It doesn't help that the guy who turned out to be a murdering rapist, her time-travel partner, was also the one with whom she had the most interesting and complicated relationship in the book, at least IMHO
That's doubly frustrating when combined with the waste of the perfectly decent mole plotline: I don't know the details of their relationship, but he sounds as though he would have been much more valuable to the narrative alive and traitorous and with the protagonist feeling weird about the whole thing.
In like a chapter we went from jokes about time-travel bureaucracy and the heroine being all "Squee! Dinosaurs!" to squicky sleeping rape attempts and the heroine picking up a guy's boot with his foot still in it and watching velociraptors play with his severed head.
Unless the earlier lightness was meant to put the reader off their guard for the horror, that is the kind of tonal shift it is very difficult for a narrative to survive. I have enjoyed some simultaneously dark and zany stories, but that just sounds jarring.
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That's doubly frustrating when combined with the waste of the perfectly decent mole plotline: I don't know the details of their relationship, but he sounds as though he would have been much more valuable to the narrative alive and traitorous and with the protagonist feeling weird about the whole thing.
In like a chapter we went from jokes about time-travel bureaucracy and the heroine being all "Squee! Dinosaurs!" to squicky sleeping rape attempts and the heroine picking up a guy's boot with his foot still in it and watching velociraptors play with his severed head.
Unless the earlier lightness was meant to put the reader off their guard for the horror, that is the kind of tonal shift it is very difficult for a narrative to survive. I have enjoyed some simultaneously dark and zany stories, but that just sounds jarring.