THE RAGES

This fantasy series opener pits a disparate group of citizens in a post-apocalyptic wasteland against killer wildlife, drug-addled cannibals, and the potential next stage of humanity’s evolution.

The survivors of the Energy Wars established the Federation of the Seven Realms. Most people live in urban Hubs, where their bodies grow corpulent and their minds frolic in the digital Vale. Others wander in barren reality, where all animals (except dogs) fall into Rages and attack humans. Harley Nearwater is a Navajo gunslinger traveling in Utah. His reputation for killing strangers with little consideration precedes him. In the town of Price, he meets Sgt. Kara Litmeyer of the Rocky Mountain Brigade, who claims to have been hypnotized by a stranger with stormy gray eyes. Suspicious, Harley shoots her. She whispers, “The end is coming.” Meanwhile, Brinna Wilde lives in a village of Neands, who shun digital life. An urge to find the Apple Orchard from her dreams leads her to drive west after the death of her grandmother. And at the Rocky Mountain Hub, Quinlan Bowden and his two small children leave their apartment complex in search of his missing wife, Vania. They’ll brave hordes of “drug-addicted cannibals” called the Wrynd and enter the tapestry of prophetic events unfolding under the watch of Lord Judge Syiada of the Federation. Davis wields a sense of desolate grandeur in his novel. He taps into anxieties that modern readers will relate to, including degradation of the environment, the need for universal basic income, and fears of automation reducing jobs. Much of the prose is atmospheric, as when Harley’s boots “click clicked on the asphalt like laughter at a funeral.” Other lines cut with sharp descriptions born of frustration; the real bodies of those in the Vale are “bulbous...and like mounds of dough.” The ChristGaians cleverly merge moralizing and environmental fervor. Characters like Cirroco Storm, biologically altered to hunt for the Federation, bring an aggressively cinematic flair to the weird narrative. Later, the powerful, enigmatic Greywalker fully enters the stage, galvanizing further cosmic drama.

An author skillfully extrapolates from the current political landscape to build a dark fantasy epic.