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This book turned out exactly as I expected, laced with pretentiousness, shambling from chapter to chapter, each one usually more boring than the last. Every sentence is overloaded with word salad, trying too hard to sound deep but ultimately feeling hollow. There are moments that seem designed to provoke deep thought, but they come off more blasé than anything.

Something that stuck out to me was when Cyrus declares at one point, “Everyone wishes that their death would mean something.�� This kind of broad generalization is repeated throughout the book as if every human shares his same ideals. But that’s simply not the case. Personally, I don’t care whether my death is meaningful, I care that my life has meaning.


That said, there are a few lines that genuinely stood out. My favorite was:


“Fear made me work hard to get better. It’s a dirty fuel, but it works. And anger helped me leave him, to get my boys away from him as soon as I could. To come thrive in this country that didn’t even believe we were people. To prove it wrong. You can put a saddle on anger, Cyrus.��


Unfortunately, moments like this are rare. The writing style deteriorates over time, shifting from storytelling to a meandering, fever-dream-like stream of consciousness. The dialogue has occasional strong moments, but it quickly loses itself.

This is basically how the later part of the book reads:

She had dark flowing hair. Black as pitch. Like an undead night. Locks of this great hair that seemed to blow in the breeze. A breeze without origin. A breeze that was suffocating in its design. One that harbored ill will against your being. Your very life force. Sucking at you. Picking at you like dirty crows feasting on the carcasses of dead soldiers in the midday sun after a long, enduring battle. A battle where no side could possibly win. A war with no meaning but unlimited costs. Costs that will forever be passed on like a slave debt to the indentured. Where even when long years have passed, we will look back and think. We will think, how? How could we have let this happen?

Oh yeah, back to her hair. She had dark, long, flowing hair.

I made all that up as I just typed away in that flow of conscious style writing but you get my point.

The author also attempts humor, but it fails over and over. The forced “funny�� story about cutting himself with an axe was so unnatural, even Emperor Palpatine would be jealous of its artificiality. You see that terrible joke? That’s what this book feels like—an exhausting attempt at being clever that just doesn’t land. Most “funny�� parts seem to be more of an inside joke between the author and his real life friends.

The writing is also riddled with pointless tangents, trying to make ordinary details seem profound. Take this passage:

He wore dark blue canvas Vans that required replacing every six months like clockwork when the soles wore through. Every six months, he’d order an identical pair from the Vans website—dark blue with gum soles and black laces. He’d walk around in the new ones on wet days to wear them in, phasing out the old, hole-ridden ones the way rich white men used topless convertibles, driving them only on perfect days to flaunt their capital. Cyrus’s holy shoes were flaunting something too—his authenticity, his class antipathy, his allegiance to the pit. It was all right there at his feet, waving like two ratty flags. Yes, they were ratty flags made by a billion-dollar shoe company, but there was no ethical consumption under capitalism, and sometimes, Cyrus figured, one had to pick one’s battles. He tried not to think too much about these contradictions.

Now, compare that to Terry Pratchett’s quote from a book called Feet of Clay, where he also talks about books and classes in society.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years�� time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

Pratchett took a simple concept, made it engaging, and delivered a line so powerful that it has stuck with me for over twenty years. Meanwhile, Martyr! tries to do the same thing with its Vans metaphor but ends up talking in such a “high brow�� style that it’s uninteresting to read.

As I stated, the novel reads like a fever dream, latching onto an idea, wringing it dry with overblown metaphorical nonsense, then moving to the next one in an endless rinse-and-repeat cycle.

And the worst part? The characters are so disturbingly boring that they don’t even feel real. Yes, they are fictional, but the whole point of writing characters is to make us believe they exist. Kevah Akbar fails at this miserably. But maybe that’s the point—this story is about death, and every single character feels dead on the page.

As for the protagonist, he spends most of the book whining about how he wants his death to have meaning over and over. He literally just has many of the same conversations over and over with different people. By the end, I half-wished he’d get run over by a bus just so the city could install a stop sign in his honor, at least then, his death would have the meaning he desired.

I already know what will happen for me, the next book I read might be mediocre, but it will feel like a Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece by comparison.