Saint Death's Herald by C.S.E. Cooney
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Pansexual brown MC, secondary queerplatonic F/F, secondary F/M/F polyamory, queernorm world
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; multiple PoVs
Published on: 22nd April 2025
Goodreads

Lanie Stones is the necromancer that Death has been praying for.

Heartbroken, exiled from her homeland as a traitor, Lanie Stones would rather take refuge in good books and delicate pastries than hunt a deathless abomination, but that is the duty she has chosen.

The abomination in question happens to be her own great-grandfather, the powerful necromancer Irradiant Stones. Grandpa Rad has escaped from his prison and stolen a body, and is heading to the icy country of Skakhmat where he died, to finish the genocide he started. Fortunately for her, Lanie has her powerful death magic, including the power to sing the restless dead to their eternal slumber; and she has her new family by her side.

Grandpa Rad may have finally met his match.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~Stripes the flying tiger-rug!
~limestone is officially the Best Rock
~shapeshifters like you’ve never seen
~a very sparkly hivemind
~ice, ice, baby

:Read my review for book one, Saint Death’s Daughter, here!:

:minor spoilers for Saint Death’s Herald!:

Saint Death’s Herald is a very different book to its predecessor, to the point that I think some readers will be initially startled by it. But if you hang on long enough for the story to sweep you away – and it won’t take long! – then you’ll find that Cooney has penned another beautiful, brilliant, beguiling epic to enchant us.

There’s no gradual build-up this time: Herald hits the ground running (or should I say: flying?) and thereafter never slows down. The blurb covers the skeleton (pun absolutely intended) of the plot, but is a bit misleading: Lanie and Duantri are close on the heels of Lanie’s ghostly grandfather as the book opens, but although his plan is to head for Skakhmat, he gets side-tracked and ends up leading them into Leech, a nation of terrifying shapeshifters. Grandpa Rad has big, horrifying plans, and he means to use the very soul-matter of the shapeshifters to bring them to fruition.

The showdown, throwdown, is epic.

If Daughter was extravagantly sprawling, Herald is tighter, far more direct, all the glittering opulence of the first book distilled down to a blinding but laser-focused radiance. Herald is faster, more streamlined, all of Lanie’s natural exuberance – not reined in (never that!) but turned to a single purpose, from which nothing is going to sway or distract her. Where Daughter dances, Herald runs, not with a sprint, but with the unflagging determination of a persistence predator hunting a dream.

I do not mean to imply for even a moment that this means Saint Death’s Herald is a more boring book than its predecessor! It is, perhaps, slightly less wiggly (I cannot say, ‘more straightforward’, because ‘straightforward’ implies a conventionality that I doubt Cooney is capable of, even were she interested in trying)(this is a most adoring compliment) – but that is not to say that Herald has been pared away to the strictly functional, that here all Daughter’s gleeful whimsy has been sanded down to dull and plodding Sense and Seriousness! That is most certainly not the case!

Saint Death’s Herald is effervescent, glittering, as fizzy and breathtaking as a shower of shooting stars. It abounds with muchness, marvellously so; it is a magic carpet to rival Stripes himself, woven out of love and wonder and rainbow-streaked wildness, and it soars.

Issue of ill-mage, heir of our arch-foe,
meet is our meeting, midst sky-road and soil!
Vengeance and vanquishment at last are upon us
Capitulate, craven–extinction ensues!

No book where one language is presented in iambic pentameter (Quadic) and another is in the alliterative verse of the freaking Norse epics (Old Skaki) is not spilling over with citrus-pink zest, okay??? This is, like its predecessor, a book that is not only endless fun to read, it was clearly also immense fun to write, and the joy and glee and delight that went into its writing radiates from the pages like sunlight. Saint Death’s Herald is so perfectly FREE: unselfconscious, uninhibited, entirely unashamed of its larger-than-life* lavishness. It glories in that lavishness, revels in itself and invites us into the revel too.

This is not a go big or go home book: it’s a go big because big is BEAUTIFUL! book.

And that is so much better.

^{*There’s a necromancy pun in there somewhere, I know it!}

Undeath, in Stripes’ opinion, was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. He was supremely pleased to be operating on the z-axis after a lifetime of apex predatoring on the ground.

I will never get tired of how these books about necromancy are fundamentally a celebration of life and living. That remains so impressively subversive, and creative, and inspiring – and such freaking FUN.

And since I haven’t yet said so outright: everything I loved about Saint Death’s Daughter is here in abundance. The footnotes; the dazzling prose; the vocabulary, full (but not overwhelming so) of words unfamiliar to me, each one small and precious and perfect as the surprise in a Fabergé egg – a treasure within a treasure. (I love looking up new words from this series, especially because they are always such marvellous new words; but I do think readers who do not enjoy consulting the dictionary can get by perfectly well deducing the meanings from context.) And hey, all the incredible characters we fell in love with in the first book? Prepare to love them even more! Saint Death’s Herald isn’t only from Lanie’s POV; this time, we also see through the eyes of characters like Duantri and Datu (and several others I’ll leave as surprises!) I didn’t expect that – it’s a big change from Daughter, where we only have Lanie’s perspective – but it’s a much-appreciated addition! I loved getting to know these characters even better than we already do, and discovering what Lanie looks like from where they’re standing? Wasn’t just fun; in a few cases, it was a very necessary reminder that she appears very differently to other people than she does to us.

