Bitter Seeds (Ian Tregillis)

Bitter Seeds
The Milkweed Triptych, Book 1
Ian Tregillis
Tor
Fiction, Fantasy/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: During the brutal Spanish Civil War, British agent Raybould Marsh is sent to collect a defector who claims to have information on a new German weapons program... a man who goes up in flames before his very eyes. Not long after, Marsh sees a dark woman with wires running to her skull, who winks as though she knows him. This is his first contact with the Reichsbehorde, humans brutally manipulated into manifesting unusual abilities such as immolation, telekinesis, invisibility, and more. With his mentor and superior Stephenson, Marsh becomes part of the Milkweed project, a top-secret military group charged with finding out more about these superhumans... and, more specifically, finding a weakness, as the drumbeats of war sound louder. But the only way for Britain to fight back seems to lie with the hidden community of warlocks in their borders, such as Marsh's college friend Will Beauclerk - and the price for such assistance is steep and bloody.
Klaus and his sister Gretel came to the farmhouse laboratory of Doctor von Westarp as starving children, and became among the handful to survive the man's cruel treatments and experiments. Now Klaus can temporarily render himself insubstantial, but it is Gretel and her precognition who becomes central to the growing Third Reich and its war effort. Soon Klaus starts to wonder just how trustworthy she is - and if she has any master other than herself.
As threat blooms into open warfare, Europe is rocked by the collision of two unnatural forces that could spell the death of whole nations, even humanity itself.

REVIEW: Bitter Seeds adds supernatural elements to the horrors of World War II, creating an unrelentingly dark and bleak tale filled with people who do terrible things, sometimes with the flimsiest of rationalizations. That, indeed, is war in a nutshell, but reading about it for pages on end, no breaks, no humor, knowing that any happiness is doomed to create an even greater despair... it wears on a reader, at least this reader. Nobody is particularly sympathetic (save maybe Klaus, in very brief snatches), nor are they supposed to be; war brings out the worst in everyone. The plot veers downright Lovecraftian at points, with "Eidolon" entities outside of space and time and reality as the source of warlock "magic" - in truth, merely a blood-soaked negotiation with inherently hostile things whose only true desire is the extinction of all life forms as abominations against the nature of the universe. The German superhumans, on the other hand, were created by nothing but the ingenuity and raw brutality of humankind, torturing numerous children to death for every success story - and even those successes tend to be broken or mentally unbalanced. Between the two sides, there can be no "good guys," no winners to root for, nobody who won't sell their own souls to the Devil - literal or figurative - in a heartbeat, then sell the souls of anyone who happens to be in sight to sweeten the deal. Tregillis presents some interesting ideas and truly horrific moments, capturing some aspect of the raw evil wrought by war, but overall I found it too depressing and, on a base level, too repelling to consider reading onward in the off chance of a less-than-horrific conclusion.

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