Genres: Adult, Fantasy
Representation: Asexual MC, trans POV character, major bisexual character
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
ISBN: 9798989347414
Goodreads
In a holy city where sins and blessings can be revealed through consecrated touch, Csilla - born without a soul - is worthless to the Church that raised her. But when a series of murders corrodes the magic that keeps the city safe, the Church elders see a use for her flaw: she can assassinate their prime suspect, a heretic with divine heritage, without the stain of sin.
The heretic, however, makes a counter-offer: clear his name and catch the real killer, without becoming a target herself, and he'll use his power to get her a soul. When their investigation catches the attention of Ilan, a ruthless Church Inquisitor demoted for his failure to solve the case, he reluctantly offers his help in order to earn back his position. He’ll bring in the murderer— or failing that, Csilla and the heretic. But as the death toll rises and their hunt pits them against the Faith, Csilla will find that salvation comes at the cost of everything she believes in.
Highlights
~what if sin could be seen?
~brace yourself for some holy torture
~giving souls to the soulless is Very Complicated (who woulda thought)
~never trust the rich
~if the statue stops weeping, it’s time to panic
The Faithful Dark was originally pitched to me as ‘Queer gothic fantasy with an ace healer, transmasc priest, and chaotic bisexual angel hunting a serial killer in fantasy Vatican’, and while that’s not perfectly accurate – Mihály is what we might call a nephil, a mortal descendant of angels, not an actual angel himself – it gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect.
The worldbuilding looks simple, but Baumer follows through on the implications and ramifications of every detail in a majorly satisfying way. This is a setting where the existence of souls is an objective fact, not a belief, and where holy relics can display exactly how much sin – aka shadow – a person is carrying around. Consecrated objects actually glow with the blessings said over them. Asten takes the place of God, and is referred to as They, which I like very much; we have a woman messiah-type figure called Arany, whose holy statue weeps gold even in the current day. Silgard, the city which is the main setting of the book, is the centre of the faith, literally built and blessed by the celestial.
There had been a time when the streets glowed with the divinity of those who walked on them, every footstep a benediction. Saints and angels had made this city on a river the locus of the faith, nestled safely in the center of the territories of the Immaculate Union, and built walls of stone inlaid with prayers to last until the material world fell to dust.
Dropped into the middle of this is Csilla, a young woman with no soul at all, who has been raised by the Church (which tonally is very reminiscent of Medieval-esque Catholicism) and works tending the sick and elderly.
Csilla is a sweetheart; some readers might even find her too saintly (although I didn’t). The one thing about her that niggles at me is how no one seems very interested in how she can exist without having a soul; shouldn’t she be a major theological/spiritual question mark for the Church? Why has no one tried running any experiments (with various relics) or written some huge thesis reconciling her existence with that of God? No one is at all curious or concerned??? Even Mihály, the heretic from the blurb who offers to try and give Csilla a soul of her own, doesn’t seem to question how or why Csilla doesn’t already have one. I found this extremely weird.
Anyone can see you’re raw, lighting yourself on fire to keep strangers warm.”
The hunt for the serial killer spiralled out into a much bigger plotline that was INFINITELY more interesting than a simple find-the-serial-killer story; the ‘real’ plot was concerned with one of the biggest theological issues in this world, and I was surprised that I actually kind of understood where the bad guys were coming from (although I disagree with their ultimate conclusion). It was very clever and sneaky and all tied up with sin and angels and redeeming humanity, and I loved it.
He was no demon, but angels had once been equally terrifying in their justice–perhaps all the more so because the punishments they dealt were deserved.
(I do wish we’d gotten a little more information on the holy war going on in the background, and what the world outside the (very holy) capital city looked like, but it’s clear we’ll be getting more of the latter in the next book. And in fairness, we DID see outside the city – just not as much as I would have liked.)
My biggest issue with Faithful Dark was the abrupt transitions Baumer tended to use between scenes; I wasn’t always sure how the characters had gotten to the location they were now at, or how they’d reached the conclusions they did. This got more common, and worse, the closer we got to the end of the book, and was very frustrating. But I was far too invested in the story at that point to consider DNFing it. That being said, View Spoiler »
Arany’s sacrifice was what let the Church still see Asten’s hope for Their creation made manifest, reflected in consecrated glass and water and stone. The weak would never keep faith without proof of sin or power
But back to the worldbuilding: it’s pretty majorly interesting to present us with a world where faith is fact – not in the sense that everyone believes as a matter of course (although they do) but in the sense that this religion is verifiable. Consecrated objects shine. Holy statues weep for everyone to see. Checking whether someone has been consorting with demons takes seconds with tools given to every guard at every gate of the city. You can literally see whether someone has sinned, and you can see it when that sin is washed away.
(Which all does beg the question: what religion, exactly, is the holy war being fought against? Who are these others who don’t follow this Church? Why don’t they follow this Church, when there’s so much proof that this god, these priests, these tenets are the real deal?)
In the center of it all was the statue of Arany, the golden feathers of her eight wings and a dozen gold-dripping eyes alight from the ever-glowing candle fires at her feet. The shadow of her judgement was inescapable. She’d died so the world could still be good, and Csilla was leaving her legacy in tatters.
