R.A. Salvatore is getting ready to return to the world of Corona, made famous by his DemonWars Saga. Saga Press has signed the fantasy author for a new trilogy of novels, which will be a number of years after the events of his recent Coven trilogy.
The DemonWars saga is one of Salvatore’s best known works. He kicked off the series in 1997 with a trilogy of novels: The Demon Awakens, The Demon Spirit, and The Demon Apostle, which follow Elbryan Wyndon and Jilseponie “Pony” Ault, friends who are forced out of their homes when their village Dundalis is destroyed by a demon horde. They’re taken in by elves, and raised to fight in the coming battle.
Salvatore followed that trilogy in 2000 with a standalone installment, Mortalis, which saw the people of Corona picking up the pieces after the invasion, and follows Pony as she works to track down the man who killed Elbryan. Mortalis served as a bit of a bridge between the first trilogy and the next: Ascendance, Transcendence, and Immortalis.
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In addition to that seven-book arc, Salvatore has written other books set within the same world, which largely stand alone. There’s his Saga of the First King quartet, which includes The Highway Man, The Ancient, The Dame, and The Bear, while more recently, he published The Coven trilogy, which includes Child of a Mad God, Reckoning of Fallen Gods, and this year’s Song of the Risen God.
The new trilogy will take place several years after the conclusion of that latest trilogy. In conversation, Salvatore said that The Coven trilogy, set decades after the events of the original novels, “left the world in a really interesting place.” He likened the events of that trilogy as a transformative event on the scale of the European invasion of North America. “This is going to be a story about surviving in a desperate and unjust world,” he said, “and trying to fix it.”
Longtime DemonWars readers will “hopefully see a logical progression of the original books through the end as kingdoms consolidate,” Salvatore explained. “So the world will make sense — the economics and clashes of cultures, etc. All of that has to make sense.”
The new books are set to debut in the spring of 2023 according to Saga, and Salvatore notes that he’s hoping to tell a more personal story amidst a much larger-scale conflict, something he intended to do with The Coven trilogy before it grew in the telling.
While this new trilogy can be read independently from the others in the long-running series, Salvatore noted that readers wanting to get a jump-start on the world can either go back to the original DemonWars novels or, if they want to start a bit closer to the action, start with The Coven trilogy: “That’ll be the most relevant to the new series — that’s where the world gets left behind.”
