Book Blog: The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett

I read about this book in Joshua Guess's blog/book Living With the Dead and I can see why it would come to mind if you were living in the zombie apocalypse. I don't read much fantasy, but thought this one was very good indeed.

It's a future world where "demons" arise from the ground every night and humans have to barricade themselves behind magical wards or signs which the demons cannot cross. This severely limits what people can do and this civilisation is barely surviving in a medieval stage. Three children are born into this world; Arlen, who learns it is possible to fight the demons, Leesha the healer-apprentice, and Rojer, who lost his family to demons. Human settlements are tenuously linked by the Messengers, who risk their lives to keep them going. There's hints that this demon world arose out of our own, which is described as a time when the demons had been defeated and people forgot about them, but I'm not sure. The author may be using what I call templates, i.e. there's a civilisation based on Middle Eastern culture, this one is based on Europe and so on.

Don't want to spoil it for anyone, so I won't give any more details, except I'm off to the library to borrow the sequel today. :-)