Title: Catharsis

Author: Mabataki

Genre: Fantasy

Quick Summary: Honorable Hunter, pursue the echoes of blood, and I will channel them into your strength. You will hunt beasts... and I will be here for you, to embolden your sickly spirit.

Thoughts:

I love Maba's work so, so fucking much. Catharsis is no exception. 

Maba does almost everything perfectly. The descriptions, the attention to the setting, the characters... Almost everything is awe-striking and several times brought the hairs on my arms alight. I was so engrossed in this, the only thing that really stopped me was the horrendous migraines I get when I read on my phone too much. I think, without the migraines, I would've finished this all in a day and then felt a deep, pulsing longing for something more...

I love Marceline as a character. She's got an interesting profession that I've rarely seen in books before this one. She's got a consistent characterization and voice. I also adore the awkward romantic "tango" she and Ariadne engage in throughout the course of the book. They like each other, and that's pretty obvious, but Maba doesn't let their romance consume the entire book though they do enunciate that these are two women with clear [and apprehensive] interest in each other. And then the last chapter with them... You can't see it but I'm clutching my chest and sighing wistfully.

And also Marceline's tumultuous relationship with her mother. At least, tumultuous because of events in the book. There was a lot of sadness to be felt for them both.

In terms of the world... it's darkly beautiful. Maba nails the Gothic tone down to a T and I must applaud them because it's been a while since I read something that so perfectly captured this sort of setting. This world is dark and brooding and there's so much to it... It was done really well. Also, there are small "easter eggs" throughout about another one of Maba's works, Maelstrom, which, as a reader of Maelstrom, I greatly appreciated. 

And not just the world, but the plot itself. The last couple of chapters, especially, were heart-wrenching.

Maba also writes brilliant fight scenes, highlighted especially in the beginning and the end of the book. The last fight was a nail-biter, I'll say that much.

I will also say that there are a couple of things that could do with fixing. 

In earlier chapters, when Mercy/Marceline goes to the Vale... it's not exactly clear how she returns to the real world. She gets there, sees something spooky, chapter ends... and she's back in the real world and seriously hurt. This happened twice. The first time I read this through, I thought I had just missed something, but I reread a couple of times and it happened again and it's... really jarring. Those are really the only two instances that yanked me out of the book. If this "jolt" is intentional, it needs to be better worked in. I'm not entirely sure how, but it needs to be. Otherwise, laying out what happens between the Vale and Mercy's return better would greatly benefit Maba and the story.

The other thing I will complain about is that... this perhaps parallels Bloodborne too much? I caught on rather quickly, because I am a fan of the game [and now this book], to parallels between Yharnam and the world Maba gives us... but there's a lot of similarities that kept stacking up and I think this book could do with an extra degree of separation between Bloodborne and Catharsis. I want to read Catharsis, not a heavily-edited Bloodborne, know what I mean?