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