Why You'll Love This
Anskar trains to become a holy knight-sorcerer — but the power waking inside him belongs to the enemy he was raised to destroy.
- Great if you want: a conflicted hero whose faith and identity slowly fracture
- The experience: steady build with mounting dread — tension tightens across the pages
- The writing: Hogan keeps the world grounded with crisp, unshowy prose and clean plotting
- Skip if: you want fast answers — this first book lays long groundwork
About This Book
In a world still scarred by the memory of a Necromancer Queen's reign, a young initiate named Anskar DeVantte is about to discover that the order he was raised to serve may not be what it seems. Seventeen years after the queen's defeat, something ancient and hungry is stirring again—and Anskar, wrestling with forbidden powers and fracturing faith, may be more entangled in that resurgence than he can yet understand. Hogan builds his stakes not just through external threat but through Anskar's internal unraveling: the slow, unsettling realization that devotion and truth don't always point in the same direction.
What distinguishes Incursion as a reading experience is its patient, layered approach to fantasy worldbuilding. Hogan resists the urge to rush, instead letting the tension accumulate through Anskar's trials, relationships, and creeping doubts until the larger plot snaps into focus with real weight behind it. The prose is clean and purposeful, and the moral ambiguity embedded in the Order's structure gives the story the kind of texture that lingers after the final page. Readers who enjoy fantasy that earns its darkness rather than borrowing it will find this a satisfying and absorbing start to the series.
