Fiction Reviews
The Malevolent Eight
(2025) Sebastien de Castell, Jo Fletcher Books – Quercus, £16.99, trdpbk, xvi + 382pp, ISBN 978-1-529-44092-8
This is the second book in the 'Malevolent' series and follows on from The Malevolent Seven. The good news, if you liked the first volume, is that this is more of the same. It picks up their story a few weeks after the previous novel and it does a solid job of introducing the characters and filling us in with what we need to know of the story so far; it is not at all necessary to have read the first volume in order to enjoy this one.
To make it clear - this a very amusing story but frequently cynical, if not downright sarcastic, and is not for the linguistically squeamish. As it says on the cover ‘They may be heroes … but they’ll never be the good guys’. To quote from the story: ‘What they got instead was seven emotionally unstable mercenary mages with unpredictable powers and severely compromised moral compasses’. And that is where the humour lies.
Our heroes are a misfit bunch of wonderists and dropouts from both angelic and infernal backgrounds and they come with a lot of baggage. Despite this, they had recently saved the mortal plane from a terrible invasion by the inhabitants of the Pandoral plane. Wonderists are people who are in touch with other planes; somewhere out there, for example, is a reality where thunder and lighting naturally appear from empty skies and all a thunder, or tempestoral, mage does is blur the lines that separate the two realities such that lighting will strike from their own empty sky. They are lead by Cade Ombra, our highly self-opinionated narrator; once he was a Glorian Justicar but now he is a mage with an unknown awesome power that he secretly picked up in the battle against the Pandorals. His best friend is Corrigan Blight (a tempestoral mage) and the other members of the Seven are Aradeus Mozen (a rat mage), Galass (a blood mage though once a Glorian Sublime), Alice (a former demon), and Shame (a former Angelic Emissary); their final member is Temper, a seven foot tall, vampire kangaroo who slipped through from another plane in the midst of some powerful magic.
Following on from the battle with the Pandorals, the Lords Celestine (theoretically the good guys but you would never, ever want to trust one as they are actually really nasty) and the Lords Devilish (who you would never, ever want to trust either but at least they do not pretend to be nice) found a way of entering the mortal plane and have started the greatest of all wars between themselves, each determined to utterly wipe out the other side, and to use humans as their very disposable soldiers. Cade and his friends (a relative term) realise that the only hope for the mortal plane is to defeat both the Lords Celestine and the Lords Devilish, which will not be easy (an understatement if ever there was one). Then they find that another group of wonderists, the Apocalypse Eight, have also joined in the fight, but not with the intention of bringing peace.
Our heroes fight many battles and happily leave large piles of bodies behind them, of both Celestine and Devilish supporters - they will enforce peace on the mortal plane at any cost! After one particular battle, more of a rescue mission really, they discover that they have saved Tenebris, a retired demon and one-time seller of especially powerful spells to Cade, but now a restaurateur with a fine line in paella. Retired? Not exactly, as they will find out. He, in turn, introduces them to Spellslinger, a young lady with an almost unbelievable past and an unknown but undefeatable magic of her own. It could be that the Malevolent Seven have met their match and they are as doomed as she assures them they are. Certainly she comes out tops in their every confrontation - though it is far from certain exactly who she is working for.
But Cade is not one for giving up despite the insurmountable odds of the huge armies raised by both the Lords Celestine and the Lords Devilish, as well as a few other interested parties. The cost of his victory might be beyond consideration, but as the entire future of the mortal plane is in his hands, it might just surprise everybody as to just how far he will, and indeed can, go.
The story reaches a logical and fitting conclusion, almost a happy one given the people involved, but it is abundantly clear that there are more battles already waiting for them. According to his Acknowledgements, the author will be presenting us with The Malevolent Nine in due course. I await with much anticipated pleasure.
Peter Tyers
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