Lightfall by Ed Crocker Review

An epic fantasy of vampires, werewolves and sorcerers, Lightfall is the debut novel of Ed Crocker, for fans of Jay Kristoff’s Empire of the Vampire and Richard Swan’s The Justice of Kings.
 

No humans here. Just immortals: their politics, their feuds—and their long buried secrets.
 

For centuries, vampires freely roamed the land until the Grays came out of nowhere, wiping out half the population in a night. The survivors fled to the last vampire city of First Light, where the rules are simple. If you’re poor, you drink weak blood. If you’re nobility, you get the good stuff. And you can never, ever leave.
 

Palace maid Sam has had enough of these rules, and she’s definitely had enough of cleaning the bedpans of the lords who enforce them. When the son of the city’s ruler is murdered and she finds the only clue to his death, she seizes the chance to blackmail her way into a better class and better blood. She falls in with the Leeches, a group of rebel maids who rein in the worst of the Lords. Soon she’s in league with a sorcerer whose deductive skills make up for his lack of magic, a deadly werewolf assassin and a countess who knows a city’s worth of secrets.
 

There’s just one problem. What began as a murder investigation has uncovered a vast conspiracy by the ruling elite, and now Sam must find the truth before she becomes another victim. If she can avoid getting murdered, she might just live forever.

Devoid of mortals, the world of Lightfall is filled with vampires, werewolves, and sorcerers boxed in by dangerous and mysterious beings called the Grays. Despite the familiar setup that would typically be used for an action-packed fantasy warfare story, Ed Crocker’s debut novel is instead a sprawling and imaginative epic fantasy story focused on the political power struggle and socio-economic dynamics within the city of First Light’s walls. Full of extensive world-building, Lightfall is an ambitiously imagined novel that has all the right ideas to be a slow burn fantasy mystery thriller. Unfortunately, the presentation and execution of its ideas didn’t work for me, and I struggled with the book’s pacing and narrative.

Easily the most impressive aspect of Lightfall is Crocker’s detailed and complex world-building and lore that for better or for worse, makes up the bulk of the novel’s content. Apart from the initial discovery of the First Lord’s younger son is dead, the book’s story falls into a period of relative lull. Preceding the last hundred years, Lightfall’s world and history is full of conflict that is written in great detail. Covering various topics including the origin of the three main groups of immortals, the mystery and absence of mortal humans, the battle between vampires and werewolves followed by the destruction of both by the Grays, the story has a lot of history that is often the most interesting element in the book. The story is written in a first-person multiple perspective presentation which not only covers a lot of material, but also different versions or interpretations of history based on who the narrator is. Beyond its present and historic lore, Lightfall features extensive world-building elements that are varied and imaginative. From the vampire cities utilizing blood sample quality as a form of currency via the blood bank or stock market, the werewolf cooperative agreement with the vampires, the differences and inequality of resources between vampire classes, different types of sorcerers with varying philosophies, the amount of the thought that went into the book’s world is immense. That said, the decision to name historic events as “falls”, various city names ending with “falls”, on top of sub-sections of the city of First Light being mapped at falls is a puzzling choice that add more confusion than the intended symbolism.

Despite how sprawling the world-building of Lightfall is and its large-scale political movements that are on-par with many great fantasy epics, the novel’s incredible level of detail serves as a double-edge sword when it comes to the book’s reading experience. My biggest gripe with Lightfall is its slow pacing and debatably misplaced focus. Despite having an intriguing premise of conflicting groups of immortals on top of an initially compelling murder mystery investigation, I consistently struggled to stay invested throughout this read. Crocker’s world-building and commitment to the world’s lore is so excessive that the rest of the story and characters get lost within it. While the mysterious circumstances around the vampire heir’s death is interesting, the plot and investigation felt very stop-go, with many lengthy tangents derailing the momentum and interest after each new development. I found the lore fascinating, but a sizable portion of it felt irrelevant to the story or filler when the novel instead needed far more plot. I found the death and its implications conceptually solid, but felt like there wasn’t enough investigation, content, or connection to the greater political movements until the end of the story where everything is rushed and a bit messy.

