The God Wars ended, and we’re living with the world they left.

I write the Craft Sequence series of books and games, set in a postindustrial (and post-war) fantasyland, where black magic is big business, wizards wear pinstriped suits and conduct necromantic procedures on dead gods, and day-to-day commerce rests on people trading pieces of their souls for goods and services.  The Craft Sequence books are legal thrillers about faith, or religious thrillers about law and finance.  Plus there are hive-mind police forces, poet gargoyles, brainwashing golems, nightmare telegraphs, surprisingly pleasant demons, worldshattering magic, environmental devastation, and that deepest and darkest evil: student loans.

So, they’re pretty much like real life!

Want more information?  Here’s a big post with a lot of different pitches and introductions to the Sequence.  io9 called them “cyberpunk fantasy,” and some people have thrown around “faithpunk.”  I’m wary of -punk descriptions attached to things that aren’t actually, you know, punk; there’s a sort of inverse punk thing at play in my books, in that many of the characters are working within a deeply compromised system and trying (with varying degrees of success) to make it better.  Who knows whether they’ll succeed?

I do, I guess.  But I’m not telling.

WHAT’S WITH THE CHRONOLOGY?

I’ve written a long post about this at Tor.com, so you should really go read that.  Short version: while each book stands alone, they do take place within the same universe, and characters sometimes cross from book to book, so I wanted to make the order in which things happen clear.  The numbers in the titles refer to their place within the chronology, so right now the chronological order is:

1. Last First Snow (because First, you see)

2. Two Serpents Rise

3. Three Parts Dead

4. Four Roads Cross

5. Full Fathom Five

6. Ruin of Angels

Wait, what? Why, you may well ask, does the sixth book not have a number in the title? There are many reasons, but the one I like the best is that the first five books are a sort of complete unit. If it helps, think of them as an extra long first season of the Craft Sequence. Starting with Season Two, we’re moving forward in time with each book, so the numbers are less necessary.

To make matters even more complicated, the games, while canon, lack numbers of their own. Choice of the Deathless takes place perhaps a year or two before Two Serpents Rise; Deathless: The City’s Thirst takes place about twenty years before Last First Snow.