The Warded Man

The Warded Man, the first volume of Peter V. Brett’s Demon Cycle fantasy series, is a well-structured book that presents a frightening universe inhabited by tormented characters. Its final act, however, throws both character development and common sense through the window, demolishing much of what had been built so far.

The story takes place in an even more bleak and inhospitable feudal world than usual: in addition to terrible living conditions, unrelenting prejudice, strong inequality, and social injustice, here demons also rise from the earth when the sun goes down. The people – whose weapons can barely scratch the corelings, as they’re called – try to survive every night by drawing magical protections around their homes, which usually hold.

In this terrifying scenario, we’re introduced to the three main characters: Arlen, the protagonist, is a boy who witnesses his mother being mortally wounded by demons one night; Leesha is a girl who finds herself having to face, beyond the danger of the corelings, the sexism of her society (men are usually worse than monsters, after all); and little Rojer is a three-year-old who is saved by a minstrel when his house is burned down by the monsters.

Arlen is the most active of the three and the one who most influences the story’s main events. The boy is defined by his combative spirit: he wants more than anything to fight against the corelings and save humanity. His complexity, then, comes from the fact that the root of this dream is not altruism, but anger toward his father, Jeph. The day his mother was attacked, Arlen ran out of the protective wards to try to save her, but Jeph remained paralyzed on the porch. Traumatized by the event and infuriated by his father’s poor excuses, the boy runs away from home in search of a life that gives him the satisfaction of rebellion. He wants to prove that it is not only possible to fight the demons but also to defeat them.

In other words, his father may cower, but Arlen wants to fight. But in his greatest moments of victory, we can see how his  euphoria quickly gives way to loneliness and frustration… because there’s no one there to witness them. Arlen, after all, is not satisfied with defeating the demons; what he truly yearns is visibility and attention: he’s always believed that his father is wrong and so everyone needs to realize the same thing and applaud him for the bravery of rebelling. He doesn’t want to save people as much as to have people see that he’s saving them.

The tension of the first night the boy spends alone is great. Right from the start, Arlen was already different from other boys: even at the age of seven, he excelled at designing wards and dreamed of becoming a messenger, being responsible for traveling the perilous land delivering letters and supplies to the people. So we quickly learn that the bucolic life was not made for Arlen and that his house, while comfortable, will not take long to feel like a prison. In this context, his first night after running away works as a small climax, tying all these elements together.

Arlen is alone, finally feeling he’s free, but as soon as the demons rise from the ground, this freedom is immediately replaced by the very same fear that paralyzed his father. As skilled as Arlen is, he’s still a child, lacking the maturity to withstand the horror of the creatures, whose killing instinct is so relentless that they even mutilate their own kind when the opportunity arises. Their attacks are brutal, too, tearing apart and burning the flesh of their victims, while their demeanor is needlessly cruel: they hunt and eat humans, as you’d expect, but they also dance and laugh as they do so. They are not only fearsome predators but also sadistic in their ways. So, if Arlen begins the scene by toying with the corelings, cursing them inside the protection of his wards, it doesn’t take long for their dreadful nature to get under his skin and make him recoil involuntarily, which leads to, well, some undesirable consequences that hint at how Jeph’s actions may have been justified.

Leesha’s problems, however, don’t come only at night. When her boyfriend, Gared, spreads some questionable news about her sex life to her village, she learns that the same action can have different repercussions depending purely on one’s gender. While Gared earns respect from her father and classmates, Leesha is labeled a slut. Rejected by the local population, the girl only finds solace in her work with the herbalist Bruna, the village’s elderly doctor.

Leesha’s initial characterization is one that incels today would call woke: she’s a strong, independent woman who often struggles to oppose the sexist culture of her society. At one point, for example, she refuses to be treated as a trophy and interferes when two men decide to fight for her love. It’s in the girl’s chapters, then, that the book’s society is the most criticized. Take Gared’s story about her sex life: if he’s lying or not is irrelevant to prevent the news from crystallizing in the minds of the general population, as they employ ludicrous arguments like “If she is so adamant in denying, then it must be true,” or, “Of course it happened, it’s what always happens” to label Leesha. And when she questions Bruna about how the messages in their holy book corroborate the male worldview, the herbalist’s explanation is blunt: “It’s a book written by men.”

If Arlen’s main antagonism is with his father, Leesha’s is with her mother, Elona. Since Elona never managed to give birth to a son and had to marry a man for money while loving another, she despises her own life and wants to ensure that her daughter has another destiny – whether Leesha wants it or not: her plans for her daughter are to make her the housewife of the type of man Elona herself wished she had married.

Leesha, therefore, frequently confronts her mother and exposes what her plans really mean (“I’m not a brood mare, Mother”). She even wants to have children one day; her problem is with the necessity of the act: the idea that a woman becomes somehow inferior if she doesn’t become a mother bothers her immensely. However, as with Arlen, her attitude against her parents ends up negatively impacting her personality due to the extremes to which she takes the fight: Leesha ends up depriving herself of romantic relationships and often risks her own life just to not let her mother “win”.

Rojer, on the other hand, has no problems with his father or mother, as both are dead. Silver lining, right? The boy grows up with Minstrel Arrick, learning tricks, juggling, and singing. He’s the least developed character in the book, and if Arlen and Leesha have their conflicts introduced in the very first act, Rojer’s will only be fully formed by the end of the book. Of the three characters, he’s the most superfluous.

After presenting their personal problems, the narrative focuses on their training, regarding their respective jobs: messenger, herbalist, and fiddler. The novel’s second act may not be as gripping as the first, but it continues to develop each protagonist’s personal struggles effectively. Arlen, for example, realizes that the lonely life he so desires means the absence of friends and love, and so he must decide whether to continue his mission to upset his father or be close to those dear to him. Leesha, meanwhile, has to undertake a tense trip to a big city, where she realizes that sexism is not an exclusive evil of small towns, and Rojer… let’s just say that he’s not lucky with his figures of authority.

The latter half of The Warded Man, however, takes a hard turn down the road of “ew”. The consistency of the characters and their conflicts, the social criticism behind their plights, and the buildup of suspense and tension all go away in favor of cringy one-liners, shallow epic battles, and some morally questionable events. The narrative becomes pretty much the opposite of what it was.

The next paragraphs contain spoilers. This text will not ward you off from them, however, as it’s just a warning: the responsibility to avert your own eyes from the screen and go drink a cup of coffee lies with you, and you alone.

Let’s begin with Arlen: gone is his vulnerability, as he’s now Superman, capable of fighting demons with his bare hands, tattooing wards on his own body, and fighting with Wolverine’s regenerative powers. In the second act, he’s a child who’s always seen buried in books, having to be forced to play in the street by his master. Near the end, he’s Kung Fu-fighting demons.

However, the worst change happens with Leesha’s personality. If she was an aggressive bastion against misogyny until this point, now she decides it’s a good idea to have sex with the same messenger who tried to rape her several times on a trip. Adding insult to injury, near the climax she’s indeed raped by countless thieves for no good narrative reason (it’s to put some “realism” into the story, according to the author) and two days later, she decides to have sex with a strange man who scares the shit out of her. Rojer is the only one who remains consistent, as he now fears that his new friends are going to die, too. Everyone near him dies, and that’s Rojer’s thing.

The beginning of The Warded Man has the makings of an excellent and memorable fantasy novel, but in its final half, the narrative derails into oblivion, presenting less interesting – when not completely contradictory – versions of the main characters. In the end, reading The Warded Man often feels like reading two entirely different novels stitched together: the first can enchant you, but the second will probably just leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

July 03, 2026.

Review originally published in Portuguese on September 29, 2016.