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Darkness of the Northern Sky: An Epic Sword and Sorcery Fantasy Novel
A battle-weary warrior must fight to stop a merciless sorceress from building an empire of shadows. Commander General Soltari is a frontline soldier who longed to be with his family. When supernatural forces from the North attack his home and murder his wife and daughter, he leads an expedition north to seek his revenge on the sadistic sorceress and her allies. Now, after a supernatural blizzard decimates his force, he must find his way home to fulfill a promise he made, and kill the Queen of Shadows who has taken over his homeland.
469 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 13, 2023
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6 people want to read
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May 14, 2023
Advanced Review Copy provided by the author in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to A. E. Engle and BookFunnel.
Score: 2/5
Since this is an ARC, the review aims to be as Spoiler-free as possible.
Blurb: A battle-weary warrior must fight to stop a merciless sorceress from building an empire of shadows. Commander General Soltari is a frontline soldier who longed to be with his family. When supernatural forces from the North attack his home and murder his wife and daughter, he leads an expedition north to seek his revenge on the sadistic sorceress and her allies. Now, after a supernatural blizzard decimates his force, he must find his way home to fulfill a promise he made, and kill the Queen of Shadows who has taken over his homeland.
Worldbuilding and Characters: 2/5
Darkness of the Northern Sky is set in a world with next to no real work done to create a suitable backdrop to tell an enjoyable story. With no maps to guide the reader, I felt myself struggling to make any sense of scale, distances, topography, or flavor to create any kind of distinct picture in my imagination. There is also very little in terms of connection made to any real world analogs beyond north = cold, east = desert, yet are somehow adjacent to one another? The world doesn’t seem “lived in” and the descriptions of any of the notable points of interest (cities, towns, forests, battlegrounds, etc.) are extremely vague and generic. The cities all blend together in terms of description with nearly no bearing or cultural connection to the region they are set in. The entire worldbuilding in this book could be summed up like some unfinished indie videogame in pre-alpha development without anything specific dropped into the world and mere placeholder identities.
Speaking of placeholder identities, the names of the places, cities, buildings, etc. were significantly infuriating and Engle’s naming convention in this novel is by far the most frustrating part of the entire experience. The author simultaneously tries extremely hard and doesn’t try at all while laying out names to his world. Here are a couple of names of the locations, cities, and other geographical aspects in Darkness of the Northern Sky: Northern Lands, Southern Lands, Western Lands, Black Road, Black River, White River, Great City, Tower of the Fallen Empire of the New Dawn, etc. while ALSO naming certain other places with apostrophes that make no sense and do nothing except confuse the reader. Honestly, I spent more time merely rolling my eyes at just how incongruent and downright lazy and uneven his naming system was for EVERYTHING.
My complaints about the nomenclature in this novel will continue later…
So the world is vague, and the setting is uneven, perhaps this is a character driven novel right?
Wrong!
The characters in this novel are just as mundanely vanilla as the setting, if not more so. Our protagonist is Commander General Soltari from the Northern Lands, a high ranking grizzled war hero from the frontier, supposedly ready for retirement to a quiet life of retirement with his wife and young child. I was expecting a highly competent but world-weary warrior with interesting commentary on the world he lives in, forced into a conflict far beyond his high capabilities, plagued by the deaths of his family, unleashing his rage upon the world while being beaten down by seemingly unsurmountable odds. That would have made for a commonly told, but still enjoyable story.
However, Commander Soltari is by far the WHINIEST warrior I have ever read in all my years of reading dark fantasy. He isn’t written to be a stoic, rugged, yet ultimately jaded warrior like Logen Ninefingers (First Law) or even similar to the powerful malice wrought from the severe self-loathing of Marith Altrersyr (Empire of Dust). Soltari’s entire persona hinges around whining about the deaths of his family while simultaneously being frustratingly incompetent (for being a decorated war hero and senior counsellor to the Lord of his realm) protagonist to really do anything about it for most of the book. I found myself struggling to even paint a picture of what he looked like or how he interacted with the world through his accumulated personality, especially egregious since this novel is told with a first person narrative style, allowing for more nuanced storytelling via reading the internal thoughts and emotions about what was going on.
