Lord of Order

by Brett Riley

The Purge is here. New Orleans must die.

Long after the destruction of all electronic technology, the Bright Crusade rules the world as a fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Gabriel Troy is Lord of Order for the New Orleans Principality. For years, he and his deputies have fought to keep their city safe from the attacks of the Crusade’s relentless enemies, the Troublers—heretical guerillas who reject the Crusade’s rule and the church’s strict doctrines. As their crowning achievement, Troy’s forces capture the Troublers’ local leader. The city has never been more secure.

Alarming intelligence leaks from Washington: Supreme Crusader Matthew Rook plans to enact a Purge—the mass annihilation of everyone deemed a threat to the Crusade. Rook orders his forces to round up all but the blindly loyal and march them to New Orleans. Once the prisoners have been chained inside, the Crusaders will wall off the city and destroy the levees. The resulting deluge, reenacting the Biblical deluge of Noah’s time and the city’s devastation during Hurricane Katrina, will kill everyone inside.

Forced to choose between the Crusade and the city he has sworn to protect, Troy and five other conflicted conspirators gird for battle, fully aware that the looming apocalypse will demand horrific choices, test their faith, and require them to join forces with their sworn enemies.

Genres: Fiction, Dystopia

439 pages, Hardcover

First published February 19, 2021

About the author

Brett Riley is a professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada. He grew up in southeastern Arkansas and earned his Ph.D. in contemporary American fiction and film at Louisiana State University. His short fiction has appeared in numerous publications including Folio, The Wisconsin Review, and The Baltimore Review. He has also won numerous awards for screenwriting. Riley’s debut novel, Comanche, was released in September 2020. Lord of Order, a dystopian novel set in New Orleans was published in April 2021. Freaks, a superhero thriller featuring dangerous aliens and badass high school kids will be in stores and online March 2022. The second novel in the Freaks series, Travelers, will be released later in the summer. Riley lives in Henderson, Nevada.

Reviews

[Jennifer Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not for the faint hearted. This story is full of violence, scenes of torture, and a large battle. The characters are very strong. You never find out much about them or their backstories, but they are all individuals and combined make an awesome team with a sense of family.
The graphic imagery got quite gruesome in places. Some of it turned my stomach. But even with all the horror and despair, it still managed to paint a beautiful picture of new Orleans. I found there was quite a lot of description of smells, good and bad, which helped build a picture as well.
I really enjoyed this and think it will be one I'll remember for quite a while. The fight at the end was amazing and exhausting. I zoomed through the last 40% of the book. I just couldn't put it down.

[Beth Castrodale · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this riveting pressure cooker of a novel, a man of faith, Gabriel Troy, and the city he loves face a force of destruction cloaked in religious righteousness. To confront it, Troy and his allies assemble a ragtag army of one-time enemies united by an adeptness in bloodshed and a passion to stand–and save–their ground. Yet not all alliances seem trustworthy or certain, and as the danger from without draws closer, dangers from within appear to heighten as well. So do the tests of faith faced by Troy and his associates. Through vivid scenes of battle and quiet moments of reflection, this engrossing novel brings us to the heart of these internal and external struggles and, ultimately, suggests a way toward redemption.

[SmallPressPicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

The protagonist’s efforts to stand up for the city he’s pledged to protect had me turning the pages. Also, to its great credit, the novel conveys the dark side of participating in violent acts, showing the toll they take on perpetrators as well as victims. There’s so much I enjoyed about this novel, and if a sequel comes out, I look forward to reading it.

[MikeLikesBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Purge is here. New Orleans must die

This is the 5th novel by Brett Riley that I have read and it may be my favorite. The story was action packed. The characters live in a dystopian world where there are no cars, electricity or modern conveniences. All gone. The leaders rule by a Theocracy. Everything is done in the name of God and sinners need to be punished. Gabriel Troy, the Lord of Order for New Orleans, loses favor with the government higher ups. The Crusaders have a plan to deal with the Troublers. As the struggle grows, the Crusaders become more authoritarian. The torture, violence and executions are pretty descriptive. The story is fast paced. I read for hours because I could not put it down. There is a final battle that will shape the future of New Orleans. The author ends the story a little open ended. Will there possibly be a sequel?

