The Warded Man, by Peter V. Brett, is the first book in a new fantasy series. My brother recommended it to me recently, and I read it over the last few days.

The tale takes place in a land plagued by demons who rise at dusk and kill anyone they can find until at dawn they sink back into “the Core”. A human being is no match for an average demon’s strength and ferocity, and anyone out at night is liable to be “cored”—torn to bits and eaten.

In order to survive, humans must live behind “wards,” painted or drawn or carven symbols that interact with the demons’ magic and prevent them from passing. There are a vast number of wards, each with its own specific effect; and they must be drawn in a particular and carefully calculated geometry to create an impassable net. All known wards are defensive, but it is common knowledge that once upon a time men knew offensive wards.

The war between the demons and the humans goes back into ancient history, but eventually, in the distant past, there arose a figure known as the Deliverer. The humans took the battle to the demons, and were winning…and one night the demons failed to rise. They did not return for 3,000 years. (It always amuses me the way fantasy authors throw around periods of time like 3,000 years or 10,000 years or 5,000 years. They seem to have no notion of how long 3,000 years really is.)

During that time, the humans, no longer united by the common enemy, fought among themselves, devising all manner of high technology. The wards were largely forgotten. And then the demons came back. High technology availed little, and much of human civilization was lost. The wards that were still known sufficed to keep a small, low-tech population alive…but as our story begins, some hundreds of years later, it is clear that human population is declining year by year.

The tale follows three characters as they grow into young adulthood: Arlen, a boy from a small village who longs to bring the battle to the demons; Leesha, a girl from a larger village who trains to be the village’s “Herb Gatherer”, and Rojer, a boy apprenticed to a drunken jongleur. Each has his or her encounters with human wickedness and frailty, and also with the demons; and in time their separate paths draw them together. Perhaps a new Deliverer has arisen.

On the whole, I enjoyed the book; the main characters are interesting, and adequately drawn, and they genuinely grow as the book proceeds. I’m curious about what happens to them next. On the other hand, there are a few scenes that I simply do not believe. One character, for example, is brutally raped by bandits…and after the fetal position, the crying, the cringing when anyone male comes near and the obligatory attempts to wash the stain from her body it’s as though nothing happened. Within two days she’s trying to jump another character’s bones. Huh?

I grow increasingly fascinated by the way the standards of our present-day world creep into books set in places that are entirely other. One of the things I liked about Ernest Bramah Smith’s “Kai Lung” books is that the values of the characters are Chinese values, not English values. Or, at least, they are an early 20th-century Englishman’s understanding of Chinese values. In modern fantasy, by contrast, one all too often finds the sympathetic characters hewing pretty closely to the Spirit of the Age in all of its politically correct glory, and I see some of this in Brett’s book.

The most egregious example is when we are told by Bruna, Leesha’s mentor in the art of Herb Gathering, that the Herb Gatherers (all women) are responsible for preserving and passing along what remains of the old technology…none of which they pass along to the men, because the men aren’t to be trusted with it. A world run by women would naturally be a world at peace. Nope, not buying it.

So, I enjoyed it with some caveats. I’ll most likely read the sequels. But Jim Butcher’s Calderon novels cover some of the same territory and are a lot more fun.