Unstuck Pages

They came to earth-Pestilence, War, Famine, Death-four horsemen riding their screaming steeds, racing to the corners of the world. Four horsemen with the power to destroy all of humanity. They came to earth, and they came to end us all.

The day Jerusalem falls, Miriam Elmahdy knows her life is over. Houses are burning, the streets run red with blood, and a traitorous army is massacring every last resident. There is no surviving this, especially not once Miriam catches the eye of War himself. But when the massive and terrifying horseman corners Miriam, he calls her his wife, and instead of killing her, he takes her back to his camp.

Now Miriam faces a terrifying future, one where she watches her world burn town by town, and the one man responsible for it all is her seemingly indestructible "husband". But there's another side to him, one that's gentle and loving and dead set on winning her over, and she might not be strong enough to resist.

However, if there's one thing Miriam has learned, it's that love and war cannot coexist. And so she must make the ultimate choice: surrender to War and watch humankind fall, or sacrifice everything and stop him.

The premise of the Four Horsemen (and the mortal women they find along the way) is an unusual one and it’s a massive read that you’ll need to hunker down with.

After going through ‘War’ and ‘Pestilence’, it does appear that the emerging pattern winding its way through the series will probably involve every horseman on the warpath of judgement and destruction while their mortal women fight to save the human race. But Laura Thalassa doesn’t shy away from brutality and perhaps that’s in part, what makes ‘War’ so difficult to put down as I made my way wide-eyed through the pages and saw things through Miriam Elmahdy’s eyes as they happened. The imagining of a post-apocalyptic world that burns and crumbles when wave after wave of destruction hits, where judgement is unrelentingly meted out by otherworldly beings is strangely, a seductive idea.

But it’s precisely here that I stumbled too. The biblical overtones—the title and the series say it all—made it impossible to ignore the eschatological implications of whatever one’s religious leanings might be about the end of the world. Still, whether theology or religion or whatever those beliefs are though, it could be harder for some more than others, I think, to swallow an author’s execution of the end times, hook, line and sinker.

The harder part to believe however, was that a long-lived ‘heavenly’ (manwhoring) creature got laid low by a young woman, then had his plans for riding through the earth and bringing death derailed because he fell in love and gained some measure of human emotion. That their heavenly mission so to speak, was eventually realised as a ‘wrong’ one made it seem like a negation of the idea of supernatural judgement—one that Thalassa pulled out so strongly from the start—and perhaps, a reversal of what the book was so strongly built on (and which I had already bought into) from the very start.

Thalassa hints at War and Miriam as broader types of war and love and that the reconciliation of these both as ideas and characters would mean some kind of catastrophic turn in the plot – and a turn there was. The irony was that as War shed his otherworldly beliefs and took on more empathetic human traits, the story lost a little more of its sheen for me at the very end.

The long and short of it is, suspension of disbelief is par for the course and if the middle sags a little with a bit of repetitive storytelling, the riveting last quarter most likely made up for it. ‘War’ is by and large, well-written, both in characterisation and the odd (meta) pockets of humour that peeked out of the pages—this is where the lengthy storytelling helped and very few of the scenes actually felt like page-fillers for the sake of…page-filling. But it succeeded in making me think, so in many ways, I’d say ‘War’ is quite the success.