engineered monsters and subsequent fights were quite fun. There were moments where they nailed the gothic atmosphere, and there were a handful of solid quotes here and there. But unfortunately, these elements, despite being key to the premise, weren’t delivered on nearly enough, which is surprising, since Silver Under Nightfall is over 500 pages long. Unfortunately, most of that 500 pages is a poorly-written mess.
The last book of Chupeco’s that I read was The Ever Cruel Kingdom, which I honestly forgot about completely, other than the vague sensation of it being entertaining, but ultimately finishing it just to finish it. Not a great endorsement, I know. But even at that age, I had the sense that it felt overwritten, that there were random metaphors tripping over themselves. Unfortunately, that quality increased tenfold in Silver Under Nightfall. To Chupeco’s credit, their writing has some fun moments of being campy and gothic. In the end, they were just trying way too hard to be gothic. This resulted in so many sentences with nonsensical structure and metaphors that went on far longer than they humanly should have. At the worst points, the writing was so deliberately obtuse that I could barely get any sense of the setting or world beyond it. (Worldbuilding? Who is she?) It was just dense and unwieldy, and did very little to enhance the atmosphere.
Speaking of trying too hard, Chupeco’s dialogue was the worst victim of the above prose problem. It was terrible. All of the characters oscillated between talking like 15-year-old edgelords and fictional Victorian nobles, even though they’re all meant to be adults. The Victorian noble bit was painfully overwritten, carrying over the same problem of Chupeco’s floundering attempt at making Silver Under Nightfall gothic; again, a lot of the dialogue was stuffy at best, grammatically nonsensical at worst. On the other end of the spectrum, you have characters like Remy, who Chupeco spends 500 pages desperately trying to convince you that he’s funny.
Below is an actual quote from the book:
“…I’ve never infected anyone, if you don’t count my dry wit—”
Oh my God, free me from this prison. 90% of the humor in Silver Under Nightfall is 2017 Tumblr humor partially filtered through quasi-historical nobleman speak; like the specially-engineered vampire-creatures in the novel, it’s an unholy abomination that shouldn’t exist. And Chupeco really, really, really wants you to think that it’s funny, so much so that it supersedes most other elements that are important in a novel, like…oh, worldbuilding? Character development? No, apparently what matters most is making sure that the reader knows, beyond all reasonable doubt, that your character has a dry sense of humor. And he doesn’t. He, like most of this book, is painfully unfunny.
This brings me to the characters. I think the fundamental problem was that Chupeco seemed hellbent on making them as likable as possible, which in the novel, translated to them having virtually no flaws. We’re beaten over the head with the prospect that Remy is a poor widdle baby and nobody likes him because people think his mommy was a vampire but he’s also SO TALENTED and SPECIAL and EDGY and COOL. Textually, we get very little evidence to support this, other than his overlong monologues and the treatment he gets from his father. No character development, no revelations that aren’t external—stuff just happens to him, and Chupeco just paints him like this sad, wet puppy that got left out in the rain. Show me more interactions between him and the other Reapers! Give me some actual internal reflection and genuine grappling with his identity at the very least, dammit! As for the others, there’s not much to say about them…which is to say that most of them had one character trait each. Malekh and Xioadan were sexy, the Duke was a Bad, Bad Guy, and there were…a few others? I guess? Most of them got taken care of in the bloodbath towards the end. Silver Under Nightfall was just a classic case of a main character that was unrealistically overpowered and emo, and then all of the others were just window dressing (or threesome fodder).
However, I think the fundamental problem with the characters in Silver Under Nightfall was that Chupeco refused to give them any nuance. Remy, for how much of an edgelord he was purported to be, was purely good. Malekh and Xioadan were the same way—they were completely pure, despite the “oooh the evil vampires are seducing me ooooh 😏🫦” plot. There was a revelation at the end that could’ve complicated the relationship between Malekh and Remy in a super interesting way, but Chupeco immediately shuts it down in favor of Malekh being completely pure. Of course, all of the bad guys are completely bad. I wouldn’t even let this kind of black and white writing slide in a YA novel. It was such a lazy, uninteresting way to write these characters, especially when the novel touts itself as having all of these morally gray characters. None of the specialest, most precious little guys can have any sort of nuance or depth, I guess.
All in all, a bloated mess of a vampire novel with unwieldy writing and even worse character work. I feel like I’ve been drained…by Colin Robinson, maybe. 2 stars.
Silver Under Nightfall is the first in the Silver Under Nightfall duology, which concluded with Court of Wanderers. Chupeco is also the author of the Bone Witch series (The Bone Witch, The Heart Forger, and The Shadowglass), the Never Tilting World series (The Never Tilting World and The Ever Cruel Kingdom), the A Hundred Names for Magic trilogy (An Unreliable Magic, Wicked As You Wish, and The World’s End), The Sacrifice, and several other novels for teens and adults.
Today’s song:
That’s it for this week’s Book Review Tuesday! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!
The Bookish Mutant 