If I were to write a TW list it‘d end up way too long so let me just say this: I enjoyed watching Konig struggle and fight with himself (literally) and the ending was kind of fun - the fight scenes were pretty nice. Everything else? Oh man…
there‘s a lot to unpack. Maybe just do yourself a favour and don’t read this book. Especially not if you‘re German and thinking „this is going to be so weird and funny“ because it wasn’t. It was mainly kind of frustrating, especially because a lot of it was just dirty and dark and disgusting for the sake of being disgusting. It didn’t add to the vibe it just felt very forcibly ~dark~

So I leave this review of Beyond Redemption with the following conclusion: Read Between Two Fires instead for absolutely AMAZING medieval dark fantasy / horror with focus on religious themes and surrealism. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Such a dark little fantasy novel: magic as psychopathy, gods with obsessive compulsive disorders, planes of violent existence without end, and characters that do truly appear to be beyond redemption.

Enjoyed the hell out of it.

"The present is a split second, so tiny and trivial as to be immaterial.

Everything else, everything real and substantial, is a coral reef of dead split seconds, forming the islands and continents of our reality.

Every moment is a brick in the wall of the past, building enormous structures that have identity and meaning, cities we live in.

The future is wet shapeless clay, the present is so brief it barely exists, but the past houses and shelters us, gives us a home and a name; and the mortar that binds those bricks, that stops them from sliding apart into a a nettle shrouded ruin, is memory."

Eight Deadly Words: I don't care what happens to these characters.

DNF 78%, right before dying of terminal indifference and Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy

Low fantasy plot in Crapsack World of Black and Gray Morality with Villain Protagonists. Kinda tropey for something touted as super original.

I've seen reviews calling the protags antiheroes but they are strictly not antiheroes, they are villains. This world doesn't contain one single antihero or above.

Paradoxically, this sort of book gives me hope in humanity in several ways:
- You get to read reviews and realize there are lots of decent people out there who are repulsed by these characters.
- There are lots of decent people out there who can recognize this as a shit world and call it.
- There are lots of sane people out there who don't think Black and Gray Morality is a really cool thing to aspire to, like the plethora of darkness porn books written lately would have you believe.
- You get to say 'We live in a Crapsack World with science denialism, bigotry, climate change, homophobia etc but, hey, at least it's better than the world in this book."
- You get to realize authors like to claim they write this sort of crap for realism but, what do you know, it's a lie! It's just violence porn done for the sake of shock*. Our world, shit as it is, is better than this. Hence, this is not realistic.

Gets a star for the cool premise of delusions giving people magic powers.

However.
- Why is every type of mental illness leading to the exact same behavior, i.e. killing people? The kleptomaniac should have a character flaw that rhymes with stealing, much like the arsonist, however what they do is kill people.
- In the real world, mental illness is on a continuum and not all types of mental illness lead to violence. Besides dehumanizing and making sport of people who actually fight mental illness, this treatment is utterly unrealistic because it's factually incorrect.
- The German. It's not correct German so it's yucky to read for German speakers and it's not readable for anyone else. Why oh why German. This is the stupidest worldbuilding decision I've ever seen, it's like it's there to offend the reader and take them out of the story (like well kind of everything else for that matter).
-Cloying, self-indulgent pseudo-wisdom a la Patrick Rothfuss et al:

A sane man is simply a man afraid to unleash his inner demons.

Because mental illness = EVIL.

(Also mental illness = violence.)

This is the sort of line you read in context and it seems to make sense but then you post on the internet and you get huge backlash because everybody else can tell that it doesn't in fact make sense. It's an Ice Cream Koan, i.e. something that sounds profound but is actually nonsensical.

In addition, the writing style is kind of choppy and unvisual, the plot is slow, there's no clear throughline and it's not clear why we're doing all this, so the construction of the novel in and of itself is meh. Besides the point on the powers there is little worldbuilding, the action happening in some generic Medievalopolis trapped in Medieval Stasis
background. With likeable characters (read not Villain Protags), the book would've been maybe a 2.5 star - again code for meh.

*and sometimes for the sake of mentioning wet asses and spitting mucus to their readers

Nespasitelní jsou po dlouhé době něco, co mě bavilo a neměla jsem pocit, že čtu variaci na stokrát omílané a napsané. Fletcher pracuje se zajímavým námětem - s příčetností a šílenstvím, kdy šílenství díky lidské víře ohýbá realitu. Šílení věří svým bludům natolik, že se jejich bludy stávají skutečností. Žena se dokáže přeměnit na vlka, jiná dokáže spálit nepřátelé na popel, další věří, že je nejlepším šermířem světě a díky manipulaci se svým okolím posiluje víru v to, co tvrdí, že tak je a ono tomu skutečně tak je, čím je víra silnější.

Překlad se rozhodl zachovat nějaké původní názvy z němčiny, jiné názvy upravil do české podoby. Díky neobvyklému námětu a používání cizích označení jsem z počátku dost často listovala na konec knihy, kde je rejstřík cizích názvů a popis, o co se vlastně jedná. Vřele doporučuji rejstřík používat, protože obsahuje obsáhlejší informace pro lepší pochopení děje, které jsou v textu jen nastíněny.

České vydání má fakt pěknou obálku, která zobrazuje hlavní "hrdiny". Nutno dodat, že jim vyobrazení celkem lichotí :D Stehlen je neustále popisována jako nezdravě vyhublá, s ošklivými žlutými zuby, zažloutlé oči, matné vlasy. Na obálce vypadá celkem hodně k světu oproti popisu :D
Žádná z postav není vyloženě kladná a celkem jsou to fakt vražední bastardi. Ale vůbec to nevadí. Stejně tak, jak Fletcher smývá hranici mezi příčetností a šílenstvím, tak to samé dělá s definicí dobra a zla v celkovém pohledu na věc.

Trochu mě mrzí, že neumím lépe německy, protože i jména hrdinů trochu vypovídají o jejich charakteru. Rozhodně jsem nečekala, jakým směrem se příběh vyvine (i přesto, že se tím směrem skutečně vyvíjel, pořád jsem čekala, že to určitě dopadne jinak) a celkově jsem spokojená. Tu jednu hvězdu si nechávám do rezervy za to, že z počátku bylo těžké se orientovat kvůli cizím názvům a celkově vklouznout do netradičního prostředí. Ale na druhý díl se fakt těším :)