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

"Christ said to suffer the little children and let em come unto him. I don’t think he meant to kill em to get em there faster”. Darkly humorous, laconic asides like this guide readers of Lord of Order through a visceral, blood-soaked landscape of violence and redemption that pushes the boundaries of definition.

Lord of Order is a thrillingly violent, dark and brutal story of conspiracy and rebellion. Set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian North America of the future, it is part spaghetti western and part thriller, mixed and painted onto a religiously-themed canvas and influenced by current events; imagine The Magnificent Seven meets Inglourious Basterds, but with more gore and shades of The Handmaid’s Tale added for good measure.

Lord of Order is viscerally, pungently, well-written. In parts it is almost cinematic. The physicality of violence is described in brutally frank terms. As one character notes, “it was much easier to glorify death if you had not tromped through the bone and gristle of it most of your life”. This is not a book for the squeamish.

It is also morally challenging. On one level it is a simple tale of good versus evil, but a closer reading reveals a richer, complex and more satisfying experience. Here all the characters are painted in shades of grey and this is a story about navigating the thin line between right and wrong, where good guys do bad things for the right reasons and where bad guys believe they are doing good. Lord of Order searches for a greater good and moral redemption in the most heinous of acts. In this world the horses are the only innocents and a young orphan girl is the stoniest of stone-cold killers.

Lord of Order is not a perfect book. But it is a damn good read. The author has a couple of eccentricities that are frankly irritating at first. The “g” is dropped from many verbs, presumably to impart more of a cowboy vibe, and speech is rendered without quotation so at first it is hard to know who is speaking, or to tell if it is speech and not an internal dialogue we're being presented with. Individual violence is powerfully portrayed but panoramic battle scenes less so, which contributes to the last part of the book feeling heavier going than the rest, as well as being an obvious stall for possible sequels.

Quibbles. Lord of Order is good solid grimdark with a western feel. I'll be searching out the rest of the author's catalogue and I'll be reading the sequel to this when there is one. I heartily recommend that you do the same.

This review is an extract from a longer article prepared for Grimdark Magazine.

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lord of Order is a dystopian novel of a religious war taking place after the destruction of air and land vehicles, and electricity. Gabriel Troy, the current Lord of Order, is a strong leader with a loyal following and a fierce drive to protect his city, New Orleans. Lord of Order is the second novel by screenplay and short-story writer Brett Riley.

Troy and his officers in the Bright Crusade capture the leader of the heathen Troublers. She tells them that she has heard that Crusade leaders are going to use New Orleans as a prison for captive Troublers from across the nation. Shortly afterwards, a scout arrives to tell them to prepare for the arrival of a Crusade elder who will give them details on a new assignment. What they hear from the elder tells them that captured leader has been telling them the truth and they now need to prepare or rebel.

Riley does a brilliant job of describing each character. Each one has a specific role to play and struggles with how they will cope with the changes that are occurring around them. All of the characters are compelling and they elevate the plotline.

The beginning of the book is confusing because Riley choses to let the story unfold, slowly revealing why the characters are at war. A little history at the beginning would help the reader become emerged in the storyline. However, once one reaches a certain level of understanding, the story moves rapidly and is captivating.

Two aspects bothered me. The violence was very graphic and a little too much for me. As well, it seems to me that the language was inconsistent. One moment the language seems almost illiterate and then the next conversation appears to be quite elegant.

I recommend this book to all people who love a good fast paced story about armed conflict. Be prepared graphic descriptions of violence and torture. I give it a 3 on 5 because I was occasionally interested but uncomfortable. I want to thank NetGalley and Imbrifex for providing me with a digital copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

[Dieter Moitzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note: This book was provided at not cost by NetGalley, where this review has been posted.

This is a chilling dystopian novel the setting of which bears certain similarities to Margaret Atwood’s comparably chilling Gilead-universe in The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments. Somewhere in the past a powerful, self-proclaimed prophet, the ultra-Protestant Jonas Strickland, has succeeded in haranguing the masses in the USA to elect him president of the nation. As soon as he has accessed power, he launches the so-called Purge, which consists in worldwide bioweapon strikes that wipe out most of the population. Only his loyalest followers, the Bright Crusaders, are allowed to survive in secretly built shelters. At the undefined time of the novel (one guesses several generations later), they have rebuilt certain cities and transformed them into semi-autonomous Principalities, where they dwell now without electricity, their rustic living conditions reminding of the eighteenth century. Each Principality is ruled by a Lord of Order and a group of designated deputies (designation by one’s predecessor having become the only means of accession to any significant post by then).

