Deliciously dark! Started a bit slow but once it got the hooks in the story never let me go. If you shock easily or can't wrap your brain around the idea that the line between good and evil is not always so crystal clear then this is not the read for you.

Highly recommended! ( )

To all who is looking for an M/M romance. There is NONE here.
There IS m/m sex, but in the context of the book the gender is irrelevant.

This is not about gender. This is not about sex. This is about Love. This is also about race (humans, angels, demons, nephilim) or rather a place and the sense of belonging, fear of losing personal values, humanity and all it entails.

The lines are so blurred between good and evil, race, gender, time you might get lost.

This is about temptation to give into fate, but also freedom of will, freedom to choose.

This is the darkest, the most violent fantasy book I've read so far.

Incredible. Brilliant. 10 stars. ( )

I was going to give this a much higher star rating halfway through this
Grimlock ♥ Black Bolt
Angels of the Deep - Kirby Crow
But the thing is as it kept going on, it became more obvious that this needed heavy editing and less purple prose. I liked the ideas, I liked how dark the angelic mythology got, but it just kept going on and on and I got bored.

Some of the phrases were just there to sound pretty, too. It took a lot of words to say, y'know, nothing, which didn't help the pacing of this very much. And the pacing was so damned slow. So. Damned. Slow.

I'm glad to move onto something more interesting, to be honest. (That'll be Ash Vs. The Evil Dead. I'm watching this with a friend, but I need to catch up on the first episode first, and it's so good. So very good so far.) ( )

It was a very dark story, and some parts were hard to read about... I liked all the characters, though. Not only Beck and Sean, but Mastema as well. I only just finished reading it. I'll need some time to organize my thoughts about this book. ( )

It seems like everybody wants Beck. There’s his wife, Catherine, who doesn’t want to divorce him even though he can’t feel the same love for her that he used to. There’s Sean, who he happens to work with. Then there are the angels Mastema and Tamiel. Mastema is the servant of God, sent to Earth to hunt the Nephilim, the offspring of the angelic Watchers and moral women. And Tamiel is a Watcher dedicated to protecting the Nephilim.

Oh, and Beck is a Nephilim. (No spoilers here, it’s pretty obvious from the beginning.) But he doesn’t know it until Mastema shows up to kill him.

The coolest part about this story, in my opinion, was knowing who Beck actually was. What is actually drawing both Mastema and Tamiel to him is the human soul reborn in Beck, a soul that was once within the body of someone they both loved thousands of years ago. This ancient-love-reborn is by far my favorite aspect of the plot.

This book really is dark, starting with Beck’s shadowy past (in his current life), and ending with the choices he has to make and live with (for a very long time, since, you know, he’s immortal), and including all the gruesome things along the way. But it is a great book, and I found myself not wanting to put it down, and wanting it to go on. The ending seems to be a set-up for a sequel, which I hope happens. I would love to see if Beck can find his parents or confront the horrors of the place where he grew up.

I don’t have any real complaints about this book, except I don’t think I really understood the Veil. It threw me off a couple of times because I didn’t know if Beck had actually physically moved through it to another time and place, or if it was more of a dream. It almost seemed like sometimes it was one and sometimes the other. Maybe time traveling just didn’t seem like it would fit in this type of novel so my mind processed it as visions. But, it’s not a big deal. The only other thing that really bothered me for a long time was Sean. I pretty much guessed who he was, for the most part, at one point, but he never told Beck the truth until much later. I was so mad that he waited until so many things had happened, and I kept asking why so many times. But then the last chapter had him explain it and I felt better.

Formatting wise, there were some weird things going on with quotation marks in a few places, but it didn’t hurt my reading experience at all. ( )