Book Review

Pestilence by Laura Thalassa

Look, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve read some shit. I read the book about the blue alien/robot people who exist, I think, just to have buttsecks. I read the book about Santa’s Reindeer shifter. I read a book once about a guy who has psychic visions of murder and his eyeball rolls around in his head when it happens. Just the one eye though. Because two would be too much, I guess.

I thought I was pretty much impervious to the WTFery subgenre, but it turns out I’m wrong. I think Pestilence might have broken me.

When I looked at this book, I thought to myself, how you can write a convincing love story between a woman and one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse? and I think the answer is that you can’t. At least not for me.

That said, while this book did not work for me, I can totally see how it would be absolute catnip for other readers. Things this book has include:

  1. A captivity narrative
  2. A virgin hero who is learning how to People and is confused by everything
  3. A horse named Trixie Skillz

And I think that, if Pestilence (the character not the book) hadn’t actually been killing people everywhere he went, it might have worked for me, too. I just couldn’t get past the grimness of it all. And this book is grim.

It opens up in a currently-apocalyptic world where technology has failed and Pestilence, the first horseman of the apocalypse, has shown up. Everywhere he rides, people become infected with a plague called Messianic Fever and die.

Sara Burns was a firefighter/EMT before the world started to end. She and the three men who make up her crew are helping their city evacuate and draw straws so see who will stay behind and try to kill (or at least slow down) Pestilence. Sara draws the short straw and embarks on a suicide mission.

She waits for the horseman, tries to kill him, and it all goes horribly, horribly wrong because he can’t die. Furious, Pestilence takes Sara captive. At first she’s forced to run behind his horse and nearly dies of exhaustion and hypothermia. As they spend more time together, Pestilence starts to show some kindness toward Sara.

Pestilence is described as being beautiful in an other-worldly way. Kind of like if Elrond fucked up on career-day somehow and became a harbinger of disease and misery:

I hear him before I see him. The muffled clomp of his steed’s hooves echoes in the chill morning, at first so quiet that I almost imagine it. But then it gets louder and louder, until he comes into view.

I waste precious seconds gaping at this…thing.

He’s sheathed in golden armor and mounted on a white steed. At his back is a bow and quiver. His blond hair is pressed down by a crown of gold, and his face–his face is angelic, proud.

He’s almost too much to look at. Too breathtaking, too noble, too ominous. I hadn’t expected that. I hadn’t expected to forget myself or my deadly task. I hadn’t expected to feel…moved by him. Not with all this fear and hate churning in my stomach.

But I am utterly overwhelmed by him, the first horseman of the apocalypse.

Pestilence the Conqueror.

The more time Sara and Pestilence spend together, the more interested he becomes in her as a person. Sara tends to those affected with the plague because even though she cannot cure them, she can ease their suffering. This surprises Pestilence. Sara begs him to stop killing people, but he tells her that cannot, and that he too is disturbed by the deaths.

Pestilence is at first cold and distant, but slowly starts to humanize as he spends more time with Sara. He tries food (he doesn’t need to eat, but he can). He gets drunk (for real). He’s baffled by his sexual attraction to Sara.

He’s also a confused virgin, so if that is your catnip, here you go.

But he’s still killing a lot of people, including children, and that’s why this didn’t work for me. I can accept vampires, gargoyles, hellhounds, and demons in my paranormal fiction without an issue. They usually don’t kill enough people for it to be considered a genocide, but Pestilence does. Even as he falls in love with Sara, he continues to wipe out entire cities. I couldn’t get past the horror of it. There’s a scene where they go to a hospital, and he knows it horrifies Sara because the people there are already too sick and weak to evacuate. It made me want to throw up.

To be fair, I guess it’s his job, or what he was created for, but it’s too much to take. I honestly think that surrounded by that much death, I’d disassociate from reality rather than develop feelings for anyone or anything.

Sara is supposed to be the person Pestilence needs to see humanity’s redeeming value. It’s her love that…

Click for spoilers
gets him to stop fucking killing everyone with a horrible disease. Which apparently he can choose to do. In the end he stops killing people entirely and more or less lives a human life. Which also upset me because DUDE CAN CHOOSE NOT TO DO THIS.

Also, Pestilence doesn’t infect Sara with the fever, which means he controls it to a large degree. The fact that he’s making the choice to kill people this way bothered me a lot more than if he was unable to control his abilities and was moved by some divine hand.

BUT NO.

HE SAYS HE HATES KILLING PEOPLE BUT HE DOES IT ANYWAY AND HE DOESN’T HAVE TO AT ALL. FUCK YOU DUDE. And Sara forgives him for all the people who died because he knocked it off. 

While I like a redemptive love story, this one pushed the bounds of my credulity too much.

This isn’t a Christian romance, if you’re wondering. It obviously contains Christian themes, but Pestilence claims all religions are right and all religions are wrong. We never get a clear answer to why the apocalypse is happening other than “people are bad.”

So why do I think this will work for others? If you can get past the genocide, which is a thing I never actually thought I’d type, the whole humbling this supernatural, all-powerful creature with love is definitely a trope a lot of people enjoy, including myself. Once Pestilence warms to Sara a bit, the slow burn of their affection for each other is intense and so is the unresolved sexual tension.

Also this book can be really funny. Sara is trapped in her own head a lot with (mostly) only Pestilence for company, and she needs to amuse herself. She decides to name Pestilence’s horse:

I press the thermos closer to the horseman, not dissuaded in the least by his protests. I mean, it’s hot chocolate I’m offering. Also, I really want to see if this guy is capable of drinking fluids. I haven’t seen him touch food or drink so far.