In a complete weird character development our hero and our avenging champion who will take on the NecroQueen herself to punish her for killing his wife and daughter does this:
“Tears ran down her face and she made no attempt to wipe them away. They dropped onto the dusty floor like raindrops. I wiped one away with my thumb and held it to my lips. Then left.”
And the author is not talking about his dearly departed wife here.
Eww.
Bonus challenge: take a shot every time Soltari passes out and wakes up in another plot setting, and take a shot every time a male war veteran bursts into tears. While there is value in portraying your grizzled males with emotions worth displaying, the constant crying was more cringeworthy than emotive.
The other “major” characters were just as generic with very little to distinguish them from a vague draft prompt like “gruff but friendly viking” or “mystical desert warrior”. The side characters mattered so little that I couldn’t tell them apart even while reading the book. Their lives in the book were just as pointless as their deaths.
While the naming of the places were either overly lazy or overly complex, the naming of the characters were just plain strange to downright confusing. The names bore ZERO semblance to their world location. Us as veteran readers have come to expect a certain stylistic choice of character names usually connected to the region from which they hail from, usually reasonably connected to real world counterparts. A warrior from the frozen northern wastelands usually comes with some kind of norse or celtic names, from the deserts with some kind of arabesque names. From a city teeming with opulence and culture, with some kind of Mediterranean name. In this novel, the names felt like they were randomly pulled out from a bag and tacked onto the character. For example: the main protagonist, a rugged northerner is given a Italian/roman sounding name in Soltari, one of his fellow warrior generals, a Portuguese-ish name, another a Swedish sounding name. The whole thing felt so haphazard and incredibly frustrating to make sense of.
Luckily, my brain automatically divested itself off all effort of trying to keep track of these silly names of these whiteboard characters and started internally naming them as General 1, Warrior 2, which didn’t affect the flow of the story at all, because nobody makes any real contribution to the story anyway.
The antagonist, the infamous Queen of Shadows (real name as stupidly inane as the rest of the names in this novel, and instantly forgotten) (smut-fantasy slashfic writers come up with less generic titles) is a vaguely necromancer-y witch who has some vague control over the elements to conjure up storms and blizzards (apparently important enough to be included in the blurb, yet ultimately just as pointless as the rest of the story). She is able to necro-up several kinds of creatures with similarly stupid names which are instantly confusing, and quickly forgotten (but hey even THEY GET GODDAMN APOSTROPHES) for even hardboiled dark fantasy fans like me who are comfortable with any kind of monstrosity you can throw at me. Her motivations are so weak, I almost wanted her to succeed if only to see what she would do after. The downright teenage-tier story of “oh I was wronged in the past by evil man so I must rid the world of all life” is so tired, even high school readers would roll their eyes at it.
Plot and Pacing: 1.5/5
The plot in Darkness in the Northern Sky is severely underwhelming. A revenge plot has been done to death, and needs much more nuance or at least a twisted path with a satisfying well-earned culmination of any existing subplots to leave the reader satisfied and able to move on. This book has none of that. As mentioned earlier, the protagonist’s contributions to the plot are near zero, and he is simply carried from one checkpoint to another by some random intervention by the cartoonish antagonist, or by interacting with some NPC pointing him in some direction toward some city or another.
The author tries to give an incredibly straightforward story of “You Killed My Family, You Must Die!” some semblance of girth by adding a smattering of geopolitical intrigue with the Southern Lands being enemies with the Northern Lands because the Northern Lands invaded and stole the kingdom away from the Eastern Lands, and the Western Lands have some kind of hidden dark secret that creates the villain, and you can see just how silly this sounds. The worst part is that none of this backstory or subplotting leads anywhere or has any bearing on the actual conflict. I cannot say phoned in loudly enough!
