Eternity’s Account: Rulers (Eternity’s Account #4), by Julie Bryson & Catherine Sharpe
[This book was provided free of charge by Adams PR Group. All thoughts and opinions are my own.]
At first, upon reading this 350 page or so fantasy novel I felt I might be a bit behind the curve because I had not read nor even heard of the first three books of the series. However, the authors included a very brief recap of the first three novels at the beginning of the book and it soon became apparent that this series of books could go a very long way if it wanted to. Let us put this book into perspective as being part of a Christian fantasy series that greatly expands the material of the early chapters of Genesis [1] and puts it on a different world where there are questions of timelines, but basically one is reading a fictionalized version of the first part of Genesis, and four books in we are still at least a volume or two away from the flood. The names are (slightly) different, the place is certainly different, but reading this book with an awareness and interest in the Bible is a huge advantage.
The book itself is divided into 34 chapters that switch back and forth between Satan and his minions and their city of evil and the smaller and somewhat remote people of God, and the book as a whole is a chess match–not only figuratively but literally viewed that way by the writers themselves. I found the novel to be particularly complex–at times we view the evil characters, and there are a lot of them, divided into at least three groups: fallen angels who rebelled with Nakal (the Satan figure), Nephilim that are part human and part angel, and humans, who are called peloses after the first fallen man, Pelos, who dies at the end *Spoiler Alert*–from their own perspective, and at times we view them through the perspective of godly people (?) who are viewing the action on screens and matching it up with a holy book that is very similar to the Bible and who comment on what they see. There is a lot of skulduggery here and self-delusion, and the authors here struggle with a problem that was faced by Milton when he was writing Paradise Lost (and Paradise Regained) in trying to make God into a compelling figure given the fact that He is so holy and so all-knowing that it is hard to make him into a compelling figure in the sort of drama that human beings need to feel as if there is progress. By and large, though, this is a compelling novel that would make for arresting (and probably somewhat expensive to produce) visual fiction as a movie or television miniseries for a Christian studio.
Admittedly, the names and family lines of this novel are a bit difficult to disentangle, but they are worthwhile to understand as the book plays heavily on family and its complexity. The evil beings are constantly in a hurry and not generally cooperative and the book even explores an area of demonology that is of personal interest to me, and that is those demons that work against Satan, and who are here called the “Renegades,” adding yet more complexity to the cosmology of the world here. Suffice it to say, if you are a Christian reader who has a high degree of interest in fantasy and a serious interest in demonology as well as speculations about the relationship of God, the angels, and believers in a fictional way, this book is something you will likely enjoy. It is a very complicated story, and I probably would have liked to have started reading the series from the beginning rather than starting four novels in, but if you have a strong biblical background and similar interests in exploring the grand strategy of God’s plan for evangelism and reconciliation with fallen and rebellious (but repentant) mankind, this book definitely does as good job at providing thoughtful and complex and rewarding fiction.
[1] See, for example:
Edge Induced Cohesion 