This month I’m catching-up with two Fantasy series whose leading characters each endure a long journey from anti-hero to hero. Curiously, one thing these two characters have in common is an ability to befriend giant female spiders. In spite of my own dread of spiders, these are both series which have kept me enthralled until the final volume and left me wanting more.

I’ll start with Benedict Jacka’s twelve-volume series about London-based mage and diviner, Alex Verus. This began with Fated in 2012 and ended with Risen in 2021. I reviewed Fated on Fantasy Reads in October 2012 and caught up with the series in November 2016 when it had reached Volume 7, Burned. Yes, they do all have single word titles. These are violent action-stories with well worked-out magic and a thoughtful and complex hero.

In the first volume Verus is trying to live a quiet life running a small shop in Camden which sells magical objects. The mages of Britain are divided into two factions – Light and Dark. Verus considers himself on the side of Light but the Council of Light Mages do not trust him because Verus was originally apprenticed to notorious Dark Mage, Richard Drakh. They still sometimes call on his services because of his rare talent for seeing all possible outcomes of an action. Verus is keen to help others with unusual magical gifts and people who want to escape from the influence of Dark Mages but this also brings him into conflict with the Council. Later in the series, Verus gives up running his shop and joins the Keepers, the Council’s policeforce, but his unwillingness to ignore the corruption at the heart of the Council leads him to break rules and make even more enemies.

Verus saw and did terrible things as a teenager and most of the characters in the series assume this means that he can never become a good man. The reader is asked to consider whether people who are treated as villains – with no possibility of forgiveness or redemption – will inevitably surrender to their dark side. One attractive thing about Verus is his ability to form deep friendships with a wide range of beings, including a young woman with a deadly curse on her, a flighty elemental and an ancient spider-goddess who gives wise advice and makes wonderful clothes. When Verus finally allows himself to fall in love, it is with Anne an enigmatic Life Mage (not as positive as it sounds) whom most people fear. Verus eventually gives up the struggle to be accepted as a Light Mage and concentrates on protecting his friends, even if he has to use dark powers to do so.

In Risen Verus joins forces with his longstanding enemies – the Light Council and Dark Mage Richard Drakh – in order to defeat a malevolent djinn and save Anne, even though he knows that they will betray him as soon as his usefulness is over. A sense of doom hangs over the last volume as Verus prepares to sacrifice himself. Not everyone will like the ending but it seemed inevitable and right to me. On one level, the whole Verus series can be read as a criticism of traditional Fantasy fiction’s tendency to present characters as either good or evil with very few shades of grey between. If you like your heroes to come laden with interesting moral dilemmas and ambiguities, Jacka’s Alex Verus may be the man for you.

Initially there doesn’t seem to be any moral ambiguity about Johannes Cabal, the anti-hero of Jonathan L. Howard’s five-volume Steampunk Horror series. He is a ruthless necromancer whose own brother condemned him to Hell – though this ends badly for Hell. The first volume, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer was published in 2009 and was followed in 2010 by Johannes Cabal the Detective. I reviewed the third volume, Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (2011), which is mainly set in Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, on Fantasy Reads in January 2013. This was followed by The Brothers Cabal (2014), which features Horst Cabal, Lord of the Dead and probably the nicest vampire in Horror fiction. The author tells us that The Fall of the House of Cabal (2016) may, or may not, be the last in the series. There are also a number of short stories about Johannes Cabal, of which the most important are With a Long Spoon and The Ereshkigal Working.

Howard tends to construct his novels as interlocking short stories and he loves to dabble in diverse literary genres such as Horror, Classic Detective Fiction, Ruritanian Adventure stories and quest-centred Fantasy. This makes the Johannes Cabal novels hard to classify but the most important thing to say about them is that they are extremely funny. Howard invents outrageous plots, crafts perfect prose, and inserts himself into the stories as a curmudgeonly narrative voice. When things get exciting – as they often do – try not to race ahead to find out what happens next or you may miss some of Howard’s dry wit. Every sentence is worth reading carefully. His greatest achievement is even more unusual. Loveable necromancers are thin on the ground in Fantasy fiction but Howard has managed to create one. Johannes Cabal may be prepared to commit almost any crime to succeed in his crusade against death but his motives are not selfish. He is proud of being rational and logical but struggles to understand the full range of human emotions. He is touchingly naive about women, failing to notice when a femme fatale tries to seduce him, and for much of the series his only friend is a spider-devil. That has to be concerning.

In order to carry on with his vital work, Johannes finds himself obliged to save the world several times. During The Brothers Cabal Europe is facing a supernatural takeover by the evil Red Queen so Johannes and Horst become allies of the forces of Light who would normally be trying to kill them. These forces include the rather amateurish Dee Society, the snooty Knights Templar, a rogue branch of the Spanish Inquisition and the terrifying Sisters of Medea, whom Horst disarms with offers of Battenberg cake. Horst loses someone dear to him during the ensuing battles so after a temporary victory over the forces of evil, the brothers embark on an absurdly complicated quest for the secret knowledge that will finally allow Johannes to reverse death.

In The Fall of the House of Cabal the brothers have to divide forces to follow a series of enigmatic clues. Johannes recruits the cleverest person he knows to assist Horst – a student of criminology called Leonie Barrow who soon gets to play the role of the Great Detective. Johannes himself pairs up with charming succubine demon and psychopath, Zarenyia, who is part woman, part spider. He later acquires a second companion, deceased necromantrix and Dreamlands witch, Miss Smith. Their quest will take them to Hell and, even worse, to a version of London largely inhabited by ghosts, vampires and zombies. One of the enjoyable things about this series is that it’s the female characters who get to do most of the swashbuckling, whether they are firing machine-guns, weaving lethal webs or wielding a mean parasol. Johannes though has vital decisions to take and sacrifices to make. He contrives happy endings for nearly everyone but himself and is left facing the awful prospect that he might have become a good person.

So, if you are looking for absorbing Fantasy series to try I suggest that you hurry to make the acquaintance of Alex Verus and Johnnes Cabal. Until next month…