Leviathan by R.M. Huffman

In July of 2014, I read and reviewed R.M. Huffman's novel Antediluvian.  At the time, this is what I said of it:

"It's a fascinating story about the world-that-was described so sparingly in the Book of Genesis, where morning mists covered the Earth in lieu of rain, Watcher angels gave into lust to lay with human women, and dragon-like sauropods were used as beasts of burden."

I'm pleased to announce that Dr. Huffman has re-released this extraordinary fantasy novel with publisher Lampion Press under the title Leviathan: Book One of the Antediluvian Legacy.  In addition to illustrations of some of the characters, places, and beasts in the novel, this new edition includes:

1. A genealogy of both Biblical and Huffman's characters.
2. A bestiary that tells you the difference between a creodont and an indrik.
3. A preview of Fallen: Book Two of the Antediluvian Legacy.

What makes Leviathan stand out, in part, is how lived-in Huffman made the setting, the theology.  When one farmer says to another, "Toil, plants of the field, sweat of our faces...we'll be well aware of the ground's curse for certain," it makes sense: they're the Biblical Adam's heirs, just a few generations from the Fall, and they know it. They live it every day.

This is reinforced by the fallen Watcher angel Azazyel saying, much later, "We watched as Adam was made, and then we watched him ruin everything.  And now, Samyaza is paying the price for Adam's loosing of death into the world."  Despite the fantasy theme, we know these characters from Bible study.

Huffman's description of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals used as beasts of burden maintain the Biblical-historical theme, as does the Edenites being vegetarians (a tradition ended after the Flood when God says in Genesis 9:2-3, "The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.")

Some of my favorite parts of Leviathan were the references to other places, adding to the richness of the world. Kenan, a former adventurer, says to Noah, "I slew the high priests of the Om-Ctherra snake cult, along with its monstrous 'deity.' I fought a warlord-sorcerer, possessed by one of Satan's princes, with the Nomads of Nod."  Kenan becomes Howard's Conan, or even Moorcock's Corum Jhaelen Irsei.

If you want adventure in a fully-realized fantasy world that's both familiar and mysterious, you've got to get Leviathan. And then tell Dr. Huffman to finish up Fallen already!

The Nephilim and the False Prophet

The second book in my Armageddon trilogy, The Nephilim and the False Prophet, is live in the Amazon bookstore!

From the blurb:

Fueled by brutal, random violence and a worldwide leprosy epidemic, the Earth descends into chaos. Preparing for Armageddon, Hell plans an atrocity called The Slaughter of the Innocents while Heaven’s scattered agents fight a cold war against superstar evangelist Kyle Loubet, who they believe is the False Prophet foretold in the Bible. 

The Eremites walk the Earth: black magicians kept alive through unholy relics. Terrible visions assail the world’s remaining psychics, promising an eternal night of blood and fire and endless agony. Caught in the middle, Hector, Ozzie, and Siobhan face terrible dangers from all sides. Now free from their infernal prison, what are the Watcher angels planning? With only days before the Apocalypse, can humanity be saved?

This edition includes a synopsis of the first book in the trilogy, The Blessed Man and the Witch; a list of characters; and a glossary of terms.

$2.99 or free to read through Kindle Unlimited. Get your copy now!

The Prophecy's Angels as Immature, Brutal Childen

Gregory Widen's The Prophecy is an extraordinary, imaginative film that shows angels in a much different light from the celestial beings humanized by television shows like Touched by an Angel and articles in Reader's Digest.  Widen's angels are brutal, savage, animalistic.  Rather than create an angel mythology out of whole cloth, Widen mined the Bible for angelic references to show us that angels are, in their hearts, killers.

This central theme is stated quite clearly when Thomas Daggett, the protagonist, says, "Did you ever notice how in the Bible, whenever God needed to punish someone, or make an example, or whenever God needed a killing, he sent an angel? Did you ever wonder what a creature like that must be like? A whole existence spent praising your God, but always with one wing dipped in blood. Would you ever really want to see an angel?"

Physically, Widen's angels display birdlike behavior, given that their true forms are winged, eyeless humanoids.  They perch like raptors, a bizarre affectation that works very well in the film.  Uziel, Gabriel's lieutenant, scents for the angel Simon like an animal would, and their subsequent fight is extremely brutal, without human finesse or mercy.  After stabbing Simon, Uziel literally digs into the wound, trying to pull out his heart.

