The Final Descent

“To hell with all of you...To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.”I was wrong. In my review of [b:The Isle of Blood 9955669 The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist, #3) Rick Yancey https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1389393836s/9955669.jpg 14849405], I said that Yancey better dial back the introspection for the final installment and give us more monsters instead. However, The Final Descent is far from the tightly woven monster hunts of the first two books, and it is deathly brilliant. But maybe Yancey did give me what I wanted. He gave me monsters. Just not in the shapes I was expecting.Will Henry has fallen off the plate. No longer is the young boy with no other wish than to serve Pellinore Warthrop the best he can. In his place is a swaggering, cruel, manipulative, malicious adolescent, the tasty adjectives could go on for days. Up until this point, Will played Watson to Warthrop's Sherlock. Will may have been the narrator, but Warthrop was undoubtedly the main character. He filled up every page with his blustering bravado and intelligence, while the indispensable Will Henry swept up his messes as he walked. Now, in this book Will Henry swells, he grows tall with age and venom, his reach and influence both catastrophic and careless. And in turn, Warthrop shrivels. The genius monstrumologist so swept up in the creatures he studied – most of all, his greatest find, the xenomorph-esque python, T. cerrejonensis – he's blind to the monster that he's created. And no monster terrifies him more.I think maybe that's where some of the disappointment that others have expressed stems from. When I browse around Tumblr and Goodreads I see a lot of love for Warthrop. I'm not really sure why. He's an awful man. And The Final Descent shows him for what he truly is – genius, perhaps, but ultimately greedy and selfish and horribly abusive. Then again, here I am waxing romantic about his teenage serial killer. But at least Will Henry knows what he is, and never pretends to be anything else. The story told here is a disjointed one. It's not a plot that ramps up like a roller coaster and then falls. It's more like a downward spiral. You can see the point you're heading towards, but you can't stop falling. It's entropy, a world of chaos that inevitably leads to decay. Even the institution of monstrumology doesn't escape, but again, you know that it won't from the beginning of the series. I was a little disappointed that Will didn't become much of anything after Warthrop. With all his terrible skills, he could have been a great villain in someone else's story. But I can't blame Yancey for wanting to tie things together more neatly, even if the book he wrote was remarkably untidy. There aren't a whole lot of true horror novels in the YA world, and definitely none at the level of this series, in terms of quality, sophistication or sheer scariness. I am sad that it's over, but this was a true and fitting finale. Not loud or dramatic, but true to the characters and the story that Yancey meant to tell.