An entertaining pistol-and-sorcery fantasia set in a mesmerizing underworld.
A renegade Union soldier breeches Hell to save a little girl in Ferguson’s sprawling fantasy novel.
In late 1864, the drunk and depressed Col. Erich Von Beck deserts Sherman’s Union Army ranks as they march through Georgia after killing his only friend, Sgt. Valentine Schmidt, in a drunken accident. He washes up at the farm of a fetching widow named Jenny Mabry, where his suicidal despondency lifts as he takes to Jenny’s bed and bonds with her 8-year-old daughter, Beatrice. When Bea is possessed by a devil, an itinerant monk convinces Von Beck to descend to Hell to retrieve her soul. A magic ritual duly deposits Von Beck in an underworld teeming with devils, demons, witches, ghosts, hellhounds, fauns, centaurs, imps, and a working class of damned human souls. The place is full of horrors (“One soul carried his own intestines piled in his arms. A leering devil decapitated another; the torso chased its own rolling head, picked it up, placed it back on its shoulders”), but also contains surprising amenities, including bustling towns, taverns serving great beer, and dragon-driven railroads and airships. Von Beck is joined on his quest to rescue Bea’s soul by succubus sisters Mezyss and Meänia and the shade of Valentine, now a font of occult lore; their travels through Hell’s nine circles get them into countless bloody fights with monsters and introduce them to mythical potentates like Lilith and the horse-fly devil Beelzebub. Also searching for Bea is the devil Marchosias and his master, the Magus, who wants to appropriate Bea’s innocent soul-power to seize Hell’s throne. As he becomes embroiled in various plots and power-plays, Von Beck slowly cottons to his identity as the legendary warrior Arturus, Guardian of Fate and Warlord of the Damned, who plays a central role in prophecies.
This first book in Ferguson’s Hellfire Saga series feels like a mashup of Cold Mountain, The Exorcist, and a steampunk rendering of Dante’s Inferno; its strands don’t always mesh well. Von Beck starts out as the antihero in a Civil War novel written in gritty, evocative prose: “Summoning strength, he pulled deeply from the brown rotgut in his canteen and scrambled into his uniform. Then he trotted Trudy through the camp, saber raised as he rousted his exhausted men from their salt pork and chicory and back into column.” But in Hell, Von Beck’s character is overshadowed by the bewildering spectacle swirling around him as he struggles to get his bearings amid the underworld’s lurid grotesquerie (“When the lictor’s abdomen split open to reveal a second mouth filled with razored yellow fangs, Von Beck heard madness calling”) and byzantine politics, and the grandiose destiny he’s groping toward doesn’t seem appropriate for the grizzled, disillusioned man we first met. Still, Ferguson’s worldbuilding is engrossing, with plenty of colorful, energetic characters to take up the slack—the tough-talking, ass-kicking, red-skinned succubae are a hoot—and action scenes that are well paced and riveting. The result is a devilishly rousing adventure story.
An entertaining pistol-and-sorcery fantasia set in a mesmerizing underworld.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781732566262
Page Count: 474
Publisher: Mr. Phabulous, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.
On the orders of her mother, a woman goes to dragon-riding school.
Even though her mother is a general in Navarre’s army, 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail was raised by her father to follow his path as a scribe. After his death, though, Violet's mother shocks her by forcing her to enter the elite and deadly dragon rider academy at Basgiath War College. Most students die at the War College: during training sessions, at the hands of their classmates, or by the very dragons they hope to one day be paired with. From Day One, Violet is targeted by her classmates, some because they hate her mother, others because they think she’s too physically frail to succeed. She must survive a daily gauntlet of physical challenges and the deadly attacks of classmates, which she does with the help of secret knowledge handed down by her two older siblings, who'd been students there before her. Violet is at the mercy of the plot rather than being in charge of it, hurtling through one obstacle after another. As a result, the story is action-packed and fast-paced, but Violet is a strange mix of pure competence and total passivity, always managing to come out on the winning side. The book is categorized as romantasy, with Violet pulled between the comforting love she feels from her childhood best friend, Dain Aetos, and the incendiary attraction she feels for family enemy Xaden Riorson. However, the way Dain constantly undermines Violet's abilities and his lack of character development make this an unconvincing storyline. The plots and subplots aren’t well-integrated, with the first half purely focused on Violet’s training, followed by a brief detour for romance, and then a final focus on outside threats.
Read this for the action-packed plot, not character development or worldbuilding.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374042
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.
The conclusion to the Villains trilogy asks, In a world where there are no heroes, what does victory really mean?
Schwab’s world is one where violent near-death experiences can engender ExtraOrdinaries, people who come back to life with a new superpowered ability, but lacking empathy, patience, and a variety of other, gentler qualities. In this installment, Victor Vale is becoming increasingly desperate; ever since Sydney Clarke used her power to bring him back from the dead, control over his own ability to cause and dampen pain has been slipping. Sydney herself is chafing against her life on the run with Victor’s protective ex-cellmate, Mitch Turner, and struggling with missing both Victor and her dead sister, Serena, whom she might not be able to resurrect—and definitely shouldn’t. Meanwhile, a psychiatrist, Dr. Gabriel Gray, discovers the existence of ExtraOrdinary people and seeks to harness their power for himself with tragic consequences for himself and many other people. Because the narrative skips around in time, it becomes clear fairly early that a final conflict is looming at EON, a high-tech facility where ExtraOrdinaries are imprisoned and experimented upon. This series has really lived up to its title; while antiheroes and villains have been popular protagonists for quite some time, not every writer is willing to lean into the darkness as hard as Schwab does. Some of her characters were psychopaths even before their near-death traumas, which means they didn’t have much moral fiber to begin with. And even the people who are basically good do a lot of bad and often foolish things when faced with a crisis…and there are a lot of crises. The strength of this series lies in Schwab’s ExtraOrdinary power to make you care for many of these incredibly rash, ethically dubious—some verging on irredeemable—characters anyway. As a result, the story rises above the usual grimdark cynical slog; instead, this is a gripping and nuanced saga with an ending that feels both inevitable and well earned.
Who is victorious? The author and the readers.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250192233
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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