LIGHTFALL, starting a fantasy series featuring interestingly different vampires

LIGHTFALL (The Everlands Trilogy #1)
ED CROCKER
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An epic fantasy of vampires, werewolves and sorcerers, Lightfall is the debut novel of Ed Crocker, for fans of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings.

No humans here. Just immortals: their politics, their feuds—and their long buried secrets.

For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.

Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.

There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Vampires without humans to prey on. An entire culture with interesting status systems and hierarchies, with clandestine power networks, with careful proscrpitions against naked greed. I who hate vampire stories salute you, Author Crocker, for using the creaky, worn-out leather of the ill-fitting shoes in a new way.

What works best for me is the alternating first-person PoV narration. It really gives Author Crocker's chops at atmospheric detail presentation a showcase. I wasn't surprised that this meant the book's very dialogue-heavy as a result. The details are there, but spoken. I was probably able to ignore my general vampire weariness because it's used as a quite effective anti-capitalist metaphor, for which *chef's kiss* Author Crocker. I presume his lifelong Mancunian residence coupled with his heritage there has inflected this attitude. Works for me. Sam's plucky working-class girl attitude was also deployed well as a lens through which she sees the world of First Light. We are not trapped in the C-suite, or the scullery, by Author Crocker's use of this round-robin of PoVs.

It felt to me as though the choice of vampires as the baddies was fairly...predictable, and the use of immortality as a placeholder for generational wealth was the driver of the choice. It works; it's got the virtue of clarity and immediate familiarity, but does not add to the novelty of the western-fantasy tropes of ruling elite skulduggery due to greed. There are werewolves and sorcerers in the mix as well, used for violence and for their dark-academia stranglehold on knowledge. These are all expected in a fantasy story. It made the reason there are no humans left in this world a very oddly remote-feeling bit of lore, not a visceral development of plot.

Not that it necessarily needed to be. It's been a long time since there were humans in this storyverse. I mention it because it is part of my larger sense of mild dissatisfaction with the story as told. That skulduggery I mentioned is all wrapped in the same sense of characters discussing things, not things happening. While puzzle-solving, such as Sam's efforts to fix blame for Lord Azzuri's son Red's murder, are best handled this way, it can become less effective when it is the central narrative strategy. It requires the occasional "as you know, Bob," trap to be fallen into. Sometimes the passive voice is necessary, but it always feels to me like a stage magician's patter...too obviously hiding something.

These are my crotchets and concerns. I'm not the world's most voracious fantasy-novel consumer. I'm at best a dilettante, so I could easily be very out-of-step with the main currents in the genre. I'll say that I did NOT like Jay Kristoff's series, and I did like this book, and I'll read the next one. Why, you ask, when I've just been moaning about so much of it? Because its real-world resonances resonate with me, because it is a well-thought-through world so easy to invest in, because the political/intrigue/conspiracy bits are very much my jam at this moment in history. I'll single out the mapmaker of the book for some appreciative praise: Including the map was a good call, and the way it's presented is excellent. It's a story I feel speaks of and in our historical passage. Because, most importantly of all, I liked the experience of reading it even while I saw its imperfections.

A bit like meeting someone special you can see yourself falling in love with, just not this very minute.