Peter Octavian has been many things in his long life, a vampire defender of Constantinople, part angel, part devil and part human he has spent a thousand years in hell losing his mind before transforming into a powerful mage. Rescued from hell by his friends, Octavian still holds on the guilt over how many of them found themselves trapped in hell, so that he could escape. When the world changed around him, making him almost an anachronism, his mind turns to his missing friends...

King of Hell is the ultimate, for now, Peter Octavian novel from Christopher Golden and last of the seven book Shadow saga.

For fans of Golden, and I count myself amongst that number, he has not only delivered a satisfying conclusion to the series, but has through some wonderful sleight of hand been able to link it to a number of his other series and characters.

Stories have always been the way we make sense of the world and some stories seem to have more resonance with humans than others. A decent into hell is not a new story as such. Orpheus descended into hell for much the same reason as Octavian, to save his beloved wife, Eurydice, a story more than two thousand years old. It didn’t work out well for Orpheus and I will let the reader discover if Octavian shares a similar fate.

So, if the journey isn’t original we need to fall back on the author’s ability to add new twists and interesting concepts. In this, Golden excels, in some ways his hell has a traditional feel, replete with demons and tortured souls. However, his idea of hell is very different to a traditional view of hell somehow being beneath us, waiting to gobble up those not found worthy of heaven.

Here is a worse hell where only the evil - and what is worse, those who feel themselves deserving of nothing but torment - are confined. Here hell is just one location in a multiverse and personally the idea is intriguing enough that I would like to see Golden expand on this idea.

There are characters taken from his other series, so Squire, who is able to open portals into hell and a large chunk of the book details what happens to Phoenix Cormier and her fight against the encroaching hordes of hell. You don’t need to have read the other series; you don’t even need to have read the previous books in this as King of Hell works very well as a standalone tale.

Well worth picking up as either a satisfactory end to a series or as a good standalone novel.

8

Charles Packer