Baumer creates this world where all of this is verifiably true…and then plays with what that means, the ramifications of it – and the doubts and problems that arise even when the Church is clearly correct. For one thing, the Church doesn’t seem to be eradicating poverty or suffering, or have any explanation for why Asten turned away from the world – or how to bring Them back. And there are questions like the existence of Mihály – an Izir, the descendant of angels, very holy, capable of working small miracles…but he’s preaching a different approach to faith. How can this be? And how can the Church justify assassinating him, when he is practically a holy relic himself, living proof that angels are real?
And of course, there’s Csilla, and her soullessness. Because the various religious objects which react to souls (and sin) don’t react to her – in fact, I think her touch might actually break the consecration on some blessed objects, although I’m not completely sure I understood that correctly – the Church’s position is that she cannot sin. Which feels a bit like a riddle: she can absolutely commit acts that are sinful, like theft and murder. She just – presumably – can’t be ‘stained’ by them, since having no soul means there’s nothing to stain. But does that mean none of her actions have a moral weight/meaning? Is a moral act rendered neutral when she performs it? How can murder not be evil, just because of who’s doing the murdering? It’s the kind of thing I’d love to sit down and debate with other Philosophy and Ethics majors, and though Baumer doesn’t dive super deep into it – not bogging the story down with unnecessary amounts of introspection – it’s still this fascinating little tangle of ??? that demands answers.
Which leads us into the whole question of what even IS sin and how does it work in this setting? I was equal parts fascinated and horrified that torture does actually cleanse you of sin in this world; this is objectively, verifiably true, as various holy objects can be used to show how much ‘shadow’ a person has, and we see that post-torture, the amount of shadow falls. I mean, it has to be religious, Church-ordained torture – I don’t think any random sadist torturing a person for fun can cleanse them of sin – but still! That is so fucked up! What!!! The same seems to be true when the ‘pope’ of this world declares that some sins can be made up for with money – the rich who pay to make up for their sins actually have their sins forgiven/cleansed/whatever you want to call it! WHAT! Does this mean that this world’s God is a terrible being, or does it have something to do with a person’s self-image? If a person believes they’ve been cleansed of sin – by torture or by paying the church – are they then cleansed? Not by the torture or money, but because they now think/believe they are cleansed?
Few congregational priests came to the torture room, although they were happy enough to send others there. Hearts of iron and stomachs of silk, the lot of them.
Honestly, I’m hoping it’s that, but I do not know. It’s a very interesting bit of worldbuilding and raises (as you can see!) yet more questions. Perhaps it even hints that the Church’s understanding of sin, and how exactly Asten views sin and sinners, is very wrong…
So the worldbuilding is fabulous.
But.
The Faithful Dark does the thing I hate where, if not for the Word of God (ie, the author saying so outside of the text) I would have no idea the asexual character is asexual. Csilla isn’t attracted to anyone over the course of the book, sure, but I doubt she would be if she were allosexual either, given the a) options and b) motivations of those who express interest (…sort of) in her. At no point does Csilla say, or even think to herself, that she doesn’t feel sexual attraction to anybody ever. This is immensely frustrating when I was really looking forward to having ace rep.
I’m asexual, and I don’t know how else you can put asexuality on the page without explicitly stating it. You can show the reader pretty much every other sexuality I can think of, but asexuality is defined by an absence of a thing – you can’t show what isn’t there. You have to tell, not show. You need your character/s to discuss it, either out loud or internally; not necessarily using the word ‘asexual’ – depending on the setting, there might be another name for it in a given fantasy world, or maybe you don’t name it at all, but you explain very clearly that this character doesn’t experience ‘normal’ sexual attraction. In Margaret Owen’s Little Thieves, despite not having a word for ‘demisexual’ in their world, the MC and her love interest communicate that that’s what they both are just fine in a couple of sentences; in Sherwood Smith’s Banner of the Damned, the main character identifies as elor, her culture’s term for someone with no interest in sex with any gender. It can be done! It can be done easily and deftly!
So yes, I’m very bitter that Csilla’s asexuality is not made clear in Faithful Dark. If anything, I might mistake her as attracted to Ilan, towards the end of the book (given that Csilla is supposed to be asexual, this attraction might be meant to be romantic rather than romantic-and-sexual, or maybe not even romantic but platonic, but it’s NOT FREAKING CLEAR and that is my problem with it).
(I’m also not sure how I feel about the girl with no soul being asexual. That feels rather dodgy to me, as if the two qualities (being soulless and being asexual) are being conflated. This is another problem with a very simple solution, though; all you have to do is have another ace-spec character around who does have a soul to make it clear that there is no causal link between soulless-ness and being asexual. And would it really have been that hard to fit in another minor asexual character, given that there are probably many ace people who would join the Church (in this sort of culture/time period) to get away from the pressure to have sex and children and whatever? Csilla’s mentor/mother-figure, for example, could easily have been made ace. Problem solved.)
The Faithful Dark, then, has some mid-size issues – even if how poorly the ace rep is handled doesn’t bother you, the leaps in plot and logic made the most exciting parts of the book jerky and hard to follow. But it is an incredible plot, in a very interesting world, and I genuinely can’t wait for the sequel after the reveals we had towards the end of Faithful. On balance, I recommend it – with some reservations.
Trigger warnings: torture, on-page animal death, off-page dubious consent, disturbing amounts of faith in terrible religious tenets (like believing torture is good for you), brief mind-control, murder, whatever it’s called when someone wants to turn you into their dead girlfriend
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