Uziel's autopsy scene further shows how separate the angels are from humans, from the lack of growth rings on their bones to the bizarre makeup of their blood (chemicals usually only found in an aborted fetus).  Hermaphroditic, lacking eyes, they're just different.

Later, we see the Archangel Gabriel literally tasting the shed blood on the wardrobe after Uziel and Simon's fight, able from this to determine that it came from Simon.  Not even a higher order of angel like Gabriel is exempt from this kind of base animalism.  They're not beautiful, celestial messengers of God, but are, in Daggett's terms, "creatures."

In addition to their bestial nature, the angels in The Prophecy are bizarrely childlike in both temper and behavior.  The entire conceit of the film, that certain angels became jealous of humans for being created with souls and acquiring God's chief affection, is essentially a gigantic, millennia-long temper tantrum.  A war, with casualties and spiritual consequences that affect the spiritual future of the human race, based entirely on envy.

This is shown most clearly in Gabriel, arguably one of Christopher Walken's greatest roles.  He contemptuously refers to humans by the juvenile term "talking monkeys," but can't even drive a car, showing an immature helplessness.  During his confrontation with Simon, Simon tells him, "Sometimes you just have to do what you're told," which is very reminiscent of a parent scolding a child.  When Simon won't tell Gabriel where he'd hidden Hawthorne's soul even after being tortured, Gabriel stamps his foot and shouts in a childish fit of pique: a mini-tantrum.

Perhaps the best indication that the angels are emotional children, bereft of a father as a result of their ruinous war in Heaven, is when Gabriel tries to entice Thomas to fight alongside him: "Nobody tells you when to go to bed.  You eat all the ice cream you want.  You get to kill all day, all night, just like an angel!"  Gabriel's speaking ironically about the bed time and ice cream, but the language he uses still evokes images of childlike freedom.  Despite his contempt for humans, he is himself beneath them in maturity and ethics.

And what of God in this war-torn universe?  The only time we hear of Him is when Daggett asks Gabriel, "If you wanted to prove your side was right, Gabriel, so badly, why don't you just ask Him?  Why don't you just ask God?"

Gabriel's answer is poignant, and in many painful ways puts him on the same level as us: "Because He doesn't talk to me anymore."

Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale

My hybrid Christmas/Hanukkah story Get the Greek: A Chrismukkah Tale, was published by Liberty Island!

It's got comedy, pathos, excitement, and the most incisive social commentary you'll ever see outside of a gas station water cooler conversation.  If you've ever been interested in what Judah Maccabee really thinks about the holiday season, then this is the story for you.

There's a little bit of rough language, some implied intimacy, adult situations, mild violence, and angels.  Which reindeer takes a bullet?  What does Heaven's VFW post look like?  Where do cat souls come from?  These questions and more are answered in Get the Greek, free to read on Liberty Island!

Horror's Shifting Moral Center

A casual observer of supernatural themes in movies, television, and literature could easily conclude that angels are simply enhanced humans with wings, and vampires are merely enhanced (if anemic) humans with fangs.  They're superheroes.

The reasons for this are simple, but unfortunate: these characters are not part of a universe where there's a God who intervenes in human events.  Going there in a narrative sense is icky.  It gets into religion, and who wants to get involved in that?  Too often religion is equated with judgment (as though using one's intellect and ethics to determine what's proper from what isn't is a bad thing), and we can't have judgment in our fiction.  We can't have a supreme moral arbiter, especially when that hot angel over there is about to knock boots with the wisecracking-but-gold-hearted cambion detective protagonist.  It spoils the fantasy.

One of my most favorite parts of F. Paul Wilson's novel The Keep was when the scholar character talks with the vampire Molasar and learns that the crosses embedded into the eponymous keep are part of what is imprisoning him. The cross is indeed a symbol of power and that, as a Jew, the scholar has had it all wrong: Jesus Christ was the Messiah.  He found this to be deeply disturbing news, as would any Jewish person (including myself).  Later on, we learn that it's not a cross, but the figure of a sword hilt, but the crisis was still very poignant and meaningful.

