September has begun, and summer will soon be behind us. Or it would be, if the temperatures would start cooperating. As long as it doesn’t rain on October 10, though, I guess I can endure. Anyway, let’s finish up this reading list.
Fantasy
Title: The Pagan Night (The Hallowed War, Book 1)
Author: Tim Akers
Genre: Fantasy
Year: 2016
I started reading this one in the new apartment after getting it for Christmas last year. Then I went back to the house for a while and found a very dusty, completely unread second copy in my brother’s room! I’m not sure how that happened. Amazon doesn’t seem to have a record, so it’ll have to remain an unsolved mystery.
The Pagan Night, the first book of the Hallowed War trilogy, is an odd duck. It’s a fantasy novel that tries very hard to be epic, and it mostly succeeds at that. Coming out in 2016—so probably in the works around 2010—it has a refreshing lack of shoehorned modern politics. It’s not thinly-veiled porn, like most female-authored fantasy. There’s no assassin or orphan main character. If it came out today…well, let’s be real. It wouldn’t come out today, for all of those reasons. But if it could, I’d probably pick it up just because it was different. Traditional, even.
The world is Tenumbra, a land divided into two major nations, Tener and Suhdra. They aren’t at war (for now), but they have been in the past. Now there’s an uneasy peace brokered by the Celestial Church. That church also governs the worship of two gods: Cinder, god of the moon, and the sun goddess Strife. Sometimes the narrative is a bit vague on whether people are actually worshipping the heavenly bodies themselves, or if they just represent gods, but the supernatural powers are tied to seasons, the phase of the moon, and the time of day, so it’s likely the former. (It’s also very similar to the magic system in my Nocturne, which also came out in 2016.)
But the northern nation of Tener had its own gods until it was converted at the point of the sword. There are still a few "pagans" who venerate gods of the seasons, of rivers, and so on. Because those evil, wicked people are anathematized and must be destroyed, we don’t get much in the way of information on the pagan religion. What we do know is what concerns the main plot of the story: these pagan gods can manifest in the physical world; the manifestations, "gheists", are immune to most human-crafted weapons, but can be banished from the land; their powers are no less than those of the celestial gods.
All this comes into play with our selection of protagonists. Ian Blakely is the one who gets the most screen time. He’s your typical fantasy hero, the teenager looking to make his mark on the world, whether or not he knows how. Very Jon Snow, in a lot of ways. His father Malcolm, however, is no Ned Stark. He tries to be, but he instead comes off as the typical Boomer. He’s a good fighter, indeed a hero in his own right, but he detests war. He’s pious to the point of throwing away his heritage.
Gwen, the third major character, is where things get a little off. She’s a huntress. Her job is to lead a team out into the wilderness to hunt down pagan gods that have manifested and send them back from whence they came. Oh, and her family still clings to some of their pagan past, which…complicates matters. While Ian and Malcolm are recognizable tropes with clear analogues in other epic fantasy sagas, Gwen does seem to evoke more modern sensibilities. She’s the gung-ho girlboss, not just an athletic tomboy.
Those three are from the north, while the remaining main characters hail from Suhdra. Lucas and Elsa are the representatives of the church who are tracking down the Big Bad from the book’s prologue. They’re fully invested, complete with shadow and sun magic, respectively. Elsa is your typical zealot, while the old Lucas is willing to learn during his investigations; he comes off more as a D&D monk than anything. And Henri, who only appears as the main character in a handful of scenes, doesn’t get a lot of characterization, but still manages to come off as an interesting take on the Hound from A Game of Thrones.
I’ve mentioned Martin’s books a few times already, and that’s because I got the feeling multiple times while reading The Pagan Night that Tim Akers so badly wants to write his own version of A Song of Ice and Fire. Malcolm and Ian travel south, there’s a tourney complete with joust and melee, then a betrayal. Dark magics are awakening in the north. The narration spends more time describing banners than tactics. Ian’s mother is willing to go to war herself to save her son.
Despite the broad strokes, it’s not a total clone, and many parts of it are far better than its inspiration. Akers clearly respects heroism as much as Martin detests it. The worldbuilding has a lot of attention to detail that really sells the idea of a pagan religion slowly being overtaken by something more organized. Even the naming helps to nail the feel: Tener’s nobility tends to have English or Celtic names, while Suhdra shows more Romance or Classical influence. Westeros is very much a medieval fantasy land; Tenumbra, by contrast, could almost pass for the halfway point between Middle-Earth and here.
The characters, for the most part, are well-written in support of this. Ian is as likable as his father is detestable. Lucas is an enigma you slowly unwrap through the course of the book. Henri battles his inner demons in a way that Sandor Clegane never could. The supporting cast come together to flesh it out to great effect. At all times, the author shows how their varied perspectives on the gods themselves—the major cultural sticking point—colors their entire worldview. I’ve written about that before (the Magic and Tech series, among others), and it’s good to see that I’m not the only one who realizes the value of verisimilitude.
Not to say that The Pagan Night is perfect, however. Parts of it feel rushed, especially near the end. Characters often pop up with bits of wisdom they couldn’t have known before. The timing is also a little suspect; the main story starts just before summer and lasts until the beginning of fall. Three months is a long time for a campaign and for wandering lost in the woods, but it often seems like nothing has changed, that we just got a "Three Weeks Later" title card.
And while I did say that Akers avoids the woke mind virus mostly by predating it, some bits did leak in. There are way too many female knights, for example. Elsa is forgiven, as she has magical powers that put her solidly in the paladin class, but "Sir" Doone, Sorcha Blakely, and even Gwen herself are far too competent and far too masculine for their setting. Coming from the 2026 perspective, where women are lining up to defend someone who murdered her own children, a setting where their participation in war isn’t even acknowledged as unusual is more than a bit jarring.
I can look past that, because the story was good enough to hook me. I just kept finding parallels, like the aforementioned A Game of Thrones nods. There’s also a heavy dose of Skyrim. Tener and Suhdra could very easily be the Nords and Imperials with the serial numbers filed off. After all, the whole reason for the rebellion in Skyrim was because of forced conversion, wasn’t it? But there are also historical similarities like the Hundred Years War and even the Crusades. Tim Akers drew on a lot of sources for his work, yet he was able to make it his own.
That makes The Pagan Night a good conclusion to this year’s Summer Reading List. It’s a good story, an above average fantasy novel that doesn’t try to browbeat you for being a man. It explores the dichotomy (possibly a false one) between paganism and organized religion without getting bogged down in theological arguments. It shows a Boomer being a Boomer, putting strangers who hate him before his own flesh and blood. Is it rushed? Very often, yes. Is it hard to follow at times? Absolutely. But real history is messy, too, so I can forgive it for that.