(We know Lanie as the adorable twitling who cuddles mice skeletons and nerds out over all things Quadoni and will forget to eat if she has cool bones to play with. It’s difficult to think of her as scary. It’s only by seeing her as others see her that we realise how – how world-changing she is, or has the potential to be. Which does mean terrifying, to some.)

She is splendid, murmured the crystalskin. She is a walking terror of Athe.

Not everything is all love and glitter, though. Because Grandpa Rad is the worst kind of monster, and he is, unfortunately, what Saint Death’s Herald revolves around.

So there they were, his literal flock of siblings. Near at hand, easy to catch, fully matured. Cattle fatted for the slaughter. A massive resource, just waiting to be tapped.

And they all underestimated him.

The dream Lanie is chasing, persistence-hunter style, is of a world where a necromancer’s powers are about a love of life, are for joy and helping and healing. Her Grandpa Rad is her opposite in almost every way, something that becomes more and more obvious the longer he’s running free; they are a study in contrasts, opposing forces that cannot coexist, cannot balance, because Rad wants to own the world and Lanie wants to love it. Lanie wants to let the world be beautiful, in all its wondrous strangeness; Rad doesn’t see beauty at all, and wants to subjugate or destroy everything that is different from him, that is Not Him.

I can’t feel her anymore. Usually, with dead accident, I can feel the echo of the substance inside it. A link to Doédenna’s cloak, where the memory of life is kept stitched. That’s how I can sing the substance back, temporarily–through that link. But with this”–she gestured at the corpse–“there’s nothing to call back. It’s gone. He ate it. It’s all wrong.”

Rad is so disgustingly awful that I wish it was harder to believe someone could really be Like That. He is obviously a villain, and anyone who didn’t already despise him from the first book will definitely do so after just a few minutes of Herald. In that, he is…not boring, because he’s not predictable, and he’s depressingly clever, but as an individual, he holds no interest for me. (Even if his narcissism has, at times, the can’t-look-away factor of a train crash.) The man has one layer (which makes his disgust with the physical makeup of the shapeshifters deeply ironic), and there was never a moment I even sympathised with him, never mind sided with him. But I’m curious to see how other readers react to some of his actions, because even if he’s unremittingly evil, he…might not always be wrong?

Because the shapeshifters of Leech are extremely Other. They are so alien that they don’t even eat food – they eat souls.

Stop for a second and think about that.

They EAT.

SOULS.

Rad might be one of the novel’s driving forces, but I think the shapeshifters are its fulcrum; are, in a very real way, a kind of test case for the themes of Daughter. We were happy to embrace the messaging of the first book, which can maybe be distilled down to celebrate Life. But can we walk the walk when we’re confronted with beings who, by any human measure, are unspeakably monstrous?

Do you still think Life is always worth defending? Can you treasure strangeness that is this strange? Will you love the monsters, too? CAN you?

Lanie can. Lanie does. This is why we love her.

Lanie’s thoughts spun out in a ravelment of marvel.

But it also might be the one moment in the entire series when readers really, genuinely struggle to follow where she leads. It’s not hard for me to imagine other readers recoiling from her reaction, when she learns about the soul-eating. Certainly the other cast-members have very different opinions on it!

And this – the invention of the shapeshifters, their placement in Herald, showing us the wildly different perspectives different characters have on them – my gods, this is why I will follow anywhere Cooney leads. Because she can create beings this alien to me. Because she is so clearly delighted by the creation of them. Because she so perfectly balances horror and wonder, in making them equally and genuinely horrifying and beautiful.

No, wait, that’s not quite it. It’s not that she can create something that appals and appeals. That is impressive, but it’s not an ability completely unique to her. What I think might well be is: she shows us, teaches us, how to look at horror and see beauty. Because she does make us see through Lanie’s eyes, feel with her heart, believe with her faith. Showing me a monster, and then showing me, teaching me how to see, that it is beautiful not despite the parts of it that terrify me, but because of them? So few storytellers can do that, can pull you so deep into the story that you become it, and it becomes you, so that you carry it with you long after you turn the final page, not the person you were before, transformed – shifted – right down to the marrow. Your perceptions are forever changed; you have a sixth sense, a seventh, an eighth you never had before, senses just for strangeness. So few storytellers can teach you to see a new colour, but Cooney can, and does.

What do you call that, except magic?

