This is one wild, intricate ride: Grim, grotesque, vivid, thrilling, and with spot-on insights about our mundane reality.
Politics, religious schisms, greed, and power-mongering delay those attempting to save their world from apocalypse in Book Two of The Great Silence, following Grave Empire (2025).
The Vorr, interdimensional beings who consume souls, have invaded the afterlife and reached into the mortal world, resulting in mindless “vacants” who pass on their affliction by touch; if left unchecked, this “mind rot” will consume all of humanity. Sovan Count Lamprecht von Oldenburg’s illegal thaumaturgic device exploits this plague, converting the vacants into thralls who obey his every command, such as conquering the Sovan Empire’s mortal enemy, Casimir. Meanwhile, von Oldenburg sneaks around the city of Sova, fomenting a religious and civil uprising. He’s also completely insane, both because of the mercury in the tonic he drinks compulsively and because he’s possessed by a demon. Somehow, despite the many brutal deaths he’s both deliberately and inadvertently responsible for, his instability, and his disgusting personal habits, his influence continues to grow, as differing parts of his agenda appeal to many people with access to money, magic, and armed forces. (The trenchant sociopolitical commentary in each chapter’s invented epigraph suggests the reader might find contemporary relevance in this storyline.) As the balance of power is overset in both Casimir and Sova, few people are willing or available to confront the Vorr and the demon who freed them—a creature that readers of the previous series will recognize. That the threat and the weapon needed to combat it are the same as those in The Empire of the Wolf trilogy reinforces this sequel trilogy’s message that history repeats itself, despite—or because of—our efforts. However, the plot remains fresh and engagingly complex. As always, Swan makes both mortal life and the afterlife seem absolutely terrifying, and the few central characters who manage to survive will definitely suffer along the way.
This is one wild, intricate ride: Grim, grotesque, vivid, thrilling, and with spot-on insights about our mundane reality.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780316577038
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Orbit
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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