I am now reading the fourth book in the series. I'm just taking a short break to write this review.

I like a lot of things about it! After the first few pages you have your setting. It is a simple thing. Every night demons come out of the ground and start killing everything. Humans, at least those that are alive, know "wards" that they can paint or engrave, and which demons cannot pass.

There are a few different civilizations, past mysteries, prophecies, what not. But absolutely everything is concerned with demons and wards. For example the primary difference between civilizations, and even individual characters, is how they deal with demons.

I love this focus. The immense complexity and consistency around this core topic results in an engineering-like perspective. Sure, it's magic and not spaceships and robots, but still the books have a lot of fun with building clever things out of basic blocks. I think this is what has me hooked.

I like the writing. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it surprises me sometimes. Like a character is just walking somewhere, or lying sick, or riding a horse, and this simple activity is described in a paragraph with the addition of an unexpectedly profound thought.

A lot of fantasy novels create their own unique phrases. The Warded Man & Co do a great job of that. E.g. "It's a fallen tree. No point climbing it." says the woodcutter to wave away a past offense.

The books visit some social themes, like homelessness, misogyny, social pressures, etc. It's not bad, but these are not the focus at all, and I do not think the author has anything important to say about them. "Don't be a jerk," I guess.

The books have a very consistent quality. I almost always find the first book in a series to be way better than the rest. (I think it makes sense statistically! If the first and second books are of independently randomly chosen quality, and I read mostly popular books, I will mostly find the first book to be way higher quality than the second. If it is the other way, this series will not become popular.)

I wonder if there are some ideas held within these books. What are they really about? I think there is most likely no such deeper meaning. They are just good fun. They are very much like video games, actually! You can practically hear the fanfare when a hero "levels up". In later books there is very much a "mana bar" visible to the characters themselves. (Also might explain why I'm hooked.)

But after reading so much of it, I am starting to find deeper meaning anyway. I think an interesting theme is the theme of power. Different characters get different forms of power in different ways and use them differently. But a lot of them have immense power and how it bears on them is an interesting topic. Imagine you could just personally beat up armies. Great! But it is not trivial what your next step is.

Okay, the thing I don't like is that the characters and scenes are all slave to the pre-determined story. Characters will do silly things, just to fulfill the story. There are no accidents, nothing unexpected ever happens. All clever plans succeed. There is never a case where two clever plans would conflict and one of them would have to fail.

Actually there are a few cases when something unexpected happens. This is when the story needs something and it is just pulled out of thin air. "Check out this new alloy we randomly found!"

I think these could be fixed with a considerable amount of work. I think it is too much to expect one person to write a book. Video games, TV series, and movies are made by large teams. With more than one person working, there would be resources left for addressing these weaknesses. Or make it open-source and let fans fix these for version 2.0 of the books.

"Corespawn it, Renna!"