Her magic, at once familiar and alien, sang in Lanie’s bones: notes like needles-of-water; chords like calvings-of-icebergs; progressions of thundersnow and sleet, of graupel and permafrost and salt-ice upon the shore. She grew dizzy with the immensity of the symphony

It shouldn’t be a surprise; wasn’t Saint Death’s Daughter a magnum opus that took the frightening and unsettling, and showed us a wildly different way of looking at it? This is a series about a necromancer, about death-magic, with regular appearances by the goddess of death – and yet this story is optimistic, jubilant, heartfelt. Cooney has been subverting our ideas of ugliness and horror from the first page of the first book!

And I love her for doing it yet again.

From within her deep senses, the pearly caress of those sleeping bones tidal-tumbled through her, cuddling closer, memory-to-memory, sharing the sweetness of their divine rest.

I can’t make myself wrap up without talking a bit about the gods here. I fell head-over-heels for them all in Daughter, and I love them still – and just as we learn more about the mortal cast in this book, we get quite a bit more insight into, not just individual gods, but also how divinity works in Athe, what gods can and cannot do, their connections to their chosen wizards, the risk that’s posed each time they create an artefact imbued with their power. All of which is massively plot-relevant, because a big chunk of Herald sees Lanie caught up in situations that are a direct result of the choices made by one god or another – or choices that a god refuses to make.

I want to mention this because I found it distressingly confusing when I first read it. I didn’t understand (and felt betrayed by Saint Death, which is ridiculous, and yet) and I have the sort of brain that can’t let go of something that makes no sense to me. This was going to ruin the entire book for me if I couldn’t figure it out. And hopefully, I can preempt that happening to any other readers. Because what I eventually realised – after going over that part of Herald much more carefully than I did the first time, given that that time I was turning pages as fast as I could because it’s probably the tensest, most action-packed part of the book – is that I’d missed, or forgotten, what should be very obvious about any death deity, and most especially this one.

To you and I, any choice between Lanie and Irradiant, aka Grandpa Rad, is no choice at all. So why is it that Lanie has to prove herself Saint Death’s best-beloved? There’s no reason for the epic, horrifying, cinematic showdown in Leech – no rational reason for Saint Death to not declare Lanie Her champion and have done – unless She still loves Irradiant too.

You can’t favor us both, she muttered, but the only answer was the sharp twinge in her wizard marks.

GALAXY-BRAIN MOMENT. We’re talking about the goddess of death. Of course She can’t stop loving someone! She’s DEATH. Death is there for EVERYONE. Possibly other gods can reject mortals, but death? Even if you disappoint Her, hurt Her terribly…by Her very nature, how can She hate anyone? And so, how can She choose?

(I have a feeling this was even stated explicitly in Daughter at one point, and I just forgot.)

Do I need to tell you that this – Saint Death being unable or unwilling to stop loving anyone – makes me incredibly happy? Not just because it makes sense of a confusion that bothered me, and not even just because it’s a wonderful worldbuilding detail. I love the theology of it. It feels deeply correct. I hope that makes sense, because I can’t figure out another way to put it.

(And I could write ANOTHER 10K word essay on how this plays into the theme of rejecting violence that was such an important part of the first book; how the situation Saint Death’s not-choice puts Lanie in showcases this so beautifully; what the results of Lanie trying to fight her grandfather mean for this theme of rejecting violence, especially as contrasted with Herald’s ultimate climax. The subversion of conventions and genre-norms!!! BUT I CAN’T WAX POETIC BECAUSE SPOILERS. Just. Take it as read that Cooney is a genius with this too, and pay attention when you read it!)

This entire deep dive into – the exploration of – divinity on Athe is one of my favourite aspects of Herald. One of the most beautiful moments in the entire book is when a character I did not expect to show up again communes with his goddess – a goddess who is, and is not, the Saint Death Lanie knows and loves. The multifacety of gods is something I always get excited about; the idea that, for example, Lucifer and Loki are different masks-and-costumes worn by the same Power is a thrilling one to explore or play with, and Cooney dances with it here, giving us such a deep, intimate look into the world she’s created, the workings of the world she’s created. It’s ridiculously cool from a worldbuilding perspective, breathtaking from a story one, and – honestly, kind of an honour, in being allowed a glimpse behind the curtain, especially when you remember that Athe is where all Cooney’s stories are set.

Which means this is not the last time we’ll visit it. Saint Death’s Herald feels like the second book in a duology, not the middle book of a trilogy, which makes perfect sense – and makes me feel very loved as a reader – when you learn that Cooney wanted to make sure we would not be left anxious or unsatisfied if for some reason Rebellion is foolish enough not to give her a contract for book three. I mean, I will riot if that happens. But if this is where this series ends, then my friends, it is a truly magnificent ending, and I will console myself with the knowledge that no matter what, we will see Athe again.

(But also, Rebellion, I will riot. RIOT.)

Truly, a more-than-worthy sequel to The Most Perfect Book to Ever Book.

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