78 pages • 2-hour read
The Wrath of the Fallen
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Background
Series Context: The Gods & Monsters Saga: A World Reopened
The Wrath of the Fallen is the fourth book in Amber V. Nicole’s Gods & Monsters series. The saga begins with The Book of Azrael, which narrates the return of Samkiel, the rightful god king, after a thousand-year exile. He finds his kingdom usurped by his sister, Nismera, who has established a tyrannical rule over the realms. In this first book, Dianna Martinez is living an ordinary life as a teen in the world of Onuna with her sister, Gabby, when a deadly plague kills their parents and nearly kills Gabby. Kaden, a powerful Ig’Morruthen who plays a key role in The Wrath of the Fallen, saves both girls lives by turning them into Ig’Morruthens—shapeshifting, vampiric beings—binding Dianna to him in eternal servitude. While seeking the legendary Book of Azrael for Kaden, Dianna is captured and imprisoned by the god Samkiel, and the book becomes an enemies-to-lovers romance as the two forge an unlikely alliance and then a romantic relationship.
Throughout the subsequent books, The Throne of Broken Gods and The Dawn of the Cursed Queen, their alliance deepens into a formidable bond as they wage war against Nismera’s expanding empire. The conflict forces old loyalties to be re-examined and unearths forgotten histories, particularly concerning the origins of the Ig’Morruthen and the true nature of the gods’ power. The Wrath of the Fallen continues this epic conflict, opening after a series of devastating personal losses and strategic setbacks. Samkiel and Dianna must now navigate a fractured political landscape, confront ancient enemies, and grapple with the personal cost of their war, as new threats emerge from both within their realms and beyond. The novel builds directly on these established character arcs and world-altering events, deepening the central themes of love, power, and vengeance.
Literary Context: William Blake’s “A Poison Tree” and the Nature of Wrath
The novel opens with an epigraph from William Blake’s 1794 poem “A Poison Tree,” which establishes the destructive nature of suppressed anger, a phenomenon crucial to the theme of Monstrosity and Heroism as Artificial Categories, as acts of destruction in the novel are often driven by anger and grief at the loss of love.
Blake’s poem contrasts two forms of wrath: one that is expressed and thus resolved (“I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end”), and one that is nurtured in silence until it grows into a deadly, poisonous force (“I was angry with my foe; / I told it not, my wrath did grow”) (vii). Originally published in 1794 in the collection Songs of Experience, with an accompanying illustration by the poet, “A Poison Tree” expresses a theme that runs throughout the collection: the danger of repressed emotion. The anger toward a friend is expressed and thus melts away. Meanwhile, the anger toward a foe is nurtured in silence until it grows into a tree that yields poisoned fruit. The poem’s original title was “Christian Forbearance,” but the poem’s content makes clear that Blake invokes this traditional virtue ironically. Rather than praising “forbearance,” he argues that holding back anger only makes it curdle into hatred and even violence.
This framework directly informs the conflicts and character arcs in The Wrath of the Fallen. Samkiel, the god king, embodies the danger of repressed anger. His world-ending power, Oblivion, is a physical manifestation of his grief and rage, often triggered by nightmares of losing his mate, Dianna. After one such dream, he confesses his inability to control this power, admitting he has just become “a threat to everyone I loved” (17). In contrast, Umemri, the King of the Otherworld, unleashes his wrath immediately upon learning of his mate’s death. He descends upon a town with a “plague of demons” (3), his unchecked fury leading to the slaughter of its inhabitants. His grief, told not, grows into a force that mirrors the poisonous tree in Blake’s poem, destroying everything around him. By framing the narrative with Blake’s poem, Nicole invites readers to analyze how different characters process and express their anger, exploring whether wrath, when left to fester, inevitably becomes a corrupting and all-consuming power.
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