The Shattered Line: The Corrosion of Ages Trilogy Book One

by Jasper L. Walker, Christopher Bellehewe (Editor)

'Ferocious and highly enjoyable.'
- Anna Smith Spark

'An ambitious, blood-soaked dark fantasy debut with notes of Gentleman Bastards, Berserk, and Lovecraft. An all-consuming tome.' - FanFiAddict


For fans of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, Glen Cook, Scott Lynch, Anna Smith Spark, Brian McClellan, Evan Winter, and Brent Weeks.

If you're tired of the endless churn of meaningless gore and pointless nihilism, if you want to read Grimdark Epic Fantasy done right, add it to your Want To Read!


What am I getting into?

The Lies of Locke Lamora inspired Oceans Eleven style Heist Fantasy

The Rage of Dragons inspired Revenge Fantasy

Horror (just because I love horror)

Brian McClellan & Brent Weeks inspired Military Fantasy

Broken Earth inspired Apocalypse Fantasy

Lovecraft inspired Cosmic Horror Fantasy

Sanderson inspired Magical Discovery Fantasy

Sarah J. Maas inspired Romance Fantasy

But deep down, it's about the corrosion of self and society in a world that just doesn’t give a damn. The Shattered Line balances the darkness with equal light and joy - because darkness hurts most when there's something beautiful to lose.



Blurb:


The world is broken, the universe empty. Only a remnant of a remnant remains. A vast darkness waits to finish the job... for the last time.

The Butcher of Yill - murderer of millions and Arch Priest of the Stained Church - has finally found the Artefact that will free the Gods.

To save the world, Khanis must keep carving a path through blood and innocents even if it destroys him. Will the survivors of his massacres thank him, in the end?

Turen Draneer lives for vengeance after the loss of his family. He'll rip the Butcher's throat out with his teeth, or die trying.

Does losing yourself for revenge make it pointless? Can anything fill the hole they left in his heart?

The Ghost of Yamir and his crew of thieves steal for thrill and profit until a job gone wrong forces them into a deadly game with the most dangerous man alive... the Butcher.

Can anyone survive Khanis's plans? What truths lurk beneath the vile deceptions?

The beginning of a saga of Gods and ruin, destruction and time, power and corruption. Humanity forgets, and so is doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

"YOU LET ME IN. THE PRISON IS NO MORE. THE SHATTERED LINE BEGINS THE FINAL END OF ALL THINGS."


If you're intrigued, add it to your Want To Read right now!

Genres: Fantasy, Dark Fantasy

740 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 3, 2026

Reviews

[E. P. Soulless · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grimdark Heist That Hemorrhages Grit.

I went into The Shattered Line expecting a dive into the grimdark depths, and Jasper L. Walker's debut delivers exactly that: a foul, unrelenting cocktail of heist thrills, vengeful fury, and cosmic horror in a world that's already half-dead and itching to finish the job. The scope here is wildly ambitious, weaving a crew of desperate thieves, a genocidal butcher with god-sized plans, and threads of apocalypse and revenge that feel like they're unraveling the universe itself. It's bleak as hell, grim to the bone, and unapologetically foul in all the ways that make the genre sing. No heroes, just survivors clawing through the muck, with eldritch shadows lurking in every scheme gone wrong. Overall, I liked it—quite a lot, actually. Walker nails what he's aiming for, crafting a story that corrodes your expectations and leaves you scarred in that satisfying, "why do I love this poison?" way.

However, I must be honest: I was a bit torn. That same ambition pulls the narrative in too many directions at once, overwhelming the momentum with side quests and world-shattering detours that, while immersive, start to feel like they're chasing their own tail. And at its length? It's a touch too long—dare I say bloated?—with some stretches that could've been trimmed to keep the blade sharper. In a book this dark, every extra page risks diluting the despair.

If you're craving a grimdark epic that doesn't flinch (think Gentleman Bastard meets early Lovecraft), grab this. It's the kind of read that lingers like a bad dream. Eager for book two... but hopefully a bit tighter? Recommended for the masochists among us.

An epic debut to be proud of, kudos, Jasper!

[Donna Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhere in the multiverse Brian Lumley and Scott Lynch are drinking buddies and write books together. In this universe we have a more compact version of the pair in Jasper L Walker.

For clarity and honesty I was one of the early beta readers for this book, and receiving an arc of the final version was an absolute delight. I was hooked on the story in its raw format, and getting to read about Elias Finch and his crew of misfits attempting to overcome the odds in a polished form was even better.

The Shattered Line combines old school eldritch horror and, in my opinion, borderline sci-fi elements in a richly realised Grimdark world. Elias and the main cast are beautifully characterised, and you get behind them very quickly and want to see them achieve their seemingly impossible goal. Even the antagonist is someone with real depth, who you hate yourself for rooting for at times.

