'Lightfall (The Everlands Trilogy #1)' by Ed Crocker - review

Lightfall
The Everlands Trilogy #1
Ed Crocker

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Pub Date: Jan. 14th, 2025
​
Genre: High Fantasy / Dark Fantasy
​

Synopsis:


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.

---

PURCHASE LINKS: AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE | BLACKWELL'S | BOOKSAMILLION | BOOKSHOP.ORG | GOOGLEPLAY BOOKS | INDIGO | KOBO

---

r e v i e w

---

(I received this title as an ARC. All opinions are mine and freely given.)

'Lightfall' by Ed Crocker single-handedly did something no other book has ever done. It convinced me that I've been making a mistake by insisting on finishing books whether or not I enjoy them. Not only is it a waste of my time, it makes me not want to read at all for awhile because I've forced myself to finish what I started and been miserable all along the way. That doesn't mean I'll put one down easily, but when I'm certain it's not going to improve for me.. I'm going to call it.

That being said, I'm calling it here for this one. I will not rate this book, as I didn't finish it and that's not fair to the author. But I do have a lot of thoughts already and I'm probably sparing everyone by sharing what I have so far instead of adding to it.

I was really excited to give this book a try. I love a great vampire story, I loved the idea of what a normalized world would look like for them and other immortals from a sociopolitical point of view. Conceptually, this story held a lot of promise. And from a purely technical standpoint, there's nothing wrong here with the structure of the material. It is not a bad book, it's a book I did not like.. though despite the technical soundness of its form, it definitely has weaknesses. 

Honestly, I expected it to be some dense, high-fantasy tale.. between the synopsis and the 'for fans of' tags, but it was not. It lacked the intellectual nature of such stories and frankly seemed more like an attempt of mimicking them.

There is a constant attempt at banter that just never lands. The dialogue is weak, filled with unimaginative 'quips' implied to carry some cleverness. The characters lack any real sense of substance and aren't even charismatic enough to inspire interest in me. 

The author is overly obsessed with details that don't matter to begin with, let alone to the degree he addresses them. Paragraphs full of excessive specificity about who is drinking what every time they move and directional explanations that double back on themselves so much they end up sounding more like a Monty Python skit than world-building. It's exhausting and it feels lazy. It feels like an author just trying to put as many words on a page as possible to fill them and it bored the hell out of me.

It's told in a multiple-pov narrative, which always requires some level of control.. in my opinion. Unfortunately, since these characters are already so one-dimensional, they certainly don't have any unique voice of their own and regardless of the brief indicator at the top of a switch as to who we're reading, it all runs together.

I'm just so glad my journey with 'Lightfall' is over. I don't know what book people were reading to call it things like "wildly entertaining" or "exciting," but it couldn't have been this one. Nor do the "brilliant dialogue" comments hold true. If this is brilliant dialogue for you.. then you need to meet new people.

On the bright side, it is only a debut and the author could improve. After all, there's nowhere to go but up.