Verdict: If you want a romance with an apocalypse in it, this series delivers, and it gets better as it goes. If you want apocalyptic fiction with a romance in it, look elsewhere. And know going in that every book is built on a captor-and-captive relationship, which will be a dealbreaker for some readers.
The setup
Laura Thalassa’s four-book series imagines the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arriving on Earth to end humanity, one at a time, each in a different part of the world. Each book pairs one horseman with a human woman:
- Pestilence: Sara Burn shoots the plague-bringing horseman off his steed, only to learn he can’t be killed. He takes her prisoner instead.
- War: When Jerusalem falls, Miriam Elmahdy is spared by War himself, who claims her as his wife and takes her into his camp.
- Famine: Ana and the cruelest of the horsemen are drawn to each other despite everything he does.
- Death: Death kills an entire town at once and finds a single woman left standing: Lazarus Gaumond, who cannot be killed.
What works
The premise is bold, and Thalassa commits to it. The horsemen are genuinely frightening, and the destruction they cause is not softened. Each book is a road trip across a dying region, and the real question underneath every romance is a good one: is humanity worth saving? The books answer it differently each time, which gives the series more weight than its covers suggest. The four horsemen each feel distinct, and Death ties the series together by finally explaining why the horsemen came and what it would take to stop them.
What doesn’t
The apocalypse is mostly backdrop. If you come here for the mechanics of survival, how people find food and shelter and hold communities together as the world ends, you will find very little. The story stays tightly focused on two people.
The bigger issue is the core dynamic. In each book, the woman is held by a supernatural being who has destroyed everything she knows, and the romance grows out of that captivity. The series is aware of this and works hard to give its heroines agency and moral force, often making them the reason the horsemen change. Some readers will find that convincing. Others won’t get past the premise, and that is a fair reaction.
The books are also explicit. That is a feature for the target audience, but it is worth knowing before you hand one to a teenager who liked the cover.
Who should read it
Adult fantasy romance readers who like enemies-to-lovers stories and darker themes will likely devour all four. Readers looking for survival fiction, or who dislike captive romance, should skip it.
Have you read the series? Tell us in the comments which horseman’s book you think is strongest.
. This is one in a series of books about girls who love boys lacking some of the qualifications to make them human. Most of these boys are also deadly dangerous and in the case of I love Him to Pieces, deadly contagious. Le Sigh. Dumb bitches live for love.