Beyond Redemption Is a Wild Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Ride

After countless wars, the gods have left. With no deities to keep the world in check, it reaches out to anyone who will believe anything at all, creating powerful individuals known as “Geisteskranken,” able to weaponize their delusions and mental illnesses. The most powerful of them all is Konig, the high priest of the Geborene, who started a globe-spanning religion to feeds him their belief, which manifest as even more delusions, and make him ever more powerful. Even that isn’t enough, because Konig wants to make a god. He and his mad scientist even have a suitable candidate: an innocent boy named Morgen.
Meanwhile, a group of unsavory outlaws led by Bedeckt, possibly the sanest man left in the world, arrives at a backwater town looking for their next score. And as luck would have it, there’s a priestess at the local Geborene monastery who just happens to know the location of a certain god-child who might fetch a hefty ransom. But Konig is paranoid, and the crew will have to get through an army of zombielike assassins, a pyromaniac priestess, Geisteskranken guards, and a heavily-fortified city to make off with the god-child. Who might have ideas of his own.
Beyond Redemption is a stellar experiment in world-building. The use of German gives his land a suitably old-world feel for an environment that runs pretty much exactly how a world dreamed by a madman would operate, right down to the people you kill being forced to serve you in the “afterdeath” (a detail that may actually be based on the rantings of at least two real-life serial killers). But it is also remarkably structured for a place run and ruled almost completely by the insane, too. One class of characters even has an ordered system of battle to get the crowd to believe in them, so they can be known as the “Greatest Swordsman in the World.” Fletcher puts a lot of effort into fleshing out his world, and what emerges is a twisted but incredibly compelling cosmology in both life and afterlife.
The characters are as memorable. From the opening, none of them could be called “good.” They’re thieves, madmen, murderers, and even worse. But Fletcher makes us care. I desperately wanted Bedeckt’s crew to unite, and rise above their circumstances. I wanted Konig’s underlings to break free from his delusions. They eventually do change. None of them are redeemed, they don’t change that way, but that’s not the character arc. The arc is not about untwisting a twisted brain, but learning to manage despite it. It’s an analogue to mental illness: you don’t fix it, you learn how to deal with it so you can function on some level.
If you couldn’t already tell, this book is really dark. There are a lot of bodily fluids thrown around (trust a book full of gibbering, drooling maniacs to have drool in it, right?). The body count reaches levels rarely seen outside of world wars, most of them depicted in loving detail.
If you enjoy a good story and don’t mind some gore, if you want to read something that’ll knock you on your rear (more than once), if you want to play around in an utterly unique world, this is your book.
Pre-order Beyond Redemption, available June 15.