Chronicles of Reaper: Book 1 by J.R Lightfoot

Reaper: Chronicles of Reaper Book I follows Jaml, a warrior granted power by God to rid the world of evil. By day he is Duke Jaml of Erdine. By night he is Reaper, hunting demons who have infiltrated every level of human society by masquerading as human, which means the enemy is rarely where the reader expects to find it. The central quest is the race to find the weapons of the apocalypse, the four horsemen's Sword of Darkness, Scythe of Death, Axe of Damnation and Dagger of Fire, before the demons secure them and use them to bring Lucifer back from hell.

Readers who enjoyed Legion with Paul Bettany will recognise the territory. Scripture folded into horror, apocalyptic machinery, and a war between good and evil fought in a world that has largely stopped being able to tell them apart. The cast is enormous and the bestiary is generous: demons of every variety, lycans, succubi, a minotaur, fallen angels, and a criminal guild whose ambitions run well beyond ordinary crime. The shifting third person perspective works well here, because it lets the reader watch the trap close from both sides rather than only from Jaml's. The villains are given their own chapters rather than being kept offstage, and by the closing act this pays off, because the reader arrives at the confrontation already knowing what these creatures want and what they have lost. The cast is large enough that it does take some effort to keep everyone straight, particularly across a book of this length, but the effort is rewarded.

I particularly liked the relationship that forms between Jaml and the monk Kem. She is a fighting woman every bit as ferocious as he is, bound by vows that limit her to blunt weapons, and their banter, shared commitment and steady support of one another carry much of the novel's momentum. I also want to note something still far too rare in the genre. The lead is a black man, written by a BIPOC author, and in a fantasy landscape that remains overwhelmingly white, that matters.

Credit where it is due: the fight scenes are well written. Choreographing combat on the page is one of the harder things a writer can attempt, because every movement has to be imagined, sequenced and made legible to a reader who cannot see it, and doing that repeatedly without falling into the same pattern is harder still. Most writers space their battles out for exactly this reason. This author does not, and yet each sequence is distinct, with its own shape and its own problem to solve. That is a real skill and it deserves recognition.

My reservation is about how much of the book they occupy. There are stretches where two or three pages pass before the next killing, and while the action keeps things moving, the accumulation begins to blur. I love action, but I found myself wanting to sit with Jaml for longer. His guilt, his prayers for forgiveness after a righteous killing, and his difficulty reconciling faith with slaughter are the most interesting things about him, and they are the first things crowded out when the fighting resumes. What happens to him across the novel is revelation rather than change. His identity is exposed and his world is torn apart, but he ends the book essentially the man he was at the start, and I would have liked to see the cost of everything he endures actually land on him. Readers who come to dark fantasy for relentless action will not mind any of this, and many will consider the pace a feature rather than a flaw.

I enjoyed the second half of the novel more than the first. I suspect that is because the story spends a stretch away from Colley, and the return brings Jaml back among the characters established at the outset. Being reunited with them as the book builds towards its climax felt more satisfying and more even. The later chapters are as much about the bonds between these people as they are about the blood, and the novel is stronger for it. The ending deserves particular credit. It resolves the story it set out to tell rather than stopping on a cliffhanger, while still leaving the series somewhere to go, and that is a harder balance to strike than it looks.

The prose mixes contemporary phrasing with the elevated register expected of high fantasy, which I enjoyed.

An ambitious, violent and genuinely dark entry in biblical fantasy horror, and one that asks for some stamina from its reader.