The Final Descent – Book Review

The Final Descent

(Monstrumologist #4 – UK Title: The Terror Beneath)

by Rick Yancey

Simon & Schuster,2013

320 Pages

Young Adult (14-17 Years)

The Final Descent, the fourth and last in Yancey’s The Monstrumologist series (before he turned to The 5th Wave,) was always planned to be the wrap of the series and a last goodbye to the characters. Simon & Schuster cancelled the series after book 3 (The Isle of Blood), having fulfilled its contractual obligation, citing “low sales.” Yancey had to fight to get it published, despite the first book winning the Printz Award, and the second being nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize. Fans of Warthrop and Will Henry won out after a concerted letter-writing campaign directed at the publishers. This may account for the size and pacing of the final book relating the journals of William James Henry to the public.

Incidentally, back in 2014 there was talk that the entire series would be adapted to the screen by Warner Brothers, but that never happened. (After seeing what the movies have done to The Last Apprentice, I’m glad.)

The book jumps between three timelines: present day, 19 years after the primary storyline, when Will Henry responds to a letter from a friend about Dr. Warthrop’s well being; (he has succumbed to the Dark Wave of depression, and needs looking in on); a few years after The Isle of Blood adventure, when Will Henry has just turned 16 and Dr. Warthrop first discovers the thing itself; and an account of the horrifying first days after Will Henry was taken in by the Doctor at age 13 and introduced to the soul-killing profession of monstrumology… each pieced together from editor Rick Yancey’s modern reading of Will Henry’s journals.

Some time has past since the events on the island of Socotra; Will Henry has become a young man, and Lilly Bates a young woman. Romance brews under the surface of the final installment of the Monstrumologist.

Will Henry’s character takes a bit of a twist for the worse as he playfully injects a man with tipota and sends him on a wild goose chase to locate Dr. Kearns, (who is of course, dead.) For what? To gain the score of a lifetime. The one find that could make Dr. Warthrop truly immortal in the annals of monstrumology, T. Cerrejonensis! (Don’t google that like I did. Let it be a surprise.) He is 16 now, cynical, reckless, and quick to the bottle. How has a childhood of callous Monstrumology twisted him?

“To hell with monsters and to hell with men. There is no difference to me.”

Keep in mind we are reading the story from journals written by Will Henry at a great age. It is filled with reminiscences of when he first came to live with the doctor after watching his parents die in a fire (the worms… falling…) interspersed with a contemporary mystery: The last great monster, believed to be extinct. An egg found… skillfully conned from its owner, then stolen from the Monstrumarium by thugs leaving Adolphus, the old caretaker, in a pool of blood. The venom of this creature can become one of the most addictive drugs in the world, and could easily draw the attention of every major crime boss around.

Again it is time for The International Congress of Monstrumology, where we again meet with fellow enthusiasts of aberrant biology, Sir Hiram Walker, his apprentice, Samuel Isaacson (The Mediocrity,) and the Argentinian monstrumologist Santiago Luis Moreno Acosta-Rojas. Amidst the intrigue of whodunnit, the logical checklist of deductive reasoning that Will Henry reviews with Abram Von Helrung as to who might be responsible for the Irish thugs breaking into the lab and stealing the T. Cerrejonensis, (a species native to Argentina,) Warthrop is kidnapped. Will Henry rushes to the rescue… but Warthrop believes he was never really in danger. Too bad, because a number of the Cicilian Camorra mobsters are killed by Will Henry’s gun, and they don’t take kindly to that. In fact, their all-consuming revenge will put an end to Monstrumology itself.

To say this book is character driven is an understatement; the entire series is an exploration of the complex relationship between William James Henry and Pellinore Warthrop as they complement each others’ human shortcomings, reflecting each others darkness. The unspoken questions Yancey poses might be, How does one become a man when all you have ever known is emotionless science drizzled with horrifying gore? What you study, you become.

“You are the heartless one. You are the monstrous one. I never asked to be this. I had no choice or say in it!”
He grew very still. “You never asked to be what?”
“What you have made me.”

Jealousy over Lilly Bates’ new beau, Samuel (whom Will Henry dubs “The Mediocrity,”) ends with Samuel hanging over a bridge, held by the ankles by a hired thug, (a favorite Hare & Burke style assistant of Will Henry and Dr. Warthrop.) Will Henry has turned a corner and let the darkness take hold. He no longer feels an aversion to violence.

