Fiction Analysis - 'All Bow Down' by Kenny Ching
Part 2 of a Post-Apocalyptic Old Testament Story
Author’s Note: Fiction Analysis is back. As promised, this is an analysis of the second book of Kenny Ching’s Chronicles of Gog series. For the analysis of the first book, click here.
Warning: As always, there will be spoilers. I will try to limit the spoilers for this book. However, there will be spoilers for the previous book. Thus, readers are advised to either read that book or at least my analysis of it before reading this one.
Introduction
Welcome back to my review series of the Chronicles of Gog books by Kenny Ching. I hope you’ve read the previous book, Illusion of Control. But anyways, the story ended with a cliffhanger when we first left off.
Tavian had been killed! Yup, you heard that correctly.
But lest, dear readers, you want to complain about spoilers, it’s in the blurb of this book. I’ll let the author speak for his own work:
Tavian’s friends seek to rescue him from Og, not knowing that he’d been murdered. Egypt has rebelled against her brother Andrew, who responds in a way from which he will never recover. And Wu has become King, but now faces the seemingly impossible task of waging war against the Triopolites.
Thus was setup for Book 2 of Chronicles of Gog.
Because this is an analysis of a sequel, I will take a different tack from my usual format. Usually, I’d put the story in the last part of this analysis. But for this one, I’m going to cover the story first.
Story
Following the footsteps of its predecessor, All Bow Down also focuses on the conflict between the Kukazi and the Triopolites. But this book definitely took it up a notch. The stakes were increased as the two sides are finally locked in an all-out war.
The first thing that King Wu did in this war was to rescue Tavian, who readers might remember got himself captured in the last book. And though he was killed by Og, he was able to be revived by the creepy Egypt through nanite technology.
Readers who are paying attention might wonder how the Kukazi can possibly stand up to the Triopolites given the latter’s advantage in both technology and resources. Just how were our heroes supposed to stand up to this juggernaut?
The answer to this question is Egypt, who decided to form an alliance with King Wu, betraying her brother. Acting as a fifth column, the triumvir was able to supply the king with the necessary information to score important victories against the Triopolites. Thanks to Egypt, the Kukazi was given a fighting chance against their nemesis. But make no mistake, Wu had made a deal with the devil. Fitting, given that he is the Saul figure of the story.
Tavian, having been rescued and revived with nanotechnology, became the Kukazi’s strongest warrior. And of course, we also got a good look at his love interest Abby who ran afoul of her father, Sejanus. Meanwhile, Andrew struggled to deal with his sister’s betrayal.
What will happen? Lots of drama and political intrigue, that’s for sure.
One thing I like about this book is how the war between the Kukazi and the Triopolites was resolved within this very book. Impressive given how this book is only 137 pages long, according to Amazon. I’ve mentioned this before, but I love the author’s brevity.
But let’s move on to the characters of this book.
Characters
As I have mentioned in the previous Fiction Analysis, this book has a lot of characters. Furthermore, most of the characters have their own counterparts in the Book of Samuel. But this analysis will focus on the major characters.
Like Illusion of Control, All Bow Down doesn’t have a clear protagonist. Instead, the story has two: King Wu and Tavian (the Saul and David figure, respectively).
Out of the two, Wu is clearly the anti-hero. As I said earlier, he made a deal with the devil by allying with Egypt. But in addition to working with the enemy, there is a romantic aspect to this relationship. This made the whole affair even more despicable given that Wu already has a wife and son.
Meanwhile, Tavian is the more heroic of the two deuteragonists. But he’s not a perfect boy scout, either. The technology that brought him back to life gave him superhuman strength, but it also made him emotionally unstable. His violent streak brought him into conflict with not just his family members but also with Abby.
Speaking of Abby, I want to get into the antagonists of this book: Andrew and Sejanus.
With Egypt having betrayed the Triopolites, Andrew and Sejanus are the remaining loyal members of the Triumvirate. The two have very differing temperaments, but they both have one thing in common: female family members who betrayed them. Egypt for Andrew, Abby for Sejanus.
This is a great touch by the author as we were able to get into how both Andrew and Sejanus reacted to their respective predicament. Andrew, being the more sentimental of the two, struggled heavily. But Sejanus was unscrupulous, to say the least.
Finally, I would remiss to not talk about Egypt in detail. She’s an interesting character. A mad scientist of a woman, she’s clearly bad news. But she’s also helping out the Kukazi. Ultimately, she’s the wild card of the story.
I think I’ve said enough about the characters. They did a good job in showing the intrigue of the city-wide war. Despite the huge cast of characters, none of them feel tacked on or unnecessary; they all serve a purpose.
Now let’s move on to the setting.
Setting
I have covered the setting of the whole series in my previous fiction analysis. For the most part, the setting remained generally the same. Thus, I will not tread old ground.
That being said, this book takes the story to a new place: the forests on the outskirts of Gog. In their war against the Triopolites, the Kukazi retreated en masse from the city to set up camp in the forests and engage in guerrilla warfare – Viet Cong style. This is a nice bit of expansion into the world.
Now let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
All Bow Down is a worthy sequel to Illusion of Control and a good continuation to the series as a whole. Like its predecessor, it also ends on a cliffhanger. It’s not quite on the same level as the last one, but I was honestly itching to read the next book because of it.
All in all, I’ve been loving the sort of cyber-punk feel to this post-apocalyptic story. The way technology was used in this story definitely raised up some ethical and metaphysical questions. This would be taken up a notch in the sequel, Loyal 2 Chaos.
But that’s a story for another analysis.
End Note
This one has nothing to do with this post but rather on what I’ll be doing in the next three weeks with Germanicus Publishing.
As you might know, I aim to post three weeks of fiction followed by one week of nonfiction. But for the next three weeks, I’ll be focused on writing more stories that I don’t think I’m ready to publish in that stretch of time. Thus, I’ll be taking a break with my posting. However, I will still be sending emails every Thursday. I’m not ready to show my hand yet, though. Just keep an eye out.
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