The Lost Symbol/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Complete Monster: Mal'akh walks somewhere between this and a Magnificent Bastard.
  • Ending Fatigue: The book reaches its big reveal, then subjects the reader to several additional chapters of dull exposition.
  • Like You Would Really Do It: I mean, come on. Dan Brown? Kill off Robert Langdon? Really?
  • Nightmare Fuel: It's bad enough that Mal'akh drowns Katherine's assistant and (seemingly) Langdon (one in a tank of ethanol, the other in a coffin filling with water compounded with his claustrophia), but the point-of-view switches to those characters in their last moments submerged and dying. At least we learn Langdon averts death, but he's gonna need some therapy...
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Dan Brown seems to have learned several lessons from critics of The Da Vinci Code and taken them to heart.
  • The Untwist: The apparent Big Bad genuinely turns out to be the actual Big Bad, rather than The Lancer or The Obi-Wan suddenly pulling a Face Heel Turn and revealing themselves to have been the mastermind all along. Since this goes against the convention established in every single one of his previous books, this also counts as a Meta Twist.
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