The plot is set in New Orleans and evolves around the city’s Lord, Gabriel Troy. At the beginning he and his posse round up a bunch of heretical resistance fighters called Troublers—apparently, the Purge hasn’t been that efficient. They kill most of them and drag their leader Stransky to the town prison. During her first interrogation, she informs them of the cruel plans the Washington-based current Supreme Crusader Matthew Rook has in mind. He aims to launch a second Purge supposed to eradicate Troublers and lukewarm followers alike, using the few remaining bioweapons on certain sites. But New Orleans is meant to become first a vast open-air prison for the heretics, then a huge graveyard because once everyone is imprisoned within quickly erected new walls, the city’s dams will be destroyed, drowning everybody in the process. Doubtful at first, Troy has to accept Stransky has told him the truth when the Supreme Crusader’s emissaries arrive in town in order to implement those orders. He needs to decide whether he will follow his upbringing and hitherto firm beliefs or try to save the people living in his city, and he needs to decide quickly…

A dystopian novel is all about believable and gripping world-building, and I’ve always felt a plot gets more compelling if it’s based upon certain elements of which we can already find traces and hints in the world that surrounds us. Orwell’s 1984, for instance, will never get old because of that reason—the temptation of many political elites to control the populations they govern will never cease to exist, and where there is power, you will always find lies and alternative truths sold as reality (maybe Orwell’s Newspeak has even never been as topical as today). If the often authoritarian, tyrannical world the author invents is thus established as a likely place with likely conditions, if the characters fit in seamlessly, and if the action simply derives from implied circumstances, there is almost no need to add much in terms of plot in order to ensure a narrative that will draw in the reader. That’s what Atwood has achieved with her almost prototypical novels mentioned above; that’s what Brett Riley has achieved in this novel as well. Apart from a nigh pathological blindness to social questions, a poor education system, and the visceral suspicion of anything even remotely “leftist”, religion is probably one of the deepest-rooted and most important problems of US-American society. Rare are the countries where God appears on the money and where in every other public speech God is mentioned at least once. For most Americans this is their unquestioned normality, that strikes most foreigners as rather extreme. If you take this situation as your starting point and only exacerbate it a little, you’ll be sure to have the perfect setting for a perfect dystopian book.

So, the plausible basis for Riley’s Principalities is there (as it was for Atwood’s Gilead). The author introduces a cast of likeable characters even agnostics such as I can relate to because, beyond the blind belief they show in the beginning, they are three-dimensional and human. They all evolve throughout the book; they have feelings, they doubt their faith, their religion, even their decisions and actions; they are in turns brave and determined and then unsure and weak. They all finally decide to think and decide for themselves what’s best for their community, shaking off the blind obedience of their self-proclaimed cult-leader without losing their religion. The author seems to be quite religious himself if I interpret the acknowledgements correctly (albeit not in a bigoted, intolerant way, otherwise he wouldn’t have written such a novel in the first place). This shows in the book because even the so-called heretics I thought might be agnostics or atheists believed in God, and despite the severe trials and tribulations several characters were exposed to, they never ever lost faith in God or would even consider the possibility of such an entity not existing.

And yet, although such an all-encompassing religious subtext would normally have cooled any enthusiasm I could have had for a read, I wasn’t put off in this case. I guess that’s because the writing, very to-the-point, without frills or unnecessary ornaments, is really good—tight, straight, charismatic, atmospheric, drawing me in and dragging me along in a relentless pace through the whole book. I guess I glimpsed the possibility of a sequel in the last chapter; if yes, I’m sincerely looking forward to it; if the author has not planned to write one, I hope my review might be an incentive for him to reconsider.

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a hard book to follow. Too many characters pop up here and there, can't remember who they are...good or bad. Characters were 1 dimensional and easily forgettable. Can't remember ever reading a book where I could care less about any of them. Then there is the lack of quotation marks that makes it so hard to tell if someone is talking or maybe just thinking a thought. When they do talk to each other it's like they are doing so telepathically. It just made for a frustrating read. Sorry but not my cup of tea.

