Judge this book by its cover. I did, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection by James Maxey is a thick-as-a-brick compilation of four hack-n-slash action fantasy novels (plus the original short story that inspired them): Greatshadow, Hush, Witchbreaker, and Cinder (plus “Greatshadow: Origins”).
Just to be thorough, I did a quick image search of each individual novel’s cover art, and my initial thesis still holds up. Badass lady jumping down a dragon’s throat, small woman with big hammer versus ice dragon in a frozen wasteland, dragon attacking ship on a storm-wracked sea, they all check out. And they’re all pretty good indicators of what kinds of stories to expect on the following pages.
I’ve said it before in other reviews, I’m a fan of the “no cool idea left out if it can fit in somewhere” type of story — stuff like Christopher Moore or Chuck Palahniuk’s off-the-wall plots, or the incidental footnotes and worldbuilding asides of Terry Pratchett, or the strange, anarchic chaos of Jonathan French’s Grey Bastards. That mentality is in full swing here, with nearly every character having their own unique gimmick or X-Men-like power. There are witches who can shape metal and stone like clay; knights wearing impenetrable armor of pure faith made physical, wielding warhammers carved from chunks of the sun; pirates who can walk on water and swim through air; monks who can rewrite reality around themselves by lying to it convincingly enough; and so on and so forth, all set in a dangerous corner of a vibrant fantasy world spanning multiple realities and all of time.
Don’t misconstrue this as saying that the worldbuilding gets in the way of the storytelling, though. Dragon Apocalypse is chock full of quirky characters and incidental strangeness, but all of its weird, myriad pieces are arranged in a pulse-pounding epic fantasy that excites from beginning to end.
The series starts out following Infidel, a beautiful brawler and thief with superhuman strength and invulnerable skin. After her latest tomb raiding fetch quest goes horribly awry, resulting in the death of her longtime partner and unconfessed love interest, she signs up with a colorful cast of outlaws, zealots, knights, and mercenaries — plus a mysterious robed telepath and the unseen ghost of her recently deceased former companion — for one last high-stakes mission before retirement: storm the volcanic lair of the godlike dragon Greatshadow, the living incarnation of flame, and slay him in body and soul so that mankind can finally tame and control fire, and also maybe so that he doesn’t help bring about the looming end of the world.
Full disclosure: It is my personal belief that dragons are just about the coolest things ever. This series appears to agree with me, sporting a whole pantheon of impossibly powerful dragons whose existences and machinations not only drive large parts of the plot but also most of creation as well, ruling as they do over phenomena like “all of the fire” or “the concept of cold” or “the literal actual sun.” The result is a world where nearly all of the metaphysical building blocks are given a visceral maximalism, where the rotating cast of protagonists can eventually do things like hop in and out of various abstract realities or travel back and forth across time (in the most literal possible sense) and yet there’s still a sense of believable stakes and tension, all without the actual story itself getting so high-minded and esoteric as to become inscrutable.
In short, Dragon Apocalypse: The Complete Collection is a densely colorful and uniquely fun block of epic fantasy, and a solid choice for anyone who likes their books packed to the gills with imagination. Give it a read before the end of the world.
