“Godless monster! Cursed child! A bane on Belkas, a curse on the parents who brought you into this world!” howled the Crone. Its voice overlapped, echoing as if multitudes spoke from the same throat, discordant and hollow yet all unified by one alien consciousness. The voice of Prophecy, the tone in which all that a Fate said was truth.  “Your father will rue the day he preserved you!”
“Pretty sure he already does.”

When a god disappears, what are his people supposed to do? For the followers of the war god Belkas, the answer is a futile campaign to regain their absent patron’s favour, a raiding and enslaving others and conquering their rivals in a bid for something much larger, and which may have consequences for everyone. But they may have already damned themselves decades ago.

Godless is a book about people struggling to find places for themselves in a world that’s hostile to them. It’s a cool multi-PoV epic fantasy set in a world where one’s patron god is decided at birth and decides the path of one’s whole life. Those serving the war god Belkas are soldiers fighting an eternal war against each other and everyone else. Those serving the knowledge god Praetum are scholars and inventors seeking truth in all its forms, and so on. But when Belkas disappeared suddenly one day and one of his priests killed and imprisoned the Crones who told everyone what their affiliation was, the world became unmoored. You can feel that through all the characters’ actions when you’re reading Godless. Nobody really knows what they’re meant to be doing, and the characters who are sure are almost invariably making a serious mistake.

The characters in Godless are really interesting; the main two are Kael, the demonic son of Belkas’s militant lead priest, who has been cast out from his people, and Asra, the daughter of another war priest who has been forced into Jarn’s service. These two have a history together that’s complicated by the fact that Kael is relentlessly bullied and abused by everyone else they know through his whole childhood, and now she’s hunting him down after a crime that can’t be forgiven. Meanwhile you also have Kael and Asra’s parents, who are struggling to keep their people together after the loss of their god, Belkas’s new champion Harbinger Barad, who is a bully and who nobody respects as much as they pretend to, the Harbingers of the other gods, who can’t agree on whether or not they should save the world, the gods themselves, who are machinating, as gods are known to do, and some wacky elemental sprites, who are generally the best characters. It’s a really interesting cast with diverse motives that’s really fun to follow. I will say that, as if often the case for me in epic fantasy, Kael, in his position as the de facto “main” character in the ensemble, is the character I was the least interested in. He spends a lot of the main timeline of the book not doing much that’s obviously relevant to the other characters in his own storyline, and he came off to me as just kind of generically nice but like he was waiting for the twist in his storyline that would make him more compelling, which comes at the end of the book. I didn’t hate him or anything, but I definitely enjoyed all the other characters more.

The world is really interesting too, it feels inspired by things like Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive but it’s not derivative of those things. We don’t see a huge amount of the world but we get a lot of interesting history and implications that we’ll see more in the future. I wish we could have gotten some of this information a bit more organically—author Edward Nile is careful not to fall into the trap of infodumping that’s common in this genre, but there are still just a few more moments of characters sitting there thinking about all the context behind a place or action than I’d like—but the gods with their individual moons are super interesting, the elemental sprites that are more sentient than they appear are awesome, and what little we saw of the world seemed really well thought out as well. The nonchronological structure of the book is interesting too, we jump back and forth from the past to the present from several perspectives, seeing how Kael and Asra got to where they are now.

I have to say that because of that structure especially, I really think that Nile should have reconsidered the contents of the prologue for Godless. I totally understand the impulse to start with something dramatic, to start with the pivotal historical moment, and to start with the main character’s birth, all of which this prologue contains, but a lot of what happens in the prologue was repeated in the first chapter, which also felt like a prologue, and I think we’d have been better off actually not seeing any of those things, or maybe seeing snippets of them in a flashback later in the book. Having the prologue tells us information that I actually would have preferred to have revealed to me later in the book as I think, for example, that finding out Kael was Jarn’s son maybe midway through the book would have been way more impactful, at least for me personally.

I quite liked Godless, it’s a very cool and well-written book populated by a lot of awesome characters, and I think a lot of fans of this genre, especially fans of the more modern writers in epic fantasy like Sanderson and Steven Erikson, will also really like it. It feels like an updated take on epic fantasy and I think the series is going interesting places. It has some structural issues that for me hold it back just a little, but I’m really nitpicky and I’m judging a contest, and those things aren’t true for everyone, so I think Godless is a book that has a lot of appeal to a lot of people.