Today's vampires aren't forced back by crosses and holy water; to have that, you'd have to include the whole raft of Judeo-Christian mythology.  Because we've lost our sense of proportion, it would be considered proselytizing, and that's just evil.  It wasn't long ago that Fright Night came out, and with it a vampire that suffered injury from symbols of holiness (the way vampires used to).  Before that, we had The Exorcist, where Catholic priests were the good guys who used the power of God to exorcize a demon.  Try to find a sympathetic portrayal of a priest in mainstream television, literature, or cinema these days, where it's still considered brave to create a priest character who molests children or does something equally horrible.

In Supernatural, mumbled pseudo-Latin and nonsense-inscribed pentagrams are sufficient to exorcize or trap most demons, and the angels, as charming as some can be, are no different morally than the inhabitants of the infernal realms.  What's interesting in the Supernatural universe is that demonic possession can be cured through the use of sanctified blood, and holy water burns the possessed.  In an early scene in the episode Soul Survivor, we even see a Catholic priest, rosary and all, blessing bags of blood at a blood bank.  Where did he get the power to sanctify the blood?  It's never explored.  They have to gloss over it.  If angels can't bless things, how can priests do it?  Got me.  Ask the writers.

Modern media's deliberate avoidance, if not outright shunning of Judeo-Christian ethics as expressed in the Bible has altered the landscape of horror, shifting its moral center to nihilism.  Torture porn like the Hostel series, ultra-violent mumblegore like You're Next, dystopian zombie melodramas like The Walking Dead, and any of the ghost stories produced in the last fifteen years prove this out.  Ethics are derived from expediency, with no ultimate moral arbiter.

Horror's big enough to contain all these things and still scare you, and you don't need the God of the Bible to tell you right from wrong.  Nevertheless, what we're seeing is the horror genre reflecting today's cultural norms in ways that, it can be argued, dilute its unique power.  If vampires, angels, and demons are just more powerful humans, why not make them aliens instead?  Or X-Men?

American Horror Story Season Two: Impressions

Over the course of the last few weeks, I watched the second season of American Horror Story after having been assured by its fans that it was better than the first season, which featured Dylan McDermott crying and masturbating in the early episodes and was generally mediocre.

Unfortunately, I found the second season about as mediocre for similar reasons.

The writers did absolutely nothing to make you care about any of the characters, including Kit Walker, arguably the only "good guy" in the show.  None of them were likable.  You have to like the characters to care about what happens to them, and in horror, very bad things are supposed to happen to them.  One gets possessed by the Devil, one gets raped, many get killed horribly, etc, and it wasn't the least bit affecting.  The reporter character was simply venal and without charm; sister Jude lacked pathos despite piddling late-season efforts to achieve it; and Bloody Face, once unmasked, lacked menace.

It was a mishmash of horror themes that lacked a single unifying thread.  Alien abductions, demonic possession, Nazi experiments, and serial killers: all thrown against the wall, and none of them stuck.  Wouldn't it be interesting to see what the Devil thinks about Gray aliens kidnapping people and experimenting on them?  You won't find it here.  Despite that the story took place, for the most part, in an asylum, they barely touched on an extremely important theme: perception vs reality.  Crazy people and people on drugs often perceive reality as different from what it actually is.  That idea could have been used to show insanity.  It didn't.  There was very little madness in the madhouse.

The show suffered from some very clumsy storytelling elements that should have been taken out.  When the reporter character escapes from Bloody Face, she just happens to get into a car with a crazy, suicidal man?  Really?  That was the best way the writers could think of to bring her back to the asylum?  Didn't make sense.  The subplot with Ian McShane was entertaining, but only because Ian McShane was in it.  Certain characters just dropped off the face of the show for long periods without rhyme or reason.  Story arcs ended abruptly.  We don't get closure in real life, so we want it in our fiction.  Unfortunately, we didn't get that here.

The ending was banal and without surprise or tension.  While it was nice to see Dylan McDermott with his clothes on, his character lacked menace, and it was obvious what would happen to him in the end.  The alien kids end up becoming a lawyer and a doctor, respectively. The Nazi self-immolates.  Kit gets beamed up.  By then, I didn't care.

The show did have one bright spot: the Angel of Death.  She was awesome.  I loved every scene with her in it, even though she was underutilized as a character.

