Dream Dark by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is pretty much the textbook definition of “meh.” The primary purpose of this short story “of Gatlin’s first, and only, Linkubus” is to provide a bridge between Beautiful Darkness and Beautiful Chaos, which is does well enough.
But the thing is, there’s already a land-bridge between the two books — Chapter 1 of Beautiful Chaos. Dream Dark is totally unnecessary.
Add to that the fact that practically nothing happens. Nothing we need to know, anyhow. We get more details on the aftermath of Link being bitten by the half-Incubus, and how he deals with it early on — but we don’t learn anything we need to know. And it’s not even that particularly entertaining.
If this story’d been told from Link’s POV rather than Ethan’s, maybe that could’ve been enough to justify this. But as it is…meh.
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P.S. For the record, I’d have felt this way about the story even if I hadn’t bought the e-copy and then discovered that it was printed in the back of my paperback copy of Beautiful Chaos. Really.