The second book of any planned trilogy carries a particular weight. It has to honor the questions raised in the opening volume, push the story somewhere that justifies the reader’s commitment, and leave just enough on the table for the finale. The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey does most of this with the assured craftsmanship readers will recognize from the duo’s nine-book Expanse run. But it also carries the bruises that come with reaching for more than the page count strictly allows.
Picking up after The Mercy of Gods and the linked novella Livesuit, we rejoin the roughly three thousand human captives of Anjiin who now live, work, and die inside the Carryx world-palace. Dafyd Alkhor, the man who delivered his own people into a survivable form of servitude, has hardened into the role of factor: the human voice of the alien librarians, despised by the very people he protects. The swarm, that spy-weapon smuggled in by the Carryx’s deathless enemy, has shifted bodies. And the field agents scattered across the empire have begun sending their first reports back. None of them describe what anyone expected.
What the Authors Are Working With
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, writing together as Corey, bring the same toolkit they used to make the Expanse feel inhabited rather than imagined. They watch their characters from very close. They sketch alien biology with specific physical detail, the Carryx with their two black-and-red fighting arms, the goat-cuttlefish Sinen, the boneless slug of a Vaudai, and they allow each species its own logic rather than handing it a translated human personality.
A few things this novel does especially well:
- Voice across non-human minds. Sections from the Carryx Surur-Tlassen and Ekur-Tkalal are some of the most striking writing the duo has produced. They read like a person thinking, not a costumed lecture.
- The swarm chapters. Written in present tense and italics, these turn the spy-thriller premise inward. The voices of the dead it has consumed continue to argue with it.
- Dafyd’s moral collapse is steady, not theatrical. The book trusts the reader to track its small daily ratchet.
- The myth interludes. Each part opens with a fragment from the Myths of Origin compiled by Uuya Tomos, retelling how the boy Ke tamed Ash-Abbé, the bird that ate the sky. These sit alongside the plot rather than over it, suggesting parallels without forcing them.
A Story That Splits to Conquer
If the first novel kept its action inside one prison, this one cracks the shell. The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey sends Jessyn, Campar, Rickar, and Garral out into the empire on assignments only the Carryx fully understand, and the field reports they send home become the engine of the book. The middle act, where the reader pieces together what the deathless enemy actually is at the same speed as the characters on the ground, contains some of the strongest set-pieces in the series so far. A scene aboard a captured enemy command ship in vacuum suits, with two men cutting their way through a shielded door while a slug-shaped alien shouts at them about fingers, is exactly the kind of grounded, slightly funny, slightly terrible sequence that made the Expanse books work.
The Carryx politics deepen here too. The novel takes a long look at how an empire built like an organism handles questions of succession and replacement, and it does so without slowing for an explainer. The reader learns by watching the body react.
Character and Sentence
What surprises most about this novel is how quiet it can be. There is a long passage of Dafyd in his rooftop garden, listening to a fountain and watching alien ziggurats glow at dusk, that has more in common with literary fiction than with the propulsive rhythms of military space opera. The prose stays plain on the surface and runs deep underneath. A line like “His mind building walls between things he needed to know and things he could safely ignore” lands so casually that a reader might not register it for what it is, which is a small confession about how anyone survives life under a boot.
The dialogue, especially between the Anjiin field agents Campar and Ghati, gives the book its breathing room. Their banter is funny in the way that exhausted, frightened, attached people are funny in real life. A reviewer cannot quote anything without spoiling its shape, but the word “boyfriend” doing a lot of comedic and emotional work inside an alien war zone is one of the better small reading pleasures of the year.
Where the Cracks Show
A four-star book is not a five-star book, and the gap is honest. The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey carries the standard ailments of a middle volume.
- The cast has spread thin. Some of the Anjiin survivors who mattered in book one barely appear here, and a few of the new field viewpoints feel like delegates from plotlines waiting their turn.
- The pacing breathes unevenly. The first third stays inside the world-palace and turns inward; the middle bursts open across multiple worlds; the closing chapters try to gather everything for a thematic payoff that lands well but feels rushed against the runway given to it.
- The myth chapters work better in retrospect than in the moment. They reward patience, but a reader looking for forward momentum may resent them.
- A few species blur together. Soft Lothark, Soun, Sinen, Phylarchs, Rak-hund, Budon, Euruk, Oumenti. Even attentive readers will find themselves flipping back.
None of this is fatal. It does mean readers who came to the series for the tighter focus of The Mercy of Gods will need to widen their expectations.
The Series in Context
Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck are not new at this. The Expanse cycle, from Leviathan Wakes through Leviathan Falls, plus the Memory’s Legion collection and standalones like The Churn and Auberon, proved the duo can sustain a long arc and pay it off. Abraham’s solo work, particularly The Long Price Quartet and The Dagger and the Coin, has always been more interested in moral compromise and political cost than space combat, and that voice is louder here than it ever was in the Expanse books. The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey is the most Abraham-flavored title these two have produced together, which is part of its strength and part of why some stretches read slower.
For readers building a shelf around this book, the closest companions are Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time and Children of Ruin for sustained alien perspective, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire for empire as character, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice for hive-style consciousness, and Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota for myth-laced political science fiction. Readers with longer memories will recognize the influence of Frank Herbert’s Dune and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness in how alien societies are allowed to remain genuinely alien.
A Final Read
This is space opera written by people who have stopped trying to impress and started trying to land something. The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey is more thoughtful than thrilling, more concerned with what kind of person a captive becomes than with how the captives escape. As the middle book of The Captive’s War, it sets up a finale that should be remarkable. As a novel on its own, it asks more patience than its predecessor did, and rewards most of what it asks for.