Pestilence

3.25/5. This was such an odd book to read! It kinda blends this epic, global-scale destructive backstory of Biblical proportions to a romance that kinda reads rather cliche and tropey. I went into this knowing it was a romance novel so I don't know what I was expecting, perhaps a bit more epic-ness. I actually quite enjoyed the premise of the Four Horsemen awakening and discovering perhaps their affinity for mortal women, and also really liked some of the discussions here about religion and God, so I'd probably read more into the series. I just didn't wasn't a big fan of the romance in this one.

The protagonist Sara Burns treads on a pretty fine line between mercy and violence. On one hand, she is portrayed as being compassionate to just about every human being she comes across, even those that think the worst of her and who try to harm her. But on the other hand, she keeps talking about how, while she didn't enjoy her gruesome take-down of Pestilence at the beginning, she'd do the same thing over and over again if it meant saving the rest of humanity. Idk, it kinda doesn't add up to me.

The Stockholm Syndrome trope plays a huge role in this story, given that Sara gets taken captive by Pestilence after her failed assassination attempt. I don't mind this trope but I also think it's pretty difficult to execute convincingly, and I don't know if this book manages to do that. Pestilence presumably keeps Sara alive to “make her suffer”, and yes he does “torture” her a bit by making her run and shooting her with an arrow and all that, but ultimately there wasn't really a believable reason why he'd essentially just keep her there with him all the time. To watch him take down other people? How would he know that that would make her suffer? What if Sara had been incredibly self-centered and just congratulated herself all the time that it was someone else dying and not her? For all of Pestilence's powers, I don't think mind-reading is one of them so I don't know how he'd know that watching others die would be painful for her. We experience the whole story through Sara's first-person perspective and I'm not sure if I'm a fan of her voice either. She's supposedly an adult but a lot of the slang she uses makes her sound like a teen, or someone trying to be one, which is a little weird.

The best part of this book for me was when they came across an elderly couple, Rob and Ruth. I was really hoping that Rob and Ruth would somehow show Pestilence that humanity might be worth redeeming after all, and that he'd spare them from the plague. Unfortunately, that didn't come to pass. I teared up when they eventually died of the plague! And that made me even more bewildered that, shortly after burying them both and being presumably melancholic and resentful about what was going on with the world, Sara and Pestilence could still take a bath together in Rob and Ruth's bathroom and get horny. Whut?! Way to ruin the only moment in this book with emotional depth.

More spoilery thoughts about the last quarter of the book: Sara had plenty of valid reasons not to marry Pestilence the first time he asked, but unfortunately I don't think the narrative was convincing about it. She could've said she was reconciling herself with the frankly terrifying idea of uniting herself with an immortal non-human entity, or someone who had kept her captive for the past however long, or even just that the idea of marriage after just one night of sex needed some getting used to, but no... Sara just basically falls back into the “it's not love, it's lust!” thing which is the flimsiest excuse ever and made her sound like she was just playing hard to get. I also thought it was a bit creepy that Pestilence would essentially stalk Sara to “care for her” even after she told him pretty clearly that she wanted to leave him and we're supposed to find this romantic. We also never find out exactly how and why Pestilence decided to... just stop being Pestilence? He said he fulfills his purpose but what's the end goal that he's achieved here? Does he get any penalties for no longer being a Horseman? What're all the logistics involved here??You know, I guess I shouldn't expect that level of world-building in a romance novel but I can't help it. The premise is of epic proportions and I think the set-up was not bad, which is why I'm just frustrated that we don't have any pay-off for that.

I've heard that this series improves as it goes on so I'd probably check out more of these and hope I like the subsequent ones better!