Even though Jasper is up front is saying he isn’t worried about genre conventions, any fan of Grimdark with find the required buckets of exquisitely detailed gore and people being horrendous that we crave. If you want a dark, gritty fantasy heist, then this is the book for you.

My thanks to the author for providing me with this arc to review!

[Stephen Ginnetty · Rating 4 out of 5]

*I received an ARC for this book in exchange for an honest review*

A very grimdark tale that's not for the feint of Heart with an exceptional cast of characters to love and hate.

[Saif Shaikh | Distorted Visions · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read this review and more on my Medium page: Distorted Visions

Score: 2/5

Since this is an ARC, the review aims to be as Spoiler-free as possible.

The first novel in The Corrosion of Ages trilogy, The Shattered Line is a reality-bending, action-packed, dark fantasy tale of an epic scale. A tale of vengeance, betrayal, cunning, and heart, The Shattered Line is a valiant attempt of bringing the darker side of the epic fantasy space to new audiences.

This is grimdark.

The Shattered Line is a tale of many moving parts. It is a tale of brutality, with Turen, The Reaper of Kanavera, husband-to-a-murdered-wife-father-to-a-murdered-daughter-and-I-shall-have-my-vengeance-in-this-life-or-the-next. It is a tale of cunning, with Elias and his plucky crew, Finch’s Five-ing (get the reference? Ocean’s Eleven, Finch’s Five?) as they pull the most dangerous heist of their lives. Finally, these stories are tied into a neat bundle by Khanis, The Butcher of Yill, fueled by “divine” purpose, to deliver this world from Evil, even if the price of salvation is blood, oceans of blood.

Told through a variety of POV sections, The Shattered Line follows the journeys of Turen, the Ghosts of Yamir, which include the steadfast brawler Jorsin, the plucky adolescent thief, Heilar, the innocent-but-disillusioned noble Madeline, and the geeky-cheeky Tobar, headed by the Ghost himself, the wise-crackin’, always-schemin’ Elias. Khanis’ sections toy with the justification of evil deeds to serve a greater good, with equal parts political swordplay and murder-canyon swordplay.

The debut offering of this new author, Jasper Walker toils to bring the darker side of epic fantasy to new readers, pushing for a greater emphasis of grimdark and dark fantasy in indie spaces, corralling us bloodthirsty consumers and creators in various online forums and discussion spaces. For that, much praise is duly given.

Which makes my experience with The Shattered Line, and writing this review, a challenging task.
Unfortunately, I found The Shattered Line to be an altogether disappointing package. For someone who has been reviewing indie and traditionally published novels in dark fantasy/grimdark for a few years, and voraciously consuming books in this space by a variety of authors — both new and established for many years, my standards have crystallized, and sharpened into a nigh-scathing edge. Pushed through those blades, The Shattered Line dies by a thousand cuts.

While the artistic angle of books is always up to perspective with individual enjoyment being a personal thing, my qualms are more with the craft of this book — the building blocks of any good fantasy story. Overall, The Shattered Line feels paradoxically underbaked and overwritten. For a hefty doorstopping tome, in the epic fantasy space, the worldbuilding (the foundational cornerstone of the genre) is woefully lacking. A smattering of names, a few locations with no guiding/anchoring motifs, generic locales, anemic greyscale cities with no backdrops, the reader is left unmoored. The stylistic descriptions of the little details, which make locations feel “lived in” with real people is absent.

The characterization of the multiple-POVs we get in The Shattered Line is far too many, far too thin, and overzealously unnecessary. The author’s desire to flesh out each mainline character with their own sections within chapters, to give unique perspectives, and provide individual motivations and conflict falls flat when the characters feel less like wholesome people and more like a trope-board (so famous on BookTok right now). Every character feels like two or three descriptors pinned together, wooden marionettes of their own traits. The major trio of characters who push the story forward — Elias, Turen, and Khanis feel like side characters in veteran author offerings. Elias, noted as the leader of the crew, burdened by guilt, whipped by the expectation to keep his crew together, battling his addiction to the bottle, is yet another pale knockoff of a stalwart heist legend, a whiny Locke Lamora (The Lies of Locke Lamora/The Gentleman Bastard Series). Elias has one trick up his sleeve, a lazy one at that.

Turen is a cobbled together by the most trite vengeance trope there is in grimdark, exaggerated to cartoonish proportions by the poorly-defined magic-systems (courtesy of the macguffin Artefacts), is less compelling antihero, a whiny Superman. And Khanis? Major antagonist of this offering? A whiny butcher evoking no sense of dread or malice. The side characters are cannon-fodder lackeys, with Tobar-Ex-Machina being a slight exception.

