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Aug. 20th, 2025 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI finished reading The Golden Key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Key_(novel) .
It is still an extremely good book, which one always worries about when revisiting something from significant time ago.
This time of reading I could not like the ending though. Understand, sure, locking him in with only finite light makes a wonderful commentary on what he considers his Light that he thought should never fail. And after all the effort he put in to being a monster the horror ending fits. Plus the simple thing where people are starting to laugh at the idea of magic, so they won't see what is happening when the light goes out.
But.
We do not give people to the Shadow.
It never even once improves the world to be the ones that construct Hell.
Ends the story well, but leaves you thinking hard about the ethics of all of it.
Like the painting girl, the possibility of being a person nobody sees, like the painting that drives the ending, but the other way around. That very brief ending did include people trying to be kind though. Seeing, but not knowing how to help.
Story has a lot of excellent layers in.
I looked up where to buy a hardback of it though because a thousand pages in a paperback is looking a bit less robust than I would like. Sure it might be a decade before I read it again but I'd like it to be in one piece when I do. Shall think about it.
It is still an extremely good book, which one always worries about when revisiting something from significant time ago.
This time of reading I could not like the ending though. Understand, sure, locking him in with only finite light makes a wonderful commentary on what he considers his Light that he thought should never fail. And after all the effort he put in to being a monster the horror ending fits. Plus the simple thing where people are starting to laugh at the idea of magic, so they won't see what is happening when the light goes out.
But.
We do not give people to the Shadow.
It never even once improves the world to be the ones that construct Hell.
Ends the story well, but leaves you thinking hard about the ethics of all of it.
Like the painting girl, the possibility of being a person nobody sees, like the painting that drives the ending, but the other way around. That very brief ending did include people trying to be kind though. Seeing, but not knowing how to help.
Story has a lot of excellent layers in.
I looked up where to buy a hardback of it though because a thousand pages in a paperback is looking a bit less robust than I would like. Sure it might be a decade before I read it again but I'd like it to be in one piece when I do. Shall think about it.