The Whisper that Replaced God has a reputation as one of the better Grimdark novellas out there. I don’t read a ton in this subgenre, but my enjoyment of Michael R. Fletcher’s novels has me exploring it a little more every year. Overall, I found this book very successful and will happily pick up the sequel. Your enjoyment of it is going to depend heavily on whether you enjoy the narrator, so it might be worth reading a page or two before committing to purchasing it.
The Premise:
Mute is the convenient assassin for his younger brother the King. Born with a gift from The God of Silence, Mute can suck all sound out of the room. His childhood of ostracization and violence have left him mentally unstable, passed over for the throne and obsessed with Dorothy, whom he visits in the brothel whenever possible. When he sees his uncle and Dorothy together, he kills the man in a fit of range, and both Mute and Dorothy are captured by foreign troops. He lives a life without meaning, and perhaps this new adventure will fill that void.
Read If Looking For: depraved and traumatized protagonists, fucked up noble families, the silent scream of a dying man
Avoid If Looking For: happy endings, characters with clear motivation and purpose, exemplars of good parenting
What Worked for Me
Mute is a phenomenal character. Sometimes authors get subtle when they try to create an unreliable narrator. This is not the case here. Mute has the intelligence of a Himbo, but none of the charisma. He considers himself a hopeless romantic, but the woman he’s in love with can’t stand the sight of him. His ‘love’ is abusive, and he is set off by the smallest triggers. The man can barely remember people’s names and will happily draw his knife at a moment’s notice. He struggles with basic conversations, not understanding the subtext of political machinations. He dreams of his mother but cannot remember her face. He gets drunk on power but isn’t able to connect that rush with a desire to gain more influence … until someone puts the idea into his head. He is delightfully depraved, and Wolff doesn’t overplay his hand and push too far. Above all of this looms the curse he bears from the God of Silence, which allows him to turn everything off, giving him peace in moments that are overwhelming. Wolff even manages to do some really great character development as Mute shifts throughout the novella, showing change and growth. However, his growth perhaps makes him even more depraved and unmoored from reality.
Characterization in general seems to be a strength of Wolff’s. He had a decently wide cast of characters, all of which were easy to imagine. They all have clear motivations to their behavior despite Mute’s ignorance of how others think and feel. This story is grimdark, yes; people die, and most characters aren’t good people. However, Wolff doesn’t frolic in this darkness, which allowed me to feel like his cast of merry murderers were more than simple vessels to deliver bloodshed and misery. And hoo boy were there a lot of murderers! I can think of two named characters who didn’t kill someone. Even the God of Silence, when he chooses to make appearances in the sky, felt looming and apocalyptic in a really fun way. I’ll be picking up the sequel for sure, and I hope the series that Wolff has in this world gets published at some point.
What Didn’t Work for Me
Grimdark Fantasy benefits from humor to cut through tension. If everything is relentlessly dark all the time, you don’t feel the depths of despair as intensely. Joe Abercrombie is a master of this, which is one of the reasons that he’s so beloved. Unfortunately, Woff picked a rather annoying comedic tool: he breaks the fourth wall. Not in a meta-narrative way, commenting on story structures or irony. Instead, the commentary comes more of the Deadpool variety, beseeching readers not to leave a bad review on the overbearing company ‘Rainforest’ or their associated book company ‘’Pleasant Reads’. I’m leery on meta-commentary in general, though when it works it really works. This was perhaps the worst example of it I’d ever seen. It comes out of nowhere, slaps you in the face, and then vanishes for 40 pages before popping up again. There just wasn’t any cohesion with the rest of the novella, and there were plenty of opportunities for other characters to provide release valves to Mute’s pressure cooker of a brain.
I also found this novella a bit listless at times. The plot and pacing were excellent, but Mute’s melancholy was infectious. He just doesn’t want for much except for Dorothy, combined with a plot setup that leaves him as a fairly reactive character. He just sort of floats along, giving us an engaging internal dialogue while he adapts to the situations Wolff throws at him. In a longer novel, this would have been a big problem for me. As it stands, the story is short enough (80 pages) that my frustration at Mute’s passive role in the story didn’t have time to build up into a more meaningful distaste.
Conclusion: for a grimdark novella with a tortured narrator, The Whisper that Replaced God is a phenomenal choice
Marked for Plot 