Community Reviews
When I stumbled upon the first book in the series, The Darkness That Comes Before, I loved the premise of dueling sorcerers, chorae, the cult around the warrior monk, and the intrigue that surrounded it all. But progressively the books lost that early thread of intrigue and became more focused on the warring between the sides. This was handled deftly in The Darkness That Comes Before, but the subsequent books felt CGI-ready with continuous scenes of slaughter between limitless armies. It’s easy to conjure ever more warriors and skinnies, but the characters of Achamian, and his recurring nightmares/memories of the first Apocalypse, and that of the barbarian Cnaiür urs Skiötha get smothered in the literal stacks of bodies that pile up.