Pestilence’s hand digs into my hip, where he holds me against him in the saddle. “If I try it, will you quiet?”

“No, but you know you don’t really want me to be silent.”

My words are punctuated by the steady clop clop of Pestilence’s horse, who I’ve secretly named Trixie Skillz. I’m pretty sure the steed is male (haven’t checked because unlike some people I know, respecting one’s privacy is important), but no matter.

So this book does have some humor, and it has a hero that I think some readers may really enjoy, even if I couldn’t care about him. The plague thing is a lot to get over, but if you can suspend your disbelief, then it’s a solid paranormal romance.

It was just way too dark and sad for me.

This book is available from:
  • Available at Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!

Pestilence by Laura Thalassa

View Book Info Page

Add Your Comment →

  1. Lisa F says:

    Genocide and child murder in a fantasy romance. Eesh, what was he author thinking?!

  2. Wahoo Suze says:

    Wow. Everything @Rose said above. Rule #1 of Misogyny: Women are responsible for what men do.

    What really gives me the shivers is that a book like this can make it past several other people, given a green light, given an attractive cover, and be published and promoted in a time when actual IRL people are publicly promoting genocide, and when Syria is going through what it’s going through with barely a peep spoken in protest by people in power.

    Studies have shown that reading fiction makes people more compassionate, but this book sounds like it would do the opposite. The message is that people who aren’t you are expendable, that other people’s torture and death is acceptable if it furthers your (stupid) goals.

  3. barney valeska dds says:

    this story touched parts of me unknown

  4. Fi says:

    On top of all that, epidemic disease has got to be one of the least sexy things ever. I’m thinking plague, swollen buboes, coughing blood, “bring out your dead”. Ick.

    I’m wondering how the author will pull off the rest of the Horsemen as romantic interests. War might work as a hunky warrior type, but Famine? Children with stick limbs and swollen bellies, food riots for a single loaf of bread, disease spreading through malnourished populations, cannibalism? Romantic it certainly isn’t.

  5. 2L82Pray says:

    I really did try to finish this book, and couldn’t. My review on Amazon was… unkind. Everything everyone else said but I also had issue with there being a 4 Horseman and then…no further mention from the Characters at the beginning about this being a religious Apocalypse. At one point the the female asks herself, Does God hate us? Yes. You are in the Christian Apocalypse…that means God hates you. God is killing everyone. I had trouble with that, and I’m not a Christian (pagan agnostic). If you’re going to do a book with a religious theme, at least acknowledge the theme. Granted, I couldn’t finish this so I have no idea what happens later on, and I admit but the beginning was too much to bear.

  6. Alni says:

    (Spoilers ahead)

    I came here basically to read someone’s ranting on the shit I just read so… thanks! I needed that! Apart from the utter not working romance WHAT WAS THE AUTHOR THINKING? I pick up a romance novel for some enjoyable, FUN reading. Not to read pages and pages and pages of graphic descriptions of people dying of the plague! My favourite genre is fantasy and there’s a lot of gore and violence in my favourite books but nothing as crappy as this. I HAVE read about a main character killing children but that character practically broke when he had to do it, walked away from the scene like a zombie and jumped into the river trying to wash the blood away. It was tragic. You cared about the guy. Pestilence… doesn’t give a damn. Neither does Sara. Sara got on my nerves more than Pestilence by the way.

    (a) ‘Omg! Those abs on my serial killer abductor are, like, totally f-ing hawt!’ Am I reading about a 16 year old with no brains?
    (b) Someone else mentioned it. Shame on anyone who lost their wife, kid, father, mother to Pestilence wanting to kill him. Shame on them if they get violent! Poor Pestilence. Its not that I’m for an eye for an eye but if someone threatened to kill my family slowly and painfully, I’m not sure how far I would take it.
    (c) Why does he ride THROUGH the cities to get beat up? he can apparently spread the plague for miles and miles and miles so he can sit on a hill 2hrs drive from the city and everyone there will die. I think it is -comboed with the author selecting him to feel pain- so he does get beat up and we can cry over him and the brutality of the evil people who want their loved ones and themselves to -you know- not die a horrible death.
    (d) He’s not Christian. He’s not human. He wants to… get married? Really? The author is very selective about what human customs he’s aware of.

    Got carried away, didn’t mean to rant. The reason I did start this comment was to say:

    @Katie Thanks for mentioning Lords of Deliverence series by Larissa Ione. I’m still at the start but those Horsemen seem like guys (and girl) that I’d root for! Enjoying the story so far 🙂

  7. ChrisK says:

    @alni I’m still mad at this book for making me ugly cry in the middle of the night while nursing a grumpy af baby who wouldn’t sleep.

  8. Alni says:

    @ChrisK Thats just bad. This book is depressing.

    On another note. I stopped reading Lords of Deliverance. The story and chars are amazing but I reached book 2 and there’s no way on earth I will ever root for a r- / victim relationship. F- that! No means no and I don’t care if the person saying no has boobs or balls. They said no. Get off them!

    I need a good book.

  9. IdiotArchetype says:

    The genocide Pestilence commits is, of course, horrendous and if I were to actually mean this “person” in real life, I couldn’t look at them; but the story had a way of drawing my attention away from that grizzly fact until more deaths would jump in occasionally to remind me that, no, this man is not the misunderstood hero archetype. When my mind was otherwise engaged, however, I enjoyed Pestilence’s surprise in meeting the humanity of the people he was demolishing. Then those people would die….
    I am definitely looking forward to the next installment, War; I want to see where she takes this series.

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

*


This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

$commenter: string(0) ""

↑ Back to Top