The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Anton Gorodetsky is a magician-detective from Moscow’s Night Watch, an organization of light wizards and sorceresses that police the dark magicians. In spite of all the Night Watch’s claims about self-sacrifice and goodness, Sergei Lukyanenko’s urban fantasy takes place in a world that exists beyond the borders of good and evil. The light magicians are just as prone to illicit activities and there is a Day Watch that monitors the activities of wizards like Anton before they can go overboard in their attempts to save the world.

The Night Watch collects three short stories that together form the novel’s narrative arc. In each, Anton, an underdog detective, is tasked with stopping the forces of darkness with little more than his wits and his ingenuity. Fans of urban fantasy will struggle to resist Anton’s world of vampires, werewolves, and opaque magic systems, ... Read More

The Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

The Day Watch is the second novel in Sergei Lukyanenko’s Watch series. Like its predecessor, The Day Watch contains three short stories set in Russia and Europe that can be read independently or as part of a larger narrative arc. His work has once again been skillfully translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield.

Unlike its predecessor, Anton Gorodetsky is not the narrator of The Day Watch. Instead, all of our heroes are from the “Day Watch,” ostensibly a villainous faction of magic users known as “Dark Others.” However, in Lukyanenko’s world, we can never be sure who the villains are. The Day Watch certainly seems villainous: they take on the form of demons whenever they can, they betray their own, and they are willing to sacrifice infants to win battles. However, every evil act that t... Read More

The Twilight Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

The Inquisition carefully manages the balance of power between the Day and Night Watch, and nowhere in the world is it as precarious as in Moscow. At any given moment, the leaders of the Moscow Watches, Gesser and Zabulon, could carry out a diabolical scheme to seize power for their side in this never-ending cold war of magicians. As always, middle-class magician-detective Anton Gorodetsky is caught in the middle. As always, the world does not make sense. The magicians feel like they must regulate their own activities to keep balance, all the while wondering whether there is a difference between the light and the dark, and of course completely aware that there are cosmic forces for good and evil that will keep both teams roughly even no matter what they do.

So what’s the point?

Perhaps Sergei Lukyanenko has finally caught on that he has written himself into ... Read More