I had no idea this book existed before seeing it on a store shelf (in Australia, where Clipstone gets special treatment for being a local), so I guess the Publishing Powers That Be have decided that the Lakesedge books didn't do well enough for her to deserve further marketing. Them's the breaks.

In the pursuit of a 'signature style' and aesthetic, Clipstone has doubled-down on her worst excesses as a writer - this is even more 'just vibes, no plot' than her previous books, and she can't go for a single page without some vague but atmospheric metaphor about the moon or blood or honey or sacred wine. All the women in the cast are lesbian or bisexual, and the imagery is so overwhelmingly traditionally feminine (sometimes to the point of unbelievability - the clan of monster-fighting women all have long hair and wear long, pale linen dresses, which never get in the way but are very convenient for making bandages) that poor young Ravel feels a bit unnecessary as a love interest.

Certain concepts from Lakesedge are repeated in this, particularly the love interest being a very nice sweet boy who is 'cursed' or 'infected' by the dark power of an evil god, but so much emphasis is given to his victimhood and the tragedy of his lost innocence that he never feels remotely 'dangerous' to the heroine. I don't really mind this, I think sweet harmless monster boys are cute and fun, but the categorisation of this book as 'horror' and 'dark fantasy' is ridiculous.

The setting is claustrophobically tiny (with no indication whatsoever of how this remote outpost functions in terms of its government, economy, food supply, religion etc, let alone the rest of the world) and unfortunately it feels a bit derivative, particularly of Origins-era Dragon Age (which itself owed a great deal to the first ASoIaF novel), but there's a bit of Shadow and Bone in there as well. There is nothing new under the sun, and most (all?) of my favourite stories take a lot of inspiration from earlier works, but in this case Clipstone hasn't added anything particularly unique or interesting, twisted, or expanded on any elements of the source texts, so it's all just unmemorable and (ironically) rather bloodless.