The Baku-verse
Urban fantasy set in Portland, Maine
Real streets. Real weather. A city most people cannot see properly. The Baku-verse novels by Reed Logan Westgate are dark urban fantasy, and most of them happen here.
Why Portland
I write about Portland because it is the city I know well enough to break properly. It is small enough to cross on foot and old enough to have layers. It has burned more than once and been rebuilt on top of itself. That makes it a good place to hide things.
Most urban fantasy lives in New York, Chicago or London. Portland gets fog off Casco Bay, cobblestones in the Old Port, and long winters. The magic in these books is old. It fits a city that is old for America.
Where the books go
The Old Port. Cobblestones, brick, bars and late nights. The Baku Trilogy keeps coming back here after dark.
Exchange Street. The necromancer Oxivius Soulforge walks it like he owns it. In Dirge of the Dead, a nightclub on Exchange Street has just been rebranded. The owner is not human.
Turtle Island. Coarse sand, smooth rocks, and a sky full of stars. It is not on any ferry schedule. Xlina does not arrive there by boat.
Not only Maine
The Soulstealer trilogy goes back four hundred years and more. The Crusades, Hungary, Rome, and the first winters of Plymouth Colony. It is the history of one necromancer, and it ends on the day he arrives in modern Portland. The novella, The Druid of the Morrigu, goes west to Mount Greylock in Massachusetts.
Where to start
Two ways in. Start with The Infernal Games in present-day Portland, or go back to 1010 and start with Soulstealer: Origins. Both work. See both reading orders, or browse every book.
