I picked up Nevernight (and the sequel Godsgrave) because the author, Jay Kristioff, had written some neat Japanese-Western fantasy novels years back that I remembered liking, and the third book in this new series had recently come up.
Holy unexpected smut, Batman!
It's limited but it's far, far more graphic than the fade to black kind I'm used to seeing in my fantasy novels. Unlike a lot of the prurience in fantasy novels, though, the book actually does prepare you for it in that it's a book about a goddamn assassin school and if you think you're going to be protected from the realities of life in order to "enjoy" this, well, prepare to psychologically experience what happens to your bowels when someone slices you open.
So anyway, despite the gore and sex, it's not as gratuitous as it could be. I don't find the details especially distracting because they fit within the story (it isn't sex or violence for the sake of it - well, any more than reading a story about a working assassin should be). The story itself is surprisingly mundane. Well-to-do girl's father is murdered and her family torn apart as part of some political scheme. Girl plots revenge. Girl finds means to revenge and does everything in her power to act on it. Things are more complicated than they seem. Tragedies befall her. She powers on. Also there is some magic. Not, like, Harry Potter magic. Visceral magic, and religious magic.
What really works for me (and did work for me in his original work, I imagine) is what I appreciate in some of my favorite authors: turns of phrase. You will get analogies like you never believed could exist here, drawing on the lore of the world but in a context that makes those strange fantasy words not seem so strange. As you might expect for a book so centrally about death, the humor is off-beat and dark. There's a core mystery about the girl's subtle powers and what happened with her family that pushes her along through the story (revenge is still a powerful motivator for her, but that really can only drive you so far).
Overall, not the best books I've ever read. They don't do anything especially clever with the plot or characters. But... I enjoy the world building - not just for the world, but for the way in which it is built and communicated to the reader. I appreciate the inversion on expectations - there's a certain level of polite decorum that comes packaged with other stories about warriors and assassins, but not here. I very much appreciate, even though they do come out somewhat trite sometimes, the writing exercises that are exposed via mirrored scenes and dialog, and very closely held character and tonal "voices" that tell you what you need to know by word choice and context moreso than by actual vocabulary.
So if you can tolerate some gore and sex, I'd recommend them. Those two things don't dominate the text (it's not some masturbatory storytelling where everything is an excuse for violence or pornography) but they are there in a way where you won't be able to read the book if you don't want to read those things.
