The Final Descent by Rick Yancey
The Monstrumologist # 4
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Number of pages: 320
My copy: Kindle edition
Will Henry and Dr. Warthrop have encountered many horrors together—but can Will endure a monstrumological terror without his mentor?
Will Henry has been through more that seems possible for a boy of fourteen. He’s been on the brink of death on more than one occasion, he has gazed into hell—and hell has stared back at him, and known his face. But through it all, Dr. Warthrop has been at his side.
When Dr. Warthrop fears that Will’s loyalties may be shifting, he turns on Will with a fury, determined to reclaim his young apprentice’s devotion. And so Will must face one of the most horrific creatures of his monstrumology career—and he must face it alone.
Over the course of one day, Will’s life—and Pellinor Warthrop’s destiny—will lie in balance. In the terrifying depths of the Monstrumarium, they will face a monster more terrible than any they could have imagined—and their fates will be decided.
* * *
I reserved reading the last book in the Monstrumologist series for Halloween, and I promised myself not to read it the way I read the third book — meaning I won’t read it for ages. I was a little bit hesitant to dive into it, actually, because my memory of the third book told me that things have gone down the darker path for Will Henry and Pellinore Warthrop. Not that it hasn’t been dark from the start, but really, I was kind of wary about how things will end, and what we will know of Will Henry and what exactly happened to Pellinore Warthrop.
In The Final Descent, we meet an older Will Henry than the one in the previous books — one just a little older than the Will Henry in The Isle of Blood, and one way older, who returns to Warthrop after a long time of being apart. There’s another monster, one that hatches from an egg and becomes a snake that just grows bigger and bigger as it devours its prey inside out. There’s still the society, Lily Bates and the Monstrumarium and the Abraham Von Helrung, and of course, lots of gore and darkness, just as the first three books had.
The Final Descent is written in a different way, flashing forward and back, that I’m not entirely sure which was the more dominant time in the story. It gets a little confusing at first, but the voices of the younger and older Will Henry were both distinct, and I can’t help but wonder what exactly happened in between that made the older Will Henry like that. It was a far cry from the Will Henry in the first two books, which made me just a little uncomfortable because this wasn’t the Will Henry I’ve known to love. I guess this is an effect of puberty, as well as what happened in the third book, but it didn’t exactly sit well with me, so much that I almost had a hard time reading through the book to get to the end.
The book is all parts ambiguous and it circles around, until it gets to the end and I sort of understand what happened. Except that I’m still not entirely sure, because it really felt like the Will Henry I read in this book was just different. That doesn’t mean I feel a lot satisfied, because I really and truly missed how it was in the earlier books. Oh, the writing was beautiful, I have to give it that. But by the time I got to the end, I was just happy I’m done reading that I can put it behind me. I’m not really wishing for a happy ending, but something a little less…philosophical or existential, I guess?
But then I realize that maybe I started falling a little out of love with the series by the time I started slowing down in reading the third book. Perhaps I was just in this for the adventure, and to get my own dose of gore. I still think that The Monstrumologist series is one of the best out there, but unfortunately, this book is the one I liked the least.
Number of dog-eared page(s): 16
Favorite dog-eared quote(s):
I am the infinite nothing out of which everything flows.
We are vain and arrogant, evolution’s highest achievement and most dismal failure, prisoners of our self-awareness and the illusion that we stand in the center, that there is us and then there is everything else but us.
For true beauty – beauty, as it were, with a capital B – is terrifying; it puts us in our place; it reflects back to us our own ugliness. It is the prize beyond price.
You cannot choose not to fall in love, but you can choose for the sake of love to let love go. Let it go.
Rating: [rating=3]
Reviews of other The Monstrumologist Books:
#1 The Monstrumologist
#2 The Curse of the Wendigo
#3 The Isle of Blood
Other reviews:
Opinions of a Wolf