More than a year ago I reviewed Larry Correia’s fantasy novel, Hard Magic, set in the 1930s in an alternate world where real magicians have appeared in the human population, making the world rather different than the one we know. Germany was defeated magically in World War I, and has ceased to be a serious power; Berlin is a quarantined dead city, full of zombies. Japan decisively defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, and is now the dominant power in the east, under the rule of a ruthless magician.

Meanwhile in the USA, there’s controversy over how magicians (called “Actives”) ought to be treated. There’s a strong movement to round them up and mobilize them for government purposes. In Hard Magic we met the Grimnoir Knights, an international organization of benevolent Actives, devoted to fighting the evil Japanese Imperium, but forced to work underground due to public hostility.

The central characters in the trilogy are two recently recruited Knights. One is Jake Sullivan, a Heavy (he can manipulate gravity) who has proved to be unusually intelligent and is emerging as the effective fighting leader of the Grimnoir. The other is Faye Vierra, a poor “Okie” girl whose gift is Traveling (teleportation). At the end of Hard Magic, it began to be clear that she is perhaps the most powerful Active in the world. And not everyone’s happy about that, because the last time someone like her showed up, it didn’t turn out well.

Spellbound, the next book in the series, involves the arrest of a couple of the Grimnoir leaders by a secretive government agency, and a plot to commit an act of terrorism in Washington, DC, and to blame it on the Grimnoir. An unlikely ally appears in the form of a Japanese Iron Guard, a highly disciplined and arrogant fighter who has come to realize that the Imperium has fallen under the control of evil forces (it’s an interesting complexity in these stories that the main enemy, the Japanese Imperium, exists for the purpose of fighting a cosmic evil even worse than itself).

Warbound, the third novel, involves a journey by Faye into dead Berlin (where she learns things about her own power that terrify her), and a couple of suicide missions (by airship) by Jake and his knights to secure a lost weapon and to use it to prevent a Cthulhu-like evil from outer space from turning the power of the Imperium against human life itself.

Lots of fun. Interesting characters, and pretty good values (author Correia is a Mormon). There’s some mild rough language, and off-stage sex, but nothing very offensive by contemporary standards. I enjoyed the books and recommend them.