Songs of the Dead

Book One of The Strata Wars series is set in a version of London where a hidden thanaturgic (death-magic) world exists alongside the mortal one. Beneath the city lie the Strata, layers of historical past formed from the collective memories of the dead, where semblances (lingering souls) and vestiges (semblances bound to corpses) reside. Thanatists, rare individuals who die, escape the afterlife, and reclaim their bodies, can bind and command vestiges. A spiritual barrier called a ward protects the Iron Horse, a metal pub and music venue, and guards the Abyssal Steps, the only staircase descending through all levels of the Strata.

Jack Solomon, a heavy metal vocalist who grew up in the gang-plagued Westmont neighborhood of Los Angeles, has moved to London to pursue music. On the night his band, the Hounds of Winter, fires him before their biggest show, Jack heads to the Iron Horse, run by his mentor, Henry Wilkinson. Outside the pub, a mysterious woman presses a rune-marked stone into his palm. Inside, Jack helps a nervous young singer named Angela DuFresne, performing her first show at the Iron Horse, overcome stage fright, then retreats to the greenroom, snapping hair ties against his wrist to manage painful memories tied to his mother's abandonment.

That night, a man in corpse paint shoots Henry and Jack outside Henry's flat. Jack dies and awakens on the Asphodel Meadows, a dark plain where winds push the dead toward a mountain of fire. A memory of Henry saving him from a moment of crisis gives Jack the will to fight back to his healed body. Henry and the shooter are gone.

Cassius Classicus, a vestige in a Roman centurion uniform who had been seeking Henry's aid, collapses nearby, his spirit tearing free from his body. Jack instinctively renews the golden bindings holding Cassius's spirit to his flesh. Cassius explains that Jack has become a thanatist. A massive wraith-hound—a ghostly, predatory creature from the Strata—attacks, and Jack flees through the Iron Horse ward, which the creature cannot cross. At the pub, two regulars, Church and Lady, reveal themselves as vestiges bound to Henry, who was himself a thanatist. They show Jack the Abyssal Steps beneath the stage and explain that the ward is failing without Henry, making the Steps vulnerable.

Henry's journal reveals the ward requires an "old soul," a being containing many unified souls, to renew it. Henry had asked Muster Brach, leader of the Shiguan, a thanaturgic faction, to search for relevant arcana. Brach visits the Iron Horse, argues that topside (surface-world) music is damaging the Strata by ignoring its inhabitants' histories, and invites Jack to join; Jack declines. Lakshmi Gopalkrishnan, a raptorial (an independent enforcer of thanaturgic Precedent Law), questions Jack about the shooting. At Westminster Abbey, Father John Kincaid explains that wraiths are semblances that lingered in the Endless Dark after death, consuming other semblances and growing dangerous. Jack's rebirth likely summoned the wraith-hound.

Jack learns Angela has been murdered. Following the rune stone into the Modern Stratum, he meets Emaline, the woman who gave him the stone. She reveals herself as Brach's daughter and urn-bearer (right hand) but claims to secretly oppose him. She tells Jack that Brach orchestrated Henry's assassination to seize the Abyssal Steps and seeks an ancient song from the deepest stratum to fuel a revolution by controlling cultural narratives. They strike a deal: Jack will help prove Brach ordered the hit, and Emaline will help him find texts about renewing the ward.

At the morgue, Jack identifies the killer and views Henry's body, recovered from the Thames. When men steal the killer's body into the Strata, Jack pursues them to a pumping station filled with hundreds of preserved corpses, including Angela and prominent public figures. A Shiguan thanatist burns the killer's body, destroying the key evidence linking Brach to the murder.

Henry's will names Jack sole proprietor of the Iron Horse. In a grotto beneath the pub, the Ward manifests as a woman formed of swirling earth, revealing her origin as an ancient woman who unified her dying people's souls to protect this ground. She tells Jack he must begin to forgive those who abandoned him, or the ward is lost.

Events accelerate. Jack's friend Jimmy Bates, a vestige, is killed by the wraith. Sir Joseph Swan, a Shiguan thanatist, attacks the Modern Stratum, weakening the ward and delivering a summons from the Strata Chancery, the thanaturgic court, charging Jack with Henry's murder. A freebooter named Madam, whom Brach coerces by holding her son captive, teaches Jack a technique for locating wraiths.

Jack tracks an immature wraith to Highgate Cemetery and cuts its bindings, but the creature bites into his shadow, feeding on his deepest wound: his mother's abandonment. Lady stitches his torn soul closed, warning the sutures are temporary. A second, mature wraith remains at large. The ward ceremony requires Orcus thread, an illegal catalyst woven from strands of soul. Jack ventures into the Endless Dark to harvest it, barely escaping.

At Wembley Stadium, Jack performs "They Always Go Away" and finally completes the third verse, singing from his mother's perspective and acknowledging both his anger and a recognition that she escaped a bad life. At Brach's Guildhall headquarters on the Victorian Stratum, Jack witnesses an army of vestiges commanded by Brach's 17-note-octave viola. Brach goads Jack's lifelong friend Chuey into attacking, then stabs him with a khopesh, a sickle-shaped sword. To save Chuey, Jack must sacrifice his Wembley memory as healing energy, erasing his progress toward forgiveness. At Newgate Prison, Jack finds Henry's soul imprisoned with the semblance of his wife, Martha. The mature wraith attacks and mortally wounds Henry. With no body to return to, Henry shares his darkest secrets, and Jack sings his memories back in a compassionate light. Henry passes on at peace.

Jack identifies the wraith as George Frideric Handel, who has been consuming songwriters to absorb their skill, obsessively rewriting Messiah to prove wrong a father who forbade him from music. At Jack's trial, Cassius confesses to the murder on Brach's orders. Jack exposes Brach's guilt by playing a revelatory stroke on his lantern, a bow-played thanaturgic instrument, while singing Brach's gleam-note pattern, the unique musical signature of his soul, revealing the scar of betrayal in Brach's shadow. The chancellors convict Brach. Jack then discovers that Cassius's shadow bears the same wound, confirming that Cassius carried out the assassination. Jack severs Cassius's bindings as penalty, and the centurion's semblance fades.

Brach escapes into a substitute body, and his forces storm every stratum. Jack and his remaining friends fight down to the Ancient Stratum, where the dying Ward battles Handel's wraith. Cassius, reappearing after breaking free from Brach's forces, helps free Jack from the wraith's darkness. Together, Jack and his friends sing Handel's Hallelujah chorus, illuminating the composer's Rupture, his core obsessive soul wound, not as failure but as enduring legacy. Handel releases all the consumed souls and passes on.

Chuey sings Jack the chorus of "They Always Go Away," which he carries because Jack imparted the memory when healing his wound. Jack recognizes his song was never only about abandonment but about the people who stayed. On the Asphodel Meadows, Cassius gathers the souls of fallen Iron Horse friends, who choose to become a new ward-soul, a collective old soul capable of powering the ward. Jack cuts his soul sutures, fuses his song's light with the Orcus thread, and binds the new ward-soul to the ancient soil. Golden light drives the Shiguan back.

Three days later, Jack performs at Wembley one final time, then reopens the Iron Horse. Emaline, now leader of the Shiguan after denouncing Brach at trial, reveals that she manipulated her father into ordering Henry's assassination, engineering the chain of events to remove Brach from power and claim the faction. Jack demands she return Madam's son as the price of his silence and cuts ties with her. Inside the pub, Jack sings "Behind Blue Eyes," the song he and Henry walked home to every night, surrounded by friends who are the family Henry always said he would find. Whispers from beneath the Ancient Stratum hint that Jack still knows nothing of true darkness.