On top of the unfocused details, the book’s presentation of being written in the first perspective split across no less than eight different characters doesn’t help. While reading this book, I was under the impression that Crock’s ensemble approach was chosen to present a variety of perspectives and narrations from different political and immortal groups while also giving the story a complex and interwoven experience. By focusing the narrative on a large group of unlikely allies, the story can show the corruption and issues within Lightfall’s current arrangements. While great in theory, I felt this narrative choice created several prominent issues throughout the novel. By constantly shifting the perspective between different characters and their actions that happen at the same time, it causes the timeline to move at a sluggish rate in an already slow-paced book. While the different perspectives and context are sometimes interesting, filling holes or missing details in other perspectives, it often seems excessive, similar to the world-building. 

Another consideration that comes with first person perspectives is the inherent challenge of making sure each perspective has a distinctive character voice to justify its inclusion. While by no means terrible, the character work and writing felt noticeably weaker compared to the political power play and world-building details. While the main characters such as Sam, Sage, and the First Lord had character tones specific to them, the other characterizations felt less developed and their character perspectives considerably less interesting to read. It’s a tall order to try to write a book in the first-person tense spread across so many characters, and unfortunately its sub-par execution is quite evident throughout the story. With such a large cast, there isn’t enough time for each character to really develop and many often feel like shallow caricature rather than a fully fleshed out person, particularly Jacob and Alanna who get shafted by having very little screentime.

Additionally, a good amount of the book is spent referencing historical moments, sensory observations around each character, and explanations about different societal concepts in Lightfall with relatively little internal reflections, introspections, or more personal character moments, apart from Sam who has some good moments towards the end of the book. None of these topics benefit or utilize the first-person tense, especially with so many pages consisting of characters recapping past events or worse, narrating that they’re narrating to someone else the events that recently occurred. I’ve read other reviews that believe the third-person tense would’ve worked much better for juggling such a large cast of characters and invoking a more traditional fantasy tone which I fully agree with. The expansive perspectives even have the opposite effect of occasionally ruining the tension or intrigue of certain events by giving the reader too much of the big picture. Certain moments like the interrogation of suspects, the worries of Queen of Leeches, the random shifts to the Spymaster’s guards, the presentation of these accessory (and frankly often unnecessary) perspectives leaves little to the imagination and robs the sense of anticipation, contributing to the underwhelming experience.  With some editing, I could see the perspectives narrowed down to just Sam, Sage, and the First Lord for a more concise, focused, and faster paced read.

With a pacing that constantly drags, character work that ranges from serviceable to lacking, and less than distinctive narrations, the novel is left to rely on its core story and murder investigation to carry the reading experience. Fantasy murder mystery is a recent sub-genre that I’ve been seeing pop up a lot recently, Robert Jackson Bennett’s the Tainted Cup being a masterclass example of a compelling mystery paired with excellent fantasy world-building. At times, Lightfall often felt like it was finding its footing, but the mystery and political commentary never quite hit its stride. The focal death is surprisingly quite straightforward, and I was personally a bit let down by the circumstances and motivations that lead up to it. For how complex and well thought out the story’s history and world are, the reveal of the villain and their aspirations were surprisingly simple, almost contrived even. On a smaller and more specific scale, there were also many potential plot points that don’t really make sense; some being pretty noticeable plot holes, others being simply baffling narrative choices.

While having an excellent premise on paper and imaginative world-building for days, the full reading experience of Lightfall is unfortunately not all that it wants to be. Whether it be due to conscious artistic choices or simply having too wide of a vision without focusing enough on its core story, I can’t help but feel like something went wrong in the conceptualization or editing of this book. The intent and political power struggle behind the scenes of the murder mystery paired with its confident fantasy flair makes it clear that Crock is a great writer and even better visualizer. Yet the pacing and presentation, lackluster character work and overall underwhelming excitement leaves a lot to be desired. I could even overlook all those drawbacks if the core mystery had a strong reveal or plot twist but as the story progressed, the highlighted details and convoluted logic became impossible to ignore, my patience for sticking to the end ultimately not being rewarded. And that’s a shame as this was a book I was very excited to read; complex and ambitious narratives like this one are normally right up my alley. Not only that, but as an editor and freelance SFF/Horror book reviewer, I was optimistic to see what Ed Crocker would write in his debut. While readers that enjoy slow and expansive world-building may find this book unique and intriguing to read, unfortunately this isn’t one I can confidently recommend and a series I most likely won’t be continuing.