In 2016, I reviewed Vox Day’s lengthy novel ‘A Throne of Bones’ (‘AToB’) and found it to be “very, very good”. Now, 8 years since my review and 11 years since the first book was released, he has finished the sequel – ‘A Sea of Skulls’ (‘ASoS’), which can be bought as an ebook on the Arkhaven Comics website. The book was released in incomplete form in 2016, but not finished until the end of 2023 (nearly double the original length) and your author has refrained from reviewing until now that it is complete. I paid for the original release of the book, and received a free upgrade voucher for the finished version. For those who have not already received it, the final version is well worth buying. Be warned, spoilers follow.
A Sea of Skulls by Vox Day
For those unfamiliar with the series, the, “Arts of Dark and Light” is set in a fantasy world on a continent called Selenoth. The setting and story is dominated by the ‘Republic of Amorr’, which is almost indistinguishable from the Roman Republic. Amorr, however, exists in a fantasy world that will be familiar to players of Dungeons and Dragons and other Tolkien-derived settings. The world contains many of the usual fantasy elements of elves, dwarves, demons and magic. Amorr has some variations in timeline and technology, for example it has a monotheistic faith very similar to Christianity that is already the official state religion. In the real Rome that did not happen until the Republic had been replaced by the Roman Empire. Technology levels vary from bronze-age to medieval – with roughly ancient era Amorr next to medieval Savondir – a France analogue.
The ongoing story, not unlike other fantasy novels such as the Malazan Book of the Fallen, by Steven Erikson or a Song of Ice and Fire by George R R Martin, concerns conflicts between various human and supernatural factions in multiple fantasy states.
The story itself is a competent fantasy story. The finished version shows Vox Day’s improvement as a writer and is slightly easier to read than the original release and the first book.
Very little of the setting is new – generic historic world, magic, dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins and so forth, but one thing that makes it stand out is that unlike most of the bland, lockstep, science-fiction and fantasy establishment of this era, Vox writes from the perspective of a deeply religious Christian and right-winger.
As I said of the first book, the Amorran God is made clear in the setting to be very, very real and the religion is effectively Christianity for all intents and purposes. In earlier short stories in the same setting, the ‘Immaculate’ (Christ) directly intervenes and utterly crushes his opposition. Another refreshing, although less rare, element of the series is that the world is dark, brutal and does not shy away from portraying historical beliefs, abuse and prejudices in uncompromising terms as well as the horrors of practices such as slavery.
The various factions are flavoured by peppering their speech with non-English words. The Amorrans (obviously) use Latin, the Savondir French, the elves use Welsh whilst the goblins and orcs seem to use African words from languages like Igbo and Hausa. “Shugaba”, for example, is used to denote goblin and orc leaders and means, “leader” in Hausa.
The second book in the series, ASoS has the luxury of less need for world-building and focuses more on the action. We resume the story across multiple threads and multiple points of view. The Dalarn are essentially Vikings – blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic types fleeing genocide conducted by a plague of werewolves that have invaded their islands. The Dalarn flee to Savondir – the France analogue which is being invaded by Orcs and Goblins. Amorr is engaged in a civil war, with one legion having ended up in Savondir by happenstance and helping to fight the Orcs. Meanwhile, the elves are fighting a different branch of the same Orcish horde. Behind the scenes powerful supernatural beings pull the strings of the many factions.
Some issues facing the various nations mirror real world problems. The elves face demographic decline. Much like the modern Hungarian government, the elven ruler eventually seeks to encourage his subjects to have children. Of course, the elven king is somewhat more brutal than the Hungarians and simply orders his subjects to marry on pain of punishments like exile and / or forced servitude.
The characters are engaging and in many cases, likeable. Even Lugbol the Orc is an entertaining and sometimes sympathetic point-of-view character. All of the cast have identifiable and different personalities, goals, traits, strengths and flaws.
Overall this is superior fantasy which deserves a wider audience. It is a great shame Vox no longer promotes the series on Amazon – he does not seem to be banned – although his well publicised reservations about Kindle (archive) are understandable. In essence, he seems to be trading reach via use of the larger platform for the higher margin that comes with selling on his own platform at Arkhaven.
The Didact has named the final version of ASoS as one of his best books of 2023. In that review, he does express reservations about some flaws – he says some storylines seemed rushed and keeping track was hard. Your author disagrees. The storylines seemed to progress and end in satisfying ways. Like the Didact I found the book hard to put down.
The core flaw of ASoS and the Arts of Dark and Light series in general to my mind is not the multiple threads but around accessibility. The genius of Tolkien was not just in his detailed and consistent fantasy world-building, but in its point-of-view. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are both seen through the view of the hobbits, who are for many practical purposes, essentially child-like. Almost everything is filtered through the hobbits – even the words and actions of other characters are coloured by the hobbits’ reactions. Middle-Earth is therefore easy to get into and children can progress as they grow up from the Hobbit, to the Lord of the Rings and thence (if they are so inclined) to more adult material such as the Silmarillion.
The Arts of Dark and Light seem much closer to Tolkien in purely moral and ideological terms than much modern fantasy that is derived from his work. They also have more detailed world-building. They do not, in my opinion, have such broad appeal power. Tolkien without the hobbits is hard high fantasy and that is roughly where Selenoth falls.
In a recent post, Vox Day described himself as past his peak. I am not so sure that is the case. I for one hope he still has at least one more book of this fantasy series left in him. I suspect any drop in blog traffic arises more from a shift of focus to existing rather than new fans. Perhaps there is time for at least one last sally into the sinister platform-lairs of big-tech to try to reach out to those who might want to listen to what he has to say. If Vox is right, however, he can at least take satisfaction in the glimmers that he has lasted into what, from his perspective, may be the turning of the tide. Many of the ideas he has championed over the years seem to be coming back into fashion across the globe. Sadly, many of Vox’s dark predictions have turned out to be all too correct. The future, even a brighter one, is often born in pain.
AToB and ASoS are both very, very good books. However, they are not ground-breaking. They take place in a near-generic historic fantasy universe and stand out in many ways only for swimming against the tide of current fashionable thought. They do not have the ease of access that Tolkien or C S Lewis brought to their works, although ASoS seems significantly better in its final form when compared to the initial release or AToB. That makes them no less worthy purchases.