One of the worst things that Engle repeatedly does, is have Soltari COMPLETELY AND INSTANTLY move on from ANY plot revelation made to him via evidence or conversation with the other NPCs. He literally DOES NOT REACT AT ALL.
The pacing is terribly uneven, with the first three acts of the novel proceeding at a near snails pace with very few action set pieces or plot-driven twists, and felt like the author was trying to set up a trilogy before pivoting away at the final moment and rushing through the final quarter toward an unsatisfying conclusion. To give you an idea of just how uneven the final conflict is, the author devotes more than three of the final chapters to the final showdown, only to have this Walmart WitchQueen, MONOLOGUE for over one and a half chapters. The Incredibles already made fun of
this trope in 2004, but Engle probably skipped the lesson while writing this novel.
I also find it mildly funny that the author namedrops the title of the book several times in the story and gave me severe “Suicide Squad” meme vibes.
Prose: 1.5/5
Along with Engle’s downright insulting naming convention, his prose is also terribly uneven and quite often jarringly anachronistic. He makes the cardinal modern fantasy sin of using apostrophes in his names (take a shot every time you encounter a new name with an apostrophe in it, I dare you!) as well as makes the amateurish mistake of using numerals to describe numbers in fantasy prose. I mention his sins of naming things so often because it plagues every facet of this book and tremendously lowered the overall enjoyment while consuming this content.
As mentioned earlier, none of the characters have any distinct voice shown via handcrafted prose, but worse still he randomly throws in middle english pronouns like “thee” and “thou” yet turns around and uses modern words like “ok” in the next paragraph. I’m sorry but a random gatekeeper using middle english laden “posh” speak for literally two sentences and then reverting to bog standard vanilla prose is confusing. It breaks immersion and just comes off as shoddy writing.
There were several grammatical mistakes and typos throughout the prose in this novel, and a few instances of awkward verbiage and phraseology but these are the least of this book’s concerns, and hopefully will be fixed before final release.
Overall impression:
From the blurb and the cover, I went into this story expecting a dark fantasy tale with near-grimdark themes about a grizzled warrior forced into a battle with a magical force much more powerful than himself led by the major antagonist, the Queen of Shadows in a grim and frostbitten journey of violence and malice.
What I got instead was an insipid tale centered around a protagonist with no discernible personality in a paper-thin setting, surrounded by characters of zero real contribution, in a world devoid of any real weight, culminating in a battle against an antagonist with childish motivations in an altogether lukewarm package laced with uneven prose and GODAWAFUL NAMING SYSTEMS!
Score: 2/5
Since this is an ARC, the review aims to be as Spoiler-free as possible.
Blurb: A battle-weary warrior must fight to stop a merciless sorceress from building an empire of shadows. Commander General Soltari is a frontline soldier who longed to be with his family. When supernatural forces from the North attack his home and murder his wife and daughter, he leads an expedition north to seek his revenge on the sadistic sorceress and her allies. Now, after a supernatural blizzard decimates his force, he must find his way home to fulfill a promise he made, and kill the Queen of Shadows who has taken over his homeland.
Worldbuilding and Characters: 2/5
Darkness of the Northern Sky is set in a world with next to no real work done to create a suitable backdrop to tell an enjoyable story. With no maps to guide the reader, I felt myself struggling to make any sense of scale, distances, topography, or flavor to create any kind of distinct picture in my imagination. There is also very little in terms of connection made to any real world analogs beyond north = cold, east = desert, yet are somehow adjacent to one another? The world doesn’t seem “lived in” and the descriptions of any of the notable points of interest (cities, towns, forests, battlegrounds, etc.) are extremely vague and generic. The cities all blend together in terms of description with nearly no bearing or cultural connection to the region they are set in. The entire worldbuilding in this book could be summed up like some unfinished indie videogame in pre-alpha development without anything specific dropped into the world and mere placeholder identities.
