Synopsis
The first duty of a man is to his family…
With an army flowing into the highlands like a plague of locusts, Rolf the skull breaker flees the front lines to get his family to safety, but the siren call of glory awaits him. Only the brave will have a seat the at the Father’s table in the afterlife. How will his son ever respect him, if he runs?
Review
What I find most compelling about Only Death Lies That Way is its scale. This is not a story about heroes turning the tide of war or armies clashing for the fate of nations. An invading army is coming, and there is nothing these characters can do about it. They will not affect the greater outcome of the world. Instead, this is a story about what a family does when their entire life is uprooted, and that smaller focus makes it hit harder than a lot of epic-scale tales manage to.
Montague’s depiction of the small-scale effects of large political actions is genuinely interesting. Wars are decided by rulers and generals, but they’re survived by families, and this story lives in that space with real conviction. At its core, it’s about the lengths a parent will go to protect their child and their family, regardless of species, and that universal thread gives the story a raw emotional weight.
The action sequences are really well done, vivid and gripping in ways that feel physical and immediate. The morality of the world is pulled from a bygone era, something closer to the Iron Age or the Vikings, and there is a bit of dissonance that comes with that. These characters operate by a code that doesn’t always align with modern sensibilities. But that dissonance is also part of what makes the story interesting. It asks you to sit with a different worldview and understand the choices characters make within it, even when those choices feel foreign.
Montague continues to write with the sharp, unflinching style fans of his work have come to expect. Only Death Lies That Way is a smaller story told with big conviction, and it’s all the better for it.
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