TL;DR Review: Bigger, more epic, and far more horror-drenched. A brilliant start to a tonally different but no-less-engaging new trilogy in one of my new favorite fantasy worlds.
Synopsis:
Blood once turned the wheels of empire. Now it is money.
A new age of exploration and innovation has dawned, and the Empire of the Wolf stands to take its place as the foremost power in the known world. Glory and riches await.
But dark days are coming. A mysterious plague has broken out in the pagan kingdoms to the north, while in the south, the Empire’s proxy war in the lands of the wolfmen is weeks away from total collapse.
Worse still is the message brought to the Empress by two heretic monks, who claim to have lost contact with the spirits of the afterlife. The monks believe this is the start of an ancient prophecy heralding the end of days—the Great Silence.
It falls to Renata Rainer, a low-ranking ambassador to an enigmatic and vicious race of mermen, to seek answers from those who still practice the arcane arts. But with the road south beset by war and the Empire on the brink of supernatural catastrophe, soon there may not be a world left to save…
Full Review:
It’s an absolute delight to be back in the grim, horror-tinged world of the Sovan Empire!
Grave Empire picks up two hundred years after the end of Trials of Empire, in a world that looks much the same and yet surprisingly different.
The Empire has continued its relentless expansion and now finds itself stretched thin and beset by powerful enemies that are trying to reconquer lost lands and curb their greed for growth. A war is raging and the Empire is losing—but it’s another battle entirely that could be the downfall of mankind.
One of our POV characters, Renata Rainer, finds herself drawn into a diplomatic mission to the mer-men of Ozeanland (yes, you read that right, mer-men!) in an effort to discover why the afterlife has gone silent. Necromancy and thaumaturgy have been integral to Imperial power yet now all entreaties to the dead go unanswered. The prophecy of “The Great Silence” hangs like a dark cloud over her mission. There grows within her and her companions the fear that something is very, very wrong in the world of the dead.
Another of our characters, von Oldenburg, has made a career of turning magic to his own greedy ends, and when he stumbles across what seems to be a magical plague, he is immediately fascinated by the its potential. What could ever go wrong when meddling with supernatural forces beyond human control?
Finally, there is young Peter Kleist, a naïve young gallant who enlists by mistake, and not even a captaincy can keep him out of the worst of the action. On the contrary, the rookie officer is sent directly to a remote fort where the enemy never attacks, but supernatural screams ring out all night, every night. And his story…well, you’ll have to read it to believe it.
The Empire of the Wolf series did an amazing job of layering in the macabre, supernatural, and horrorific into a fantasy world. In Grave Empire, it’s taken to a whole new level.
Every moment of happiness and sunshine is bookended by a terrible sense of foreboding. You just know something is wrong, but you can never quite put your finger on what until well into the book. It’s a masterpiece of building suspense by dangling just enough information to keep you coming back, but for every question that’s answered, two more are presented.
The horror is more of an undertone at first, but the building dread keeps rising and rising, dragging you deeper into the mystery and the feeling of wrongness. It’s like a ghost that’s seen only out of the corner of your eye—just when you think you’re getting somewhere, it takes a new twist or turn you never could have seen coming. And for that, I absolutely adored Grave Empire.
I do miss a little the narrow focus of Empire of the Wolf. However, expanding the world with three POV characters and the broader focus does an amazing job of making the story feel bigger—which it absolutely is.
This isn’t just one man’s mission to solve crime and save the world; no, it’s an entire Empire struggling to keep from being destroyed—not just in this world, but in the next, too!
Grave Empire sets up a fascinating new problem, incredibly high stakes, antagonists you know from the start are going to be a real bugger to deal with, and a grander, world-spanning story. We’re also treated to expansion of magic, the addition of mer-men and their battle sharks (hell yeah!), and a fascinating look at a Napoleonic-era Europe going through serious growing pains.
It was a truly spectacular read and I’m already champing at the bit to find out what comes next.
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