The Things Gods Break

Abigail Owen swings for the rafters here — this is fantasy as operatic morality play. An ambitious, blood-and-myth novel about the damage done by power, and the damage done by faith. You can feel the author reaching not just for story, but for cosmology — she wants to build a theology and then snap it in half.

The book orbits a world where the divine is not benign but feral. The gods in this text are not symbols; they are actors, bruisers, tyrants, children. It’s a daring move to portray deity not as unknowable ethereality, but as emotional — even petty. That decision is the novel’s engine: belief becomes a liability, devotion becomes a weapon, and once a reader absorbs that logic, every scene tightens on the page.

Owen’s pacing is bold — she trusts the reader to stay with her through dense systems, and then rewards that trust with ferocious set-pieces. Not all of them land cleanly. Sometimes the lore is told to us too directly, sometimes the metaphor is underlined instead of revealed. But the book is never lazy. It asks its audience to engage, not merely consume.

What impresses most is the emotional lattice underneath the fireworks. Characters here are not choosing between good and evil — they are choosing between different kinds of ruin. There is something almost tragic-Shakespearean in how the novel understands consequence: every victory costs something unpayable. It will not be for the reader who needs tidy resolutions or pure heroes.

This is also, crucially, a book that takes the trauma and politics of power seriously while still revelling in the pulp pleasures of fantasy: new magic systems, monstrous god-creatures, knife’s-edge betrayals. It gives you both the candy and the teeth.