I received this from LibraryThing Early Reviewers for an honest review.

[Patricia (Spellbound Stories Trish) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lord of order by Brett Riley is a transfixing tale of right and wrong, good, and bad but mostly about faith and how our choices show the person beneath. The story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where not much is left of the USA as we know it. There is no technology and the battle for New Orleans is where it all begins.
Lord of order is told from many different perspectives, but the one thing that captivated me was that you also have two sides battling for survival. When the story starts, we discover the main plot through the lens of a father sharing the knowledge to his young kids at the cemetery. He lets them know that this is a tradition to “…celebrate what is and mourn what was.”
Throughout the story we see two groups battling for power and their place in the new world. One is the Troublers fighting against the other group we have which is The Crusade, or The Church! Not all within the church have the best of intentions. As the story continues, we see that following “the right way” might not be the correct decision and as some soon find they want to leave this type of control altogether, but they cannot do it alone.
Two sides join to fight the evil within the city and make decisions that affect the lives of many. We do not get a definitive answer as too what takes place because the story leaves us with an open ending leading you the reader to decide the fates of our beloved characters. Riley cleverly ends this story as it began, with a father and his two young children. He tells them, “speak no more of these matters. Not to me, not to each other. If you can manage that, then in one year’s time, we will return to this place and continue the story.” He is leaving the choice to them because as you learn the story, choices that we make affect not just us but those around us and if they wish to know what happened next they need to learn to have patience and trust that they will discover the full truth in the end.
I give this fascinating novel 5 stars and hope to read more from this very talented author.

[Denice Langley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I debated long and hard on reading this book. But after several of my reading friends recommended it, I decided to give it a try.....and yep, I'm glad I did.
A dystopian tale set after "the end of the world as we know it" the US has been seperated into communities of those peoples who follow the ruler of the land. The population was decimated by a plague launched into those communities who still thought they had free will. As an example of the consequences of not being one of the "rightgeous", it was pretty effective.
Everyday life is a struggle. With no electricity and a crumbling infrastructure, there is no patience or tolerance for any one who would cause trouble. When a rebel group is captured, the information they have is too shocking to not be the truth. But what can be done?
This was a VERY good book and would be a great start to a series....Brett Riley? Don't hesitate as I did, trust my reading circle to sterr you right. If you love dystopian fiction.....try this one.

[Helena Torin · Rating 1 out of 5]

To be as concise as possible, this book is not worth your time. It's poorly written, its characters are hard to distinguish and annoying to follow, character growth is started and walked back on, it's both unnecessarily detailed and frustratingly vague, and by the time I'd made it to chapter three I felt as if decades had passed me by.

While this book has a strong premise and an intriguing theme, it, sadly, doesn't execute either very well.

While there are some fantastic lines and a few well done scenes, Lord of Order was still a boring, frustrating read that left me disappointed with the lost potential. It was an overall miserable experience.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to the publisher for the free early copy in exchange for my honest review

Lord of Order by Brett Riley is action packed from start to finish. If the concept of The Purge even remotely fascinates you, then this is the perfect read to lose yourself in. Well-developed characters, lots of violence, and an intriguing plot made this 400+ page novel fly by. Before I even realized it, I was halfway through! Highly recommend and can’t wait for more from Riley.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Lord of Order" just didn't work for me, even though the story is a good one. It is dark, violent, and sickly humorous. It's well-written, but it feels like there is a huge amount missing with regard to the characters, who we never really get to know. A few extra pages may have led me to give this book 4 stars instead of 3.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and Edelweiss+. This review was written voluntarily and is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

[A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please fire the person who writes the copy for the back of your books Riley, they aren't doing you any justice.

This book was a fun little trip, full of original worldbuilding but still satisfyingly knows it's a western.

[Kathleen]

This book is based on an interesting concept, but I couldn't make myself plow through the descriptions and battle scenes. Since I did not finish this, I will not rate it.

[Matt Holland · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little in the vein of A Handmaid's Tale. Hits a little different these days too.

[Brett Grossmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit of a slog. Decent character building…A post apocalyptic story set in new orleans with no fear of zombies. Just men. I am not compelled to seek out the further adventures.

[Reader Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know why this was labeled as Science Fiction, because it’s the opposite of that.