The Warded Man by Peter V. Brett is a dark fantasy masterpiece

With summer on hold, it’s a great time to thin out that To-Read pile on your nightstand. In my case, that meant finally diving into The Demon Cycle.

With many summer activities on hold, it’s a great time to thin down that To-Read pile on your nightstand and power through all those books you always meant to get around to. In my case, that meant finally dipping my toes into The Demon Cycle.

Written by Peter V. Brett, The Demon Cycle is one of those rare fantasy series that can stand alongside the big works in the genre, like Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book in the series, The Warded Man, was released to general acclaim in 2008, and since then Brett’s dark fantasy saga has continued gathering steam as it worked toward its ending, the 2017 epic, The Core.

But hype aside, how does The Demon Cycle actually stack up? Are these books worth investing precious reading time?

The short answer: absolutely.

The Warded Man is set in a world where demons called corelings — so named because of their subterranean home, the Core — rise every night and try to eviscerate any human caught outside and unprotected. The only defense humans have are wards, symbols they can etch into their houses, around their campsites, and into the walls of their few remaining cities in order to keep the demons out. Basically, the wards create force-fields that the demons can’t cross, and as the story goes on, the various uses of wards out in the world becomes an integral part of the tale. At the outset, most humans have long accepted that there is no way for them to fight back against the demons. The best they can hope for is keeping the wards around their settlements maintained, and praying that the demons don’t find a way through.

Brett uses his ward magic system to excellent effect, mining its subtleties to deliver surprising twists in the middle of actions scenes. The wards are treated like a science in the series, not dissimilar from the way that Patrick Rothfuss handled his magic system in The Kingkiller Chronicle. They are a realistic, well-defined part of the world, and since the rules of the system are made relatively clear, it brings a different level of tension when a ward is covered by mud or scuffed by a boot.

But for as cool as the magic system is, it’s the tone and characters that really elevate The Warded Man from a good book to a truly great one.

First, let’s talk about the tone. In the countless hours that I’ve spent plumbing the depths of fantasy novels, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a story where the grim dark-ness was as ever-present as it is here. While Brett’s writing is’nt as outright graphic as George R.R. Martin’s or Joe Abercrombie’s (at least not in Book 1), he sets an ominous tone that permeates every page of the novel.  The darkness is a part of the world, whether you’re reading a twisted description of human cruelty in a backwoods village or a desert ambush by sand demons. The Warded Man could be a case study for how to masterfully layer brooding tension into every scene. The best thing I can think to compare it to is the Diablo video game franchise, except with much more cohesive worldbuilding and characters that are so well-developed they might as well be real people.

For all that darkness, however, The Warded Man also abides by that famous Joss Whedon quote: “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.” There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments peppered throughout the story, keeping the grimness of the world from ever truly taking over. One character in particular, the old herb gatherer Bruna, deserves a special shout out. She steals just about every scene she’s in, as she alternates between the sort of scathing insults that only a wiry old crone could imagine, and swift thwackings with her cane.

When it comes to the characters, The Warded Man keeps things relatively compact for an epic fantasy novel. There are three main players — Arlen, Leesha and Rojer — and every chapter revolves around at least one of them. Each is the survivor of a demon attack, and in each case, that trauma has sent them down a different road. Since the story stays so honed in on those characters, it’s easy to get invested in their journeys.

And that’s good, because the pacing in this book is kind of odd. At times, it can assume the slow, plodding pace of a classic Tolkien-esque fantasy novel, especially during the first half of the story, which mainly details the childhoods of the three leads.

In fact, I’d say that if there’s any qualm to be had with The Warded Man, it’s that if you don’t particularly like the fantasy trope of following characters from childhood to epic-hero-hood, you might have a hard time with the early sections of the book. To Brett, the childhood experiences of the characters are extremely important to who they become later in life. Of course this makes perfect sense, but it means we have several hundred pages of character building before things really start taking off.

That being said, those slower sections are still gripping in their own way. The upside to Brett’s approach is that the character development is deep. We not only get to see the formative events of these characters’ lives, but we also spend years and years of their lives with them. And even though the first half of the novel is slower than the latter, it does contains more than a few great action scenes, especially where the main protagonist Arlen Bales is concerned.

Thankfully, when The Warded Man isn’t in slow burn territory, it really moves. Once the book hits its halfway point, events start coming along at breakneck speed, with set pieces so big they can span multiple chapters. And since all that time was spent developing Arlen, Leesha and Rojer from childhood, it allows the reader to really feel what each triumph or tragedy means to them.

And some of those twists are truly tragic. There’s one in particular that happens late in the book which, done by a less sensitive author, might have been too difficult to stomach. But as with every other part of this book, Peter V. Brett’s choices about what to emphasize and what to omit and made carefully and for maximum effect. Still, a trigger warning might be in order. Like war itself, The Warded Man is not for the faint of heart.

The final verdict, so far as this reader is concerned, is that The Warded Man is a dark fantasy masterpiece. And if it’s any indication of The Demon Cycle as a whole, then it promises to be a powerful ride.

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