Flash Fiction: Angels in the IHOP

  The message Raqiel had sent was at once simple and incredibly complicated: “I need you.”
We hadn’t spoken since the Argument, when he’d tried to stop Bazkiel and I from following Dad’s orders on the Sodom and Gomorrah job.  It was ugly in the way only fights between brothers can get.  He’d held nothing back.  Bazkiel had fled, weeping, and only found surcease in burning Gomorrah and its sin-ridden people to white cinders: a classic case of angelic sublimation.  For my part, I had just let Raqiel beat me with the truncheon of his words until he’d gotten tired of it.  I still bear the scars, but I no longer bear a grudge.
To prove it, I put on mortal flesh and descended to Earth at his invitation.  The venue was an International House of Pancakes in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Typical.
The bleeding hearts always like to wallow in the muck to show you how much they care.  It’s stupid.  It’s showy.  We could’ve met at the top of Mount Everest or the bottom of the Mariana Trench or even the Four Seasons in Manhattan.  But instead, we had to get down and dirty with the “real people.”  The folks.
I walked past the surly, didn’t-want-to-be-there hostess in her blue vest and polyester slacks to Raqiel’s booth, the one by the bathrooms.  He’d taken on the form of a Korean woman in late middle age for reasons known only to him, and was cradling a cup of coffee in both hands despite the damp, oppressive heat of the restaurant.  I’ll refer to him as a she from now on.
“Good to see you, Usiel,” she said, smiling.  Her eyes were red, swollen, and wet.  Several crumpled napkins littered the table.
“Raqiel,” I greeted her, and sat opposite.  “What’s up?”
“Thank you for coming to see me.”  She dabbed at the corner of her eye.
She’d decided to be coy.  I could’ve played the game: asked her how she was, what she’s been doing all this time.  Fenced a little until she was ready to talk.  But as I sat there, smelling nitrite-laced bacon and fake maple syrup, I discovered bruises that I’d thought were healed over millennia ago.  It made me angry.  Very angry.
“I don’t have time for this,” I grated.  The waitress, who had been coming over with a plastic smile on her mouth, turned and fled.  “Get to it.  I’m busy.”
I guess I still bore a grudge after all.
The look of pity in her expression had me on my feet in less than a second, but she lifted both hands and said, “I’m sorry.  I’m…I’m just sorry.  For everything.  The fight…everything.  I need your help.  Your…advice.”
I hate apologies like that.  She just wanted to mollify me so she could get what she wanted.  Still, I sat back down and said, “While we’re young, then.”
“I have to…to kill someone.  A human being.”  Her lower lip vibrated.  “Dad said it’s time for me to go out and do some real work, as if helping people isn’t work.”  She put down the cup.  “Azrael’s busy, so it’s fallen to me.”
Biting back, And this is my problem how, I waited an appropriate amount of time before asking, “Who is it?”
She pulled a thin paper napkin from the dispenser on the table and bunched it in her fist.  “Raymond Vasilakis.  He’s…”  Face crumpling, she whispered, “He’s got…children.”  And then the waterworks started again: deep, wracking, loud sobs.
Checking to see if anyone was looking, I hissed, “You’re making a scene!”  I yanked a bunch more napkins out of the holder and thrust them at her.
It took her several tiresome minutes to get hold of herself.  In the meantime, I consulted the Book of Life to see who this Raymond Vasilakis was.  For a casual perusal, all I could get were the basics: astrophysicist, three daughters, one wife, didn’t go to church, hated broccoli.  Nothing special except in the brains department, but he wasn’t a great mover or shaker.  A bench scientist.  Why did Dad want—
“Sorry,” Raqiel sobbed, seemed about to say something, and dissolved into tears again.
“Just stop it, will you?” I begged.  “They’re going to throw us out of here.  Drink some coffee or something.”
She nodded, sipped audibly, and wiped her puffy face with a sodden napkin.  “I’m not crying for me, but his children.  They love him so—“
“Save it,” I said, before I could stop myself.  Not that I wanted to.  If bleeding hearts were invisible, nobody would have one.  “Why does Dad want him off the Earth?”
Waving a hand, she said, “He’s going to be the Project Director of Hubble II in seventeen years, four months, and sixteen days.  They’re…the humans, you know…they’re going to be able to see extrasolar planets with it.  Close up.”
My jaw dropped.  That would be an unmitigated disaster.  “No,” I breathed.
With a negligent bounce of her shoulders, she said, “It doesn’t matter.  I don’t care about that.”  She wiped her nose.  “I’ve never done this before.  I mean, I know how.  But…I wanted to ask you…”  Her voice trailed off, and she looked down at the pile of snotty tissues on the table.
So soon!  No wonder Dad didn’t just want someone to deflect an event or influence an outcome: He needed this guy out.  They weren’t ready.
I shook my head to clear it.  “What?  What is it?”  That He’d entrust this task to such a weepy, self-righteous paragon of pseudo-virtue rankled me further.
“You…you always did what Dad said.  You’ve ended more lives than typhus.”  Voice hardening, she asked, “How do you live with yourself?  After?”
I drew back as if she’d presented a plate of fecal matter for my delectation.  “Is that what all this is about?  All this disgusting…crying?”
“I’m sorry if it’s not as easy for me to just kill someone—“
Banging a fist on the table, I said, “I’m not having this fight with you again,” and pointed a finger in her face.  “All you ever do is make things difficult.  You pule and whine and moan about not just your job, but everyone else’s job, and I’m sick of—“
A flicker of anger tightened her face.  “Don’t point at me.”
Grinning now, I jabbed my finger even closer.  “And I’m not the only one.  We’re all sick of not living up to a Throne’s ethical standards, as if Seraphim—“
“Stop pointing at me!” she shouted, causing people nearby to glance our way.
Nothing to see here, folks, just a little family drama.
I leaned back, unable to keep the grin off my face.  “Or what?”
“Never mind,” she said, picking up her purse.  “I knew this was a mistake.”  She started to do that awkward butt-shuffle people do when they’re easing out of a restaurant booth.
Any desire for reconciliation was eclipsed by the pleasure of seeing her walk away angry.  “I’ll get the check,” I said.
She didn’t grace me with a response on her way out, which suited me just fine.
The waitress tentatively approached again.  Favoring her with a bright, sunny smile, I ordered the Split Decision Breakfast, eggs over hard, and a large tomato juice.  Her name was Tamika, and barring significant celestial (or infernal) intrusion, would live an inconsequential, unsatisfying life until an acute ischemic stroke caused her death on May 14, 2036.  The Book of Life was pretty clear on that.  If she provided good customer service, I’d tip well.  And dissolve some of the plaque building up in her left aortic arch.  Give her some more time on Earth.
Raqiel on Hubble II.  It was ludicrous.  Not that she’d mess it up, but still.  Of all angels.
You think it's easy to just make a planet?  Dad’s not even finished the plant life on Gliese 667 Cc yet.

