REALMS

The forces of light and darkness battle for control of a medieval-ish realm in this fantasy thriller.

For thousands of years, the world of Evanescia has been sunk in division and discord. Provinces that follow King Shinar of the heavenly realm of Glodoria square off against provinces devoted to King Dakar of the hellish realm of Dakaria, while inhabitants of the neutral provinces think that King Shinar and King Dakar are mere legends. They’re not, and the struggle between the two supernatural realms for the soul of Evanescia is heating up. The Shinarian Lord Johan of Braham starts having dreams about fighting an ominous foe, a sign of a long prophesied Great Awakening, and a young neutralist farmer named Ecel discovers his preternatural gift for slaughtering the savage Dakarian minions known as Dark Riders. The Dakarian general Kairas, a bat-winged Drakan fiend who motivates his underlings by beheading them, gathers his forces for an attack on Braham, while a host of angelic Shinlings from Glodoria flutters to its defense. There is swordplay and arrow fire and Dungeons-and-Dragons-ish arcana (“The witches can only be summoned by a Drakan with the rank of general or greater”), but the main action is spiritual rather than physical. Tilley’s teeming fictive world disguises a Christian allegory: invisible Drakan and Shinling adversaries are forever whispering competitively into the ears of mortals, tempting them to doubt and despair or fortifying them with faith and resolve. More than dragons and shape-shifters, the real danger characters face is their pride and will. The result is something like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series dressed in Tolkien-esque heavy metal, but without the literary flair. Tilley’s prose is stiff and his dialogue stentorian–“May the Great King Shinar grant you wisdom, discernment, and strength to carry out your duties”–and his one-dimensional characters are crushed flat by their burden of symbolism.

A plodding sword-and-sorcery epic weighed down by strident metaphysics.