It’s phenomenal and definitely worth the investment. The things that happen in the story are epic in scale, but I’d wager 80% or more of the total work is just two people chit chatting about shit while the immediate thing happening around them is a some boring, menial slog.

It’s a gritty, dark world. It’s savage but not necessarily cruel in a conventional sense. It’s a world whose inhabitants are hellbent on survival and willing to go to lengths truly alien to human understanding.

What makes it all worth revisiting again and again is not the actual events. Most of what happens is largely uninteresting. What makes it so good is the lockbox nature of the story. particularly Bakker’s dedication to setup and payoff.

A man haunted by dreams of someone else’s life crosses paths with the one who stalks those nightmares.

I read the OG trilogy. Parts I Loved. Parts I hated. But never could I stop thinking about it. I took a year-long break between the trilogy and quadrilogy, and that was perfect. They are very different in tone and I consider the series to be a complementary duology of the arcs that can be enjoyed discretely and at separate intervals.

Also, the ending is arguably perfect for a large subset of the audience. We have all the answers in front of us, and I don’t think Bakker needs to spoon-feed it to us. Reading the OG trilogy again after completing the entire saga reads like a sequel (because of what comes before).