Is Professor Xavier an Archangel or a Principality?

You can't browse through the Paranormal Fiction section of a bookseller without running into something with an angel on the cover.  There are whole sub-genres devoted to romance between angels, romance between angels and demons, romance between angels and humans, angels and vampires (!), etc.  If there's a supernatural creature out there, someone, somewhere, is going to want to have sex with it.  Or write about someone having sex with it.

This is not to disparage the genre: people like what they like.

Call me a purist, but if you take a thing too far away from its essential nature, it ceases to be that thing and becomes something different.  If obedience to God is an integral part of an angel's being, then it will cease to be an angel when it defies God.  Without God, an angel is no longer an angel.

The idea of angels acting in defiance of an absentee God is all over modern fiction, particularly the TV show Supernatural.  In an increasingly secularized media culture, this divorce of angels from religion, from God Himself, simply turns angels into superheroes.  X-Men.  Beautiful, winged X-Men, but mutants all the same.  They can fly around, have super-strength, perform miracles, but lack the thing that makes them actually angels: faith in and obedience to God.

The angelic fiction sub-genre has plenty of room for latitude.  If there are sparkly vampires and Teen Wolves, there can be superhero angels.  A fallen angel doesn't have to de facto become a demon, an idea I explore for the Watcher angels in The Blessed Man and the Witch.

Nevertheless, magical powers and feathered wings do not an angel make.  Secularizing an angel takes him away from his core and transforms him into a superhero.

Whereupon I Give Away the Whole Store

The difficulty of depicting angels as properly angelic and God as an all-encompassing force for good in fiction is that we do not live in a culture of moral absolutes.  Likewise, we cannot rely on an ultimate moral arbiter if we cannot or will not define evil.