Speaking of placeholder identities, the names of the places, cities, buildings, etc. were significantly infuriating and Engle’s naming convention in this novel is by far the most frustrating part of the entire experience. The author simultaneously tries extremely hard and doesn’t try at all while laying out names to his world. Here are a couple of names of the locations, cities, and other geographical aspects in Darkness of the Northern Sky: Northern Lands, Southern Lands, Western Lands, Black Road, Black River, White River, Great City, Tower of the Fallen Empire of the New Dawn, etc. while ALSO naming certain other places with apostrophes that make no sense and do nothing except confuse the reader. Honestly, I spent more time merely rolling my eyes at just how incongruent and downright lazy and uneven his naming system was for EVERYTHING.
My complaints about the nomenclature in this novel will continue later…
So the world is vague, and the setting is uneven, perhaps this is a character driven novel right?
Wrong!
The characters in this novel are just as mundanely vanilla as the setting, if not more so. Our protagonist is Commander General Soltari from the Northern Lands, a high ranking grizzled war hero from the frontier, supposedly ready for retirement to a quiet life of retirement with his wife and young child. I was expecting a highly competent but world-weary warrior with interesting commentary on the world he lives in, forced into a conflict far beyond his high capabilities, plagued by the deaths of his family, unleashing his rage upon the world while being beaten down by seemingly unsurmountable odds. That would have made for a commonly told, but still enjoyable story.
However, Commander Soltari is by far the WHINIEST warrior I have ever read in all my years of reading dark fantasy. He isn’t written to be a stoic, rugged, yet ultimately jaded warrior like Logen Ninefingers (First Law) or even similar to the powerful malice wrought from the severe self-loathing of Marith Altrersyr (Empire of Dust). Soltari’s entire persona hinges around whining about the deaths of his family while simultaneously being frustratingly incompetent (for being a decorated war hero and senior counsellor to the Lord of his realm) protagonist to really do anything about it for most of the book. I found myself struggling to even paint a picture of what he looked like or how he interacted with the world through his accumulated personality, especially egregious since this novel is told with a first person narrative style, allowing for more nuanced storytelling via reading the internal thoughts and emotions about what was going on.
In a complete weird character development our hero and our avenging champion who will take on the NecroQueen herself to punish her for killing his wife and daughter does this:
“Tears ran down her face and she made no attempt to wipe them away. They dropped onto the dusty floor like raindrops. I wiped one away with my thumb and held it to my lips. Then left.”
And the author is not talking about his dearly departed wife here.
Eww.
Bonus challenge: take a shot every time Soltari passes out and wakes up in another plot setting, and take a shot every time a male war veteran bursts into tears. While there is value in portraying your grizzled males with emotions worth displaying, the constant crying was more cringeworthy than emotive.
The other “major” characters were just as generic with very little to distinguish them from a vague draft prompt like “gruff but friendly viking” or “mystical desert warrior”. The side characters mattered so little that I couldn’t tell them apart even while reading the book. Their lives in the book were just as pointless as their deaths.
While the naming of the places were either overly lazy or overly complex, the naming of the characters were just plain strange to downright confusing. The names bore ZERO semblance to their world location. Us as veteran readers have come to expect a certain stylistic choice of character names usually connected to the region from which they hail from, usually reasonably connected to real world counterparts. A warrior from the frozen northern wastelands usually comes with some kind of norse or celtic names, from the deserts with some kind of arabesque names. From a city teeming with opulence and culture, with some kind of Mediterranean name. In this novel, the names felt like they were randomly pulled out from a bag and tacked onto the character. For example: the main protagonist, a rugged northerner is given a Italian/roman sounding name in Soltari, one of his fellow warrior generals, a Portuguese-ish name, another a Swedish sounding name. The whole thing felt so haphazard and incredibly frustrating to make sense of.
Luckily, my brain automatically divested itself off all effort of trying to keep track of these silly names of these whiteboard characters and started internally naming them as General 1, Warrior 2, which didn’t affect the flow of the story at all, because nobody makes any real contribution to the story anyway.