The Shattered Line trips over itself with its narrative storytelling and overarching plot. The events in the book feel like RPG side-quests stitched together by gossamer connectors. While I appreciate particular set-pieces where the disjoined story arcs clash into each other, the twists and turns can be seen from a mile away. Grizzled veteran readers will chalk out the predictable plot within the opening chapters, with the actual narrative doing nothing to surprise the reader in a meaningful way.

An empty world, paper-thin characters, and a clumsy plot can still be pulled together in a way that smoothes out the rough edges if the author writes his tale in an engaging and compelling way. The prose and storytelling craft in The Shattered Line is by far its most egregious failing. Walker’s prose is jarringly modern, with no effort spent to adhere to the writing craft that hold up this genre. While indie writers in the modern era are fighting genre stereotypes and moving away from the lofty standards of epic fantasy creative writing, Walker’s prose is gratingly anachronistic. If your dark fantasy invincible superhero stops himself to say his wounds are “painful as fuck” (direct quote), this novel feels less like a polished package and more like a TikTok-and-redbull fueled first draft. The dialog is written in a way that is symptomatic of Marvel-brainwashing, with a witty-comment-a-minute approach, the conversations between the characters are juvenile and feel less like a long-form epic fantasy novel (a la Abercrombie, Tchaikovsky, Gavriel Kay, Lawrence, Hayes, etc.) and more like the throwaway dialog-mills written for open-world video games. The characters have no individual voices and are written identically, making it read like The Flattened Line.

As an example of faulty craftwork, The Shattered Line employs the narrative tool of retelling the same events from different perspectives, sometimes across different chapters, to provide density to the plotting. However, the author deploys this tool by simply copy-pasting dialog and narration between instances, providing no nuance brought by the new perspective. While repeated dialog provides accuracy and anchoring, large swaths of repetition with barely any novelty makes this tool fatiguing. Walker deploys this tool several times throughout The Shattered Line to rapidly diminishing returns.

Overall, The Shattered Line is bloated and tedious. With an inflated page-count, this story could have been cut down by over a third of its word-count to tell a tighter, sharper, better crafted story. With overwritten, overwrought, and amateurishly over-described passages, held together by unnaturally flat dialog, the moment-to-moment experience, especially in the dreaded mid-slump of the novel, caused me to simply skim through the tedium — never a good sign.

I want to like The Shattered Line. I want to appreciate and champion a new voice in the much-maligned-and-shoved-to-the-back grimdark space. Sadly, The Shattered Line fails by every metric, and rather serves as a cautionary tale of the downsides of independent and self-published novels. In the hands of brutally honest editors and beta-readers, this tale could have been ground together into a better product. Unfortunately, what we get instead is overwritten, underbaked, poorly crafted, bloated tedium.

A grim start to the new year.


Advanced Review Copy provided in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to author Jasper L. Walker

[J.F. Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wow did this come out swinging! This is grimdark that leans into apocalypse and cosmic horror in a big way (which I really love). The opening sets a brutal tone and the story keeps widening from there: street-level cons and theft, imperial campaigns at the edge of reality, and a frontier where the world itself feels like an enemy. The Line and the Nexus were the big hooks for me. They feel like a hostile system with rules rather than just a vague border, and the book keeps finding new ways to explore what that means for soldiers, thieves, and gods. The cast is varied and engaging, but my favorites were Madeline, Heilar, and Turen. Their mix of bond, loyalty, and accumulated damage gives the book a strong emotional spine.
I enjoy cosmic horror, heist energy, and military action, so was excited that this book plays in all three spaces. Some readers may click harder with one thread than another, but if you like that blend, there is a lot to enjoy here. There are a couple of places in the middle where I wanted a slightly tighter focus, yet the payoffs near the border and in the final stretch made it feel worthwhile. The profanity and on-page brutality are very much in-genre and will suit readers who like their grimdark loud and unflinching. Overall, this feels like a confident, ambitious entry that delivers on scope, nastiness, and big broken-cosmology ideas. If you are in the mood for unapologetically bleak fantasy with a deadly frontier and some vivid set pieces, this is well worth your time!

[Paul Zareith · Rating 5 out of 5]

An elaborate and ambitious debut that beautifully balances a broad scope, a very well thought out cast of characters and a fast-paced plot that keeps you hooked - a rare combination in the grimdark genre.

[LordTBR · Rating 5 out of 5]

An ambitious, blood-soaked dark fantasy debut with notes of Gentleman Bastards, Berserk, and Lovecraft. An all-consuming tome.