Dark fantasy that had a little too much exposition, but great story.

I love a book with a basis in real historic grimoires and Lightbreaker is drowning in that. It might be a bit much if you're not familiar the authors and their titles, but I ate that up.I liked the morally ambiguous narrator and his buddy the neophyte magus cop. They would have made a great ongoing team.Still, I was puzzled by what the Chorus was, exactly, where it came from, and why Markham uses it so effectively sometimes while holding it back at others (as the plot requires?). For a "weapon"

I was hoping I would really like this book, but I'm giving up on it about half way through. It's not a horrible volume. But it's not clicking with me.First, there is the general subject matter of arcane spiritualism and its presentation as the distillation of the many and varied religions of the world. They are all seen as poor reflections of the truth as known by the narrator, street educated as he is, and his ilk. I'm not buying it. And I'm not buying the twenty-five-cent words and sentences a...

I don't know if I'll get through the kindle sample. The prose is annoying. I wouldn't hold that against the book per se. I find Shakespeare's prose not just annoying but impenetrable.The premise, well as far as I understand it, seems interesting though. Let me read some easy stuff and then see if I feel the urge to go back to deciphering this one.

Mark Teppo's novel, Lightbreaker: The First Book of the Codex of Souls (Night Shade Books 2009), is an occult thriller and a novel of ideas in the same vein as Colin Wilson's The Philosopher's Stone (Jeremy P. Tarcher 1989). And although its cover--sexy, athletic man, accompanied by equally sexy young woman--is similar to the covers of most modern urban fantasies dominating the shelves of the science fiction/fantasy section these days, the novel does not fit comfortably within that ilk. Rather,

Lightbreaker was a dense, highly theoretical urban fantasy. I'll try to make that more clear. It's clear that Mark Teppo has vast knowledge and considerable interest in the actual magical traditions growing out of the Hermetic line of inquiry, as well as a variety of other sorts of magic. Egyptian, Buddhist, Egyptian. He's really delved deeply into this stuff.That give the book a highly figured, dreamlike, almost biblical feel, because everything that happens is reacted to and commented upon in

Lightbreaker falls into a sub-genre that I'm not partial too. It's within the bounds of urban fantasy but informed by the alchemical and pagan communities. It moves quickly and the writing was reasonable on a technical level. I don't feel that I really learned much about Markham or any of the characters. It certainly can't be hidden history anymore, which tends to cripple this tendency within urban fantasy.

The one thing I have to credit this book for is ambition. There is an attention to detail and an interconnectedness of magic that has clearly been painstakingly researched.Unfortunately, the pain of the researcher becomes the pain of the reader, as too much info is dumped on us that really doesn't help us to navigate the convoluted plot.The first-person protagonist is well-versed in magical lore but the author helpfully provides an "everyman" character in the form of a magically clueless police

What a very, very wordy book this turned out to be. In fact, it was too wordy. I read in reviews that this book was fast paced. I don't know how people thought that. I had a hard time turning pages. It took forever for things to get back on track after Teppo went off on some random tangent--that ultimately did explain some things, but wound up being confusing in the beginning. By the time he brought it back full circle, I had forgotten where I was to begin with. The wordiness ended up harming th...

If I wanted to read a lengthy book on western hermetic traditions I may have rated this at 3 stars.Maybe if I wanted to read something as an example of how to over describe something so it became harder to see the scene, rather than giving the reader an insight to what was going on then this book would probably get 4 stars at least.Though their are some annoyingly repeated tropes and heavy power creep with its related problems in many Urban Fantasy books, until reading this book I have enjoyed t...

This is an interesting read that draws on the somewhat mind-numbing realm of ceremonial magic(k) for it's fantasy core. Whilst original in the current vampire/werewolf dominance of the genre it is clear Teppo has become overly enamoured of the vast literature that comprises this field. His main characters spend altogether too much time thinking and not enough doing. Too much philosophy and repetitive exposition instead of basic character development. It gets a little frustrating at crucial plot

This novel starts off with a strong lead: The protagonist is back in town to find a woman from his past. While seeking her out, he uncovers malicious magic users and picks up a cop friend.As I went through the story, one of the things that bothered me greatly was the sense that the first-person narration was hiding the truth of things from the reader. I don't want to spoil the ending, but the item in question was the magic chain that the protagonist used. It was referenced constantly and the nar...

An interesting and engrossing first chapter - The protagonist follows a soul "jumping" from animal body to animal body. The jumper eventually winds up on a ferry going to Seattle and starts using humans, some of whom cannot handle being jumped. A Seattle cop is introduced along with our protagonist and we eventually learn our protagonist is seeking out a woman who took part of his soul from him many years ago. There is also an arcane order of watchers, rouge mystics and , oh yeah, a possible end...

I can finish a book. That's what I learned from this one.

This debut from Mark Teppo is a dark urban fantasy novel with the gritty, realistic feel that is more often found in noir mysteries than an urban fantasy setting. It carves a very solid niche for itself against the likes of Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden and Simon R Green’s Nightside series. And if that isn’t enough, this book has no vampires, werewolves or fairies thrown into the mix.Landis Markham is our hero, or rather antihero, what with his ‘take noprisoners’ style of getting things done. He i...

Some nice ideas, but but just did not work for me.

It's noteworthy that the spine of this book labels it as fantasy/horror, not just urban fantasy. There's a disturbingly dark mood to the book--all shadows, corruption, and lost souls--and therefore the gray environment of the Pacific northwest is well-suited to the book. It's also an environment familiar to me, which makes me relate to the book in a personal way.Lightbreaker moves along fast. So fast, that it sometimes feels like the middle book of a series and not the first book, like it assume...

Markham returns to Seattle with his "chorus" of human souls to find Katarina, a woman who many years ago during an arcane ritual took a piece of his soul.Armed with knowledge of arcane philosophy (and never missing a chance to pontificate about Crowley, religion, philosophy, alchemy, or the khabbalah) Markham tracks down a ring of alchemist/magic users intent on sucking the souls out of the Pacific Northwest to instigate the apocalypse. Despite how much I enjoyed the flavor of the Pacific Northw...

This book was recommended with the qualification "...but I don't actually like it, it's just, y'know, in that genre." The first chapters were about the dude doing a bunch of pseudo-angelic magic but not really interacting with any other characters. I decided the recommender was right that it wasn't very good.

This is a dense, complex book, with a main character who has deep history with the people and events he has to deal with. Michael Markham is not a perfect man, and in many ways, he isn't an admirable one, either, but the reader has no trouble understanding that he wants what he wants, even when what he wants isn't understandable in its own right.This does get in the way of the story at times, though Teppo does an admirable job of getting the reader up to speed (and keeping him there) on who Mark...