The antagonist, the infamous Queen of Shadows (real name as stupidly inane as the rest of the names in this novel, and instantly forgotten) (smut-fantasy slashfic writers come up with less generic titles) is a vaguely necromancer-y witch who has some vague control over the elements to conjure up storms and blizzards (apparently important enough to be included in the blurb, yet ultimately just as pointless as the rest of the story). She is able to necro-up several kinds of creatures with similarly stupid names which are instantly confusing, and quickly forgotten (but hey even THEY GET GODDAMN APOSTROPHES) for even hardboiled dark fantasy fans like me who are comfortable with any kind of monstrosity you can throw at me. Her motivations are so weak, I almost wanted her to succeed if only to see what she would do after. The downright teenage-tier story of “oh I was wronged in the past by evil man so I must rid the world of all life” is so tired, even high school readers would roll their eyes at it.
Plot and Pacing: 1.5/5
The plot in Darkness in the Northern Sky is severely underwhelming. A revenge plot has been done to death, and needs much more nuance or at least a twisted path with a satisfying well-earned culmination of any existing subplots to leave the reader satisfied and able to move on. This book has none of that. As mentioned earlier, the protagonist’s contributions to the plot are near zero, and he is simply carried from one checkpoint to another by some random intervention by the cartoonish antagonist, or by interacting with some NPC pointing him in some direction toward some city or another.
The author tries to give an incredibly straightforward story of “You Killed My Family, You Must Die!” some semblance of girth by adding a smattering of geopolitical intrigue with the Southern Lands being enemies with the Northern Lands because the Northern Lands invaded and stole the kingdom away from the Eastern Lands, and the Western Lands have some kind of hidden dark secret that creates the villain, and you can see just how silly this sounds. The worst part is that none of this backstory or subplotting leads anywhere or has any bearing on the actual conflict. I cannot say phoned in loudly enough!
One of the worst things that Engle repeatedly does, is have Soltari COMPLETELY AND INSTANTLY move on from ANY plot revelation made to him via evidence or conversation with the other NPCs. He literally DOES NOT REACT AT ALL.
The pacing is terribly uneven, with the first three acts of the novel proceeding at a near snails pace with very few action set pieces or plot-driven twists, and felt like the author was trying to set up a trilogy before pivoting away at the final moment and rushing through the final quarter toward an unsatisfying conclusion. To give you an idea of just how uneven the final conflict is, the author devotes more than three of the final chapters to the final showdown, only to have this Walmart WitchQueen, MONOLOGUE for over one and a half chapters. The Incredibles already made fun of
this trope in 2004, but Engle probably skipped the lesson while writing this novel.
I also find it mildly funny that the author namedrops the title of the book several times in the story and gave me severe “Suicide Squad” meme vibes.
Prose: 1.5/5
Along with Engle’s downright insulting naming convention, his prose is also terribly uneven and quite often jarringly anachronistic. He makes the cardinal modern fantasy sin of using apostrophes in his names (take a shot every time you encounter a new name with an apostrophe in it, I dare you!) as well as makes the amateurish mistake of using numerals to describe numbers in fantasy prose. I mention his sins of naming things so often because it plagues every facet of this book and tremendously lowered the overall enjoyment while consuming this content.
As mentioned earlier, none of the characters have any distinct voice shown via handcrafted prose, but worse still he randomly throws in middle english pronouns like “thee” and “thou” yet turns around and uses modern words like “ok” in the next paragraph. I’m sorry but a random gatekeeper using middle english laden “posh” speak for literally two sentences and then reverting to bog standard vanilla prose is confusing. It breaks immersion and just comes off as shoddy writing.
There were several grammatical mistakes and typos throughout the prose in this novel, and a few instances of awkward verbiage and phraseology but these are the least of this book’s concerns, and hopefully will be fixed before final release.
Overall impression:
From the blurb and the cover, I went into this story expecting a dark fantasy tale with near-grimdark themes about a grizzled warrior forced into a battle with a magical force much more powerful than himself led by the major antagonist, the Queen of Shadows in a grim and frostbitten journey of violence and malice.
