Review: Deathless by Rob J. Hayes

Blurb:

Seven were the Godless Kings who took their war to Heaven.

King Ertide Hostain was once known as the Crimson Prince. He fought side by side with angels and pegasi and defended the Sant Dien Empire against monsters. But his pact with Heaven has become strained. He has grown old, his body rots, and he has yet to choose which squabbling prince will be his heir.

The Hostain dynasty has ruled over the empire for millennia, but when Ertide finds cryptic notes from his dead father, he realises not all is as it seems. Has history been rewritten? And if so, what is heaven hiding?

Immortality has a price, and it is paid in blood.

Review:

When Rob J. Hayes first announced the God Eater Saga, I had no doubt in my mind that the sum of its parts would equal a truly unique and tremendous epic. Having recently read Demon, the first chronological book in the saga, my expectations going into Deathless, the first of the Annals of the God Eater trilogy, were very high. And while it did not reach the same heights as Demon, this entry is still highly enjoyable and is only further cementing that this saga is going to be a modern-day classic.

Set one thousand years before the events of the main trilogy, Deathless follows King Ertide Hostain, the monarch of the Sant Dien Empire. For millennia, the Empire has stood alongside angels to defend its borders in accordance with the will of God. However, for all his heroics in his younger years, Ertide is now an old man inching nearer and nearer to death, and the angels, much to his chagrin, are pulling him along on strings to satisfy God’s will and pushing him to abdicate his throne and name on of his children as heir to the empire. But things are never so simple, and when the veil covering the relationship between humanity and angels is lifted from Ertide’s eyes, he has no choice but to question his faith and seek out how to cut the strings that have long pulled him along.

At its core, Deathless is a political fantasy. Running in the background for much of the book is the question of who Ertide is going to name as his heir. However, none of his five children are suitable to succeed him for a variety of reasons, from disinterest in ruling to arrogance to madness, and the insistence of the angels for him to abdicate his throne only exacerbates the issue. While this plotline felt a bit rushed, and the payoff ultimately feeling an afterthought, the dynamic of family politics was explored quite well. Royal succession is an interesting affair in this book, where the first in line does not want the throne and wants only to fight, while the youngest in the line of succession may be the best suited, but naming him as heir would be an unwanted disruption.

With this in the background, at the forefront lies the conspiracy of what the angels are hiding from humanity. There is a secret to the power the angels hold over them, but few are those who Ertide believes he can entrust it to.

There’s a slow build-up to everything until it all erupts at the end, but after the relentless pace of Demon, Deathless feels a bit more of a meander in comparison. It’s not bad by any means, mind, and the pieces are placed on the board well. However, for the shorter length of the book, I felt the ratio of set-up to payoff was a bit more skewed toward the set-up, and the payoff did not last nearly long enough for me to fully appreciate it and let it sink in.

This would be more of an issue, though, if the main cast did not lift Deathless up their shoulders as well as they did. Ertide is a fascinating and unique lead—one of the first terminally ill elderly protagonists I’ve encountered in an epic fantasy work—and his relationship with his eccentric angel companion Moon, his interactions with his children and grandchildren, the marital obligations with his young wife, they are all enough to make this a page-turner even when the story is at a slow crawl. This is a consistent strength in Hayes’ books, and it is no different here in Deathless. 

I believe there’s also a lift given to Deathless by having read Demon first. While much of the references to the first chronological novel are of an Easter egg variety, the conspiratorial nature of the Deathless’ plot was enough to make me reflect on the events of Demon and think on what had happened in the intervening millennia. What became of the relationship between humanity and Heaven? How much of history will be rewritten? Hayes has spoken at length of getting the whole picture by reading each individual piece of this segmented saga, and I think doing so made Deathless that much more enjoyable for me.

Overall, Deathless feels like a foundational book. It’s a very enjoyable one, but it takes a bit too much time getting to where it wants to go, but where it’s going to take off from here, I truly cannot wait to see.