Kristen Lamb's point about the value of Dungeons & Dragons alignments in characterization is well-put, but it falls apart at the macro level, especially in dealing with the apocalypse.  It can be argued that the end of the world is always an individual situation, as each character will react to it in an individual manner according to his ethics and situation.  But when you deal with the larger issue of a God that ends the world, aided by His angels, character alignments don't hold up for Him, and even Lawful Good characters can protest the injustice of it.  Even if it's being done for the best of reasons, according to God.

This is the central concept behind my Armageddon trilogy: the relevance of Biblical ethics in today's ultra-modern society.  Nowhere in it do I preach, nor is it my intent to advocate for a particular moral stance within the text.  Rather, it's an attempt to bring prevailing Western belief systems into immediate conflict.  Mankind in the face of Armageddon is the ultimate existential crisis.  So how does one resolve it?  Is it possible?

During a rare moment of respite near the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, one character says, "We must be guided by our own ethics, not what we think God wants us to do. We must get comfortable with the idea that we can disagree with Him and still keep our integrity."  To many of us, this is an absolute impossibility.  It can't be done.  For others, it's a necessity: the God of the Bible is the ultimate source of evil, oppression, and ignorance.  Both points of view cannot be correct.  But can they both be ethical?

For Hell's point of view, there's this: “I know what I am, but you lie to yourself every day. You’d burn the world clean of everyone who doesn’t kowtow to your…God, and call it goodness.  That’s if you win.  You wanted Armageddon. You started this war, but we’re going to fight harder. And when we win, the world gets to go on. That’s not so bad, is it?”  In a nutshell, Hell claims to be fighting for its own survival.  Despite the unspeakable ugliness of Hell's tactics, isn't that reasonable?  Don't they have a right to resist God's plan to end the world, if the alternative is an eternity of torture in the Lake of Fire, or oblivion?

Between Heaven fighting to create the Day of God (or, in the series, the New Kingdom, the merging of Heaven and Earth into one eternal paradise) and Hell fighting to maintain the status quo (or so it claims), there are those who don't want the New Kingdom, but properly refuse to ally themselves with Hell.  As one character puts it at the end of The Blessed Man and the Witch, when everything's at stake, "We offer a better way: freedom. Freedom to strive, to progress, to no longer be subject to the whim of an angry God or a monster that feeds on torment."  Put that way, how can you disagree?

You can, though.  You definitely can.  Especially if you've embraced the God of the Bible as an all-encompassing force for good.  After all, if there's a choice between the salvation of your eternal soul and the death of your temporary physical body, why would you choose anything but God's side?  Especially when you'll be given a new body of spirit made flesh at the beginning of the New Kingdom, when Heaven has crushed the forces of Hell and turned the Pit into the Lake of Fire.  If Heaven wins.

There are more questions asked than answered, obviously.  And there's no way to make every character happy (no way to make every reader happy, either).  Sometimes it's the struggle that matters: working these things out for yourself.  If my sympathies lie anywhere, it's there.

Book Review: Antediluvian by R.M. Huffman

R.M. Huffman's research, writing, and attention to detail take familiar fantasy elements and transform them into something extraordinary in this pre-Flood adventure novel, one that is definitely worth your time.  It's a fascinating story about the world-that-was described so sparingly in the Book of Genesis, where morning mists covered the Earth in lieu of rain, Watcher angels gave into lust to lay with human women, and dragon-like sauropods were used as beasts of burden.  The offspring of these human-angel couplings, the giant Nephilim, are major figures here, as are the more recognizable Biblical characters of Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah.

The narrative begins on a small scale, as the descendants of Adam, living in post-Fall Eden, are brought into cultural (and sometimes physical) conflict with the sons of Cain, living in the massive, decadent city of Enoch.  It explodes from there into a larger story rife with horrific murders, shocking betrayals, and even a tragic seduction.  Noah, the protagonist, is forced by events to move away from the more pedestrian role of farmer and architect into freedom fighter and prophet.  

The lavish descriptions, speculative world-building, and vivid battle scenes make this a world you can look forward to visiting again in the upcoming sequel.  Four stars.

R.M. Huffman can be found on his website: http://antediluvianworld.com.