What I got instead was an insipid tale centered around a protagonist with no discernible personality in a paper-thin setting, surrounded by characters of zero real contribution, in a world devoid of any real weight, culminating in a battle against an antagonist with childish motivations in an altogether lukewarm package laced with uneven prose and GODAWAFUL NAMING SYSTEMS!
Read
June 12, 2023"Darkness of the Northern Sky" by A. E. Engle presents itself as a war epic, of a general dedicated to defending his kingdom from a great evil, but I found it was really about the personal journey of a heartbroken man.
Commander Soltari is weary of war, but is drawn to one last stand against evil forces that threaten the Northern Kingdom. Instead of retribution, he finds desolation and madness, and a burden of sorrow that follows him the rest of the book. In terms of his personal journey and the larger battle, the book does have resolution and a satisfying ending.
I did find the pacing and prose a bit challenging, in that his angst and emotional overwhelm drove the first three-quarters. Although he traveled across the map during this time, much of his movement was the result of other people's actions, and his consciousness of those decisions was intermittent and half-hearted. The action and pace picked up in the last quarter, as he takes greater control of his life. In a similar vein, I was frustrated by how little agency he often seemed to have, with many key decisions occurring by others' hands rather than his own. Again, he improves this toward the end and it was likely tied into his personal journey, but it was still infuriating.
The other thing I struggled with was Soltari's characterization. He is introduced as the war-hardened general with an entire career of bloodshed behind him, but many of his decisions and actions in the book reflect those of a younger officer, perhaps one groomed for leadership but never faced with such overwhelming odds. He is impulsive, driven by emotion-laden vengeance and blinded by hate, and he employs little strategy. He weeps for family while sleeping with another woman. He frequently lets despair get the better of him rather than leading his troops. I would have found him far more understandable had he been a young officer thrust into seniority by the sudden deaths of his superiors in the war against evil, but that wasn't who he was meant to be.
The monsters are hideous, the villain easy to despise, and the horror of the infected dead worse than anything. The winter storm was reminiscent of "The Wayfarer Redemption" in the way it carried frosty death, hopelessness, and monstrosities, and the constant journeying was like many other fantasy stories in which the characters search for answers and allies. I wished I had a map to better follow along, to better understand Soltari's path.
This story is written in first-person past tense.
Commander Soltari is weary of war, but is drawn to one last stand against evil forces that threaten the Northern Kingdom. Instead of retribution, he finds desolation and madness, and a burden of sorrow that follows him the rest of the book. In terms of his personal journey and the larger battle, the book does have resolution and a satisfying ending.
I did find the pacing and prose a bit challenging, in that his angst and emotional overwhelm drove the first three-quarters. Although he traveled across the map during this time, much of his movement was the result of other people's actions, and his consciousness of those decisions was intermittent and half-hearted. The action and pace picked up in the last quarter, as he takes greater control of his life. In a similar vein, I was frustrated by how little agency he often seemed to have, with many key decisions occurring by others' hands rather than his own. Again, he improves this toward the end and it was likely tied into his personal journey, but it was still infuriating.
The other thing I struggled with was Soltari's characterization. He is introduced as the war-hardened general with an entire career of bloodshed behind him, but many of his decisions and actions in the book reflect those of a younger officer, perhaps one groomed for leadership but never faced with such overwhelming odds. He is impulsive, driven by emotion-laden vengeance and blinded by hate, and he employs little strategy. He weeps for family while sleeping with another woman. He frequently lets despair get the better of him rather than leading his troops. I would have found him far more understandable had he been a young officer thrust into seniority by the sudden deaths of his superiors in the war against evil, but that wasn't who he was meant to be.
The monsters are hideous, the villain easy to despise, and the horror of the infected dead worse than anything. The winter storm was reminiscent of "The Wayfarer Redemption" in the way it carried frosty death, hopelessness, and monstrosities, and the constant journeying was like many other fantasy stories in which the characters search for answers and allies. I wished I had a map to better follow along, to better understand Soltari's path.
This story is written in first-person past tense.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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