Shelf Control is a weekly feature created by Lisa at Bookshelf Fantasies and celebrates the books waiting to be read on your TBR piles/mountains. Since early January 2023, Shelf Control has moved base to Literary Potpourri. To participate, all you do is pick a book from your TBR pile and write a post about it–what it’s about, when/where you got it, why you want to read it and such.
I have read and re-read the Night Angel trilogy by Brent Weeks as well as his Lighbringer series. I've been a big fan. In his Lightbringer series he did introduce a rather awkward female medical issue that didn't add to the story and even he acknowledged it was a pet thing of his. I think I'm being rather nice by saying it was simply "awkward". I considered dnf'ing the series right then and there. All of that is just to say that Weeks has been known to put stuff into his books that are of interest to him and nobody else.
He began a new Night Angel trilogy about two years ago. This was a sequel series and many fans were looking forward to it, me included. Weeks had a weekly or monthly youtube channel, was very active on social media and kept his website up to date. Soon after the release of Nemesis, he went silent.
Fast-forward two years to now and I began wondering when the next book would come out. He was still dark, so I began looking into other websites to see what might have happened. I stumbled across a Reddit thread that described the book and it appears that Weeks decided to overwrite about Depression and make his main character become truly depressed. It was offputting to all of the commentors and I got the sense that it was as bad as the sex thing in the Lightbringer series.
It has made me wonder if Weeks himself was suffering from depression and couldn't handle the fact that not everybody was enthralled with the subject as himself. It would explain his extended absence as well.
As such, I think I'm going to be passing on Nemesis. I haven't got time for authors who die on me, authors who are too lazy to finish their series OR authors who are human and fail like every other human.