But with Lilly, it is a dance of desire; he is drawn to her her ferocity, intellect, beauty… but any romance is utterly hopeless, for his tragic character can never know love or even to touch another human at all… “even the most chaste of kisses.” He is infected with the monstrous parasite, biminius arawakus.

As Will Henry becomes a man, he realizes that he has been trapped by the Amber Eye, the darkness within. He has himself become a monster; he fights against it, rails against the betrayal of Pellinore’s lies (the hypocrite!), but in the end, fights against only what he has become.

When I was younger I often wondered if monstrumology brought out the darkness in men’s hearts or if it attracted men with hearts of darkness.

Recurring themes are a fall off the edge of a flat earth: “I should have known when I left him that he would fall off the edge of the goddamned world.” and the allegory of the ice of Judecca, a reference to Dante’s Inferno. (The bottom circle of Hell, where souls are entombed in ice, the punishment specifically for traitors. But who betrayed who? There is a long line of betrayal enumerated from Pellinore’s father on down.)

What have you done,
Nothing, nothing, nothing, In the name of God, nothing

The story jumps, often jarringly, back and forth between the story told in flashback and present day, where William Henry returns to the house at 425 Harrington Lane to find Warthrop barely alive, (but still craving scones,) obviously bipolar, consumed with whatever it is (“The thing itself,” Warthrop calls it,) padlocked in his basement dissection laboratory. (Or is it grief that consumes him? Certainly not guilt.) Almost a lost cause, Warthrop is sometimes awake for days before “the wave of darkness” descends upon him again. The scorched remains of the hired woman Will Henry left to care for his mentor he finds in the trash can out back.

The basement is where I lost the last of my childhood– and left a part of it. He kept it all those years, the finger he chopped off with a butcher knife, floating in a jar of formaldehyde.
“You kept it?”
“Well, I didn’t want to just throw it out with the trash.”
He did it to save my life. Another unintentional cruelty.

The narrative hints that Warthrop wants to die, that at this point, his own mentor dead, his assistant grown and gone, in possession of the last living “monster”, he would be better off dead. “He won’t live out the year,” it is is predicted. Like the Sybil, “I would die.”

He quoted from the Satyricon to one-up me– and, I think, to mock me. “And then there’s the Sibyl: With my own eyes I saw her, at Cumae, hanging up in a jar, and whenever the boys would say to her, ‘Sibyl, Sibyl, what would you?’ she would answer, ‘I would die.’ “

The ending is cryptic and you must read closely, because Yancey will only give it to you once, if he doesn’t leave you to piece it together yourself… but that is the beauty and finesse of the series in its entirety.

Starving himself and alone, Pellinore has lost himself; I had assumed it was The Dark Wave that took him, the down side of his bipolar disorder. But could he have become addicted to the Titanoboa venom? I ask because at one point in the book, Will Henry, everything lost, falls victim to an opium den but is, of course, saved by Warthrop. (Or does Will Henry allow the deadly, instant poison to take the Doctor?) I ask because I want to believe that Will Henry would not allow Warthrop, his surrogate father, however failed, however treasonous, to fall victim to the horrible, torturous death that he described to Samuel!

Its venom in pure form is very toxic, one drop is enough to kill an adult. If diluted ten times, its properties change – it turns into a very potent drug, providing indescribably euphoric experience.

No one else could complete the circle of Pellinore Warthrop’s death. Will Henry could see into the dark places where Pellinore could not look, inside himself, where Das Ungeheuer lived.

Will Henry sets fire to the house at the end, meaning the two, the last of their kind, die together, poetically, wrapped in a deadly embrace like Jormungand and Thor at the Gottedamerung.

We have reached the crux of it this day, Will Henry. The bottom of the stairs, if you will. This is the choice my life has forced upon you… We have reached the bottom of it, you and I. The final descent– and this is the face of the beast that waits for us in the dark.

In epilogue, it is revealed that the name William James Henry was stolen from the husband of Lilly Bates; it was not the true name of the boy with the tattered hat that served as Pellinore Warthrop’s… assistant (never his apprentice.) And we feel that much more distant from the enigma that we knew as Will Henry. He is a shadow, unknowable. Untouchable.

And after, the shadow calling himself by another man’s name, lived on.

“Can you tell me the difference between a monstrumologist and a ghoul?” I asked. He shook his head soundlessly, wide-eyed, watching me cut away the trousers, exposing the pale leg beneath. “No?” I sighed. “I was hoping one day to find someone who could.”