Stuart Vowell The Lucifer Wars

Synopsis:

"The Lucifer Wars is the gritty reality of the north of England provides the initial setting for the story of judgement day. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have wrought havoc on the human race and the handful of survivors must battle against these supernatural foes as well as combating packs of killer dogs and several virulent plagues (courtesy of Pestilence). As the epic saga unravels the human survivors are forced to send the third messiah and the Four Timeless Heroes into the spirit realm for a final battle against the horrors that the Horsemen have to offer. The Four Heroes must face and defeat their counterparts both in this world and the next in order for the human race to have any chance of survival at all. While this chaos reigns both in heaven and on Earth, Lucifer is waiting in the wings to launch his own devastating assault on the messiah, and he plans to overthrow the angels and challenge God for the Throne of Heaven. As the mortals pit their wits and their courage against the forces of darkness it seems that nothing can stop the tide of destruction; the outcome is far from certain and only a few of the immortals consider that the human race is really worth saving. The horrors of the real world meet the surreal in this vicious story of Pestilence, Famine, War and Death. "

Stuart Vowell's debut novel "The Lucifer Wars" is self-published and was released in paperback in 2005. The novel is an ambitious post-apocalyptic tale that draws on religious and mythological ideas that have been compiled together to create this final desperate struggle for humanity.

Vowell jumps straight into the tale with mankind already on the edge of extinction with the final apocalypse coming thirty years early. The characters that are to each play a huge part in this complex story are all quickly introduced, with some rather careless characterization. As the few remaining survivors try to stay alive battling against wild packs of dogs and the four horsemen, the reader is subjected to some quite horrific, gruesome and nasty turns of events. As the plot progresses it becomes a fast paced page turner that delivers almost non-stop action and nail biting tension. Yet, when the novel draws closer and closer to the grand finale, Vowell's epic war becomes a little too clumsy with so many characters being suddenly introduced and then killed off.

The tale is unfortunately somewhat spoiled by the poor use of grammar, with each page filled with countless spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. From the very beginning of the novel, the reader has to struggle through the text with a huge lack of paragraphs to help break it up. Full stops are also constantly missing and are replaced instead with semi-colons, with commas almost completely forgotten. This may all sound a bit trivial, but it does make it harder to really get into the novel.

All in all, I enjoyed reading "The Lucifer Wars" and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys post-apocalyptic fiction. Hopefully Vowell will have the novel edited in the future to tidy up. In my opinion this would improve the whole book immensely.

The novel runs for a total of 343 pages of which each page is packed with text (due to the massive lack of paragraphs).