The Menocht Loop

If you came here for a time-loop puzzle, turn around now, because that is the wrong sales pitch and it trips up most newcomers to this series. The Menocht Loop is dark, overpowered progression fantasy where the lead is already one of the most dangerous people alive when you meet him, and the Groundhog Day-esque loop he is trapped in runs the length of book one before he finally breaks out at the end. Read it if you want a necromancer who can level a city and a world that keeps getting bigger and meaner around him. Skip it if you need a sustained loop puzzle in the Mother of Learning mold, or a lead who feels things out loud.

The premise has teeth, and they are the good kind. Ian Dunai is an arch-decemancer, full control over death magic, and he has spent so long inside a single repeating stretch of time that he has out-leveled the entire outside world without anyone knowing he exists. Then he finds the thread that lets him out, and the floor drops away. The loop was layer one. There are more layers, the antagonists in them scale to match, and the story stops being a man pacing a cage and becomes a man walking out into something vast. That escalation is the engine: personal, then regional, then global, then cosmic.

What kept me reading: an arch-decemancer with nowhere to go but up

The genre keeps getting this series backwards, and the part it misses is the part I loved most. The Groundhog Day-esque loop is an origin, the chamber that levels Ian across the whole of book one. He breaks out at the end of that book, and once he is climbing the repeating-day structure is gone for good. What you actually get is the rare and genuinely thrilling kind of hero, an overpowered lead who starts at the top and still has somewhere terrifying to go, because the world keeps revealing tiers above him. I came in skeptical that an already-godlike protagonist could hold six books of tension. He does, because the floor keeps dropping, and each new ceiling makes the last one look small.

The magic carries that climb. It is affinity-based and it does not hand you a screen. Roughly one person in a hundred is born with any affinity at all, real power is rarer still, and what you have is fixed from birth. Ian drew death, and decemancy in his hands works like artillery, capable of leveling a city. Later books bring in stranger affinities the community has tagged as End, Beginning, and Remorse, named like a cosmology rather than a list of elements, and that taxonomy is where the system earns its keep. There are no stat boxes, no level-up pings, no numbers to audit. Power gets measured in consequence, in who Ian can and cannot kill, and that suits the tone better than a character sheet would.

The caveat worth knowing going in: Ian gets quiet

The one thing to know before you start is Ian himself. In book 1, when the loop is squeezing him and he is sharp and desperate, he works beautifully. After that he settles into a cooler register, reserved and economical with what he shows, and several books run a long way on a lead who keeps his wanting close to the chest. The community is split on this. Some readers find the middle books harder to engage with because Ian holds so much back, and I felt that pull in places too.

How much it matters comes down to what you are here for. If you read progression fantasy for scope and the cold competence of a man who solves problems by being scarier than them, that restraint reads as menace and you will be fine, maybe even sold. If you need an interior life, a voice, a reason to ache for the character rather than the conquest, the middle stretch asks more patience. The villains do not always pick up the slack early on either, when an antagonist can amount to another necromancer with nothing personal riding on the fight. This series trades in stakes of scale more than stakes of the heart, a livable trade once you know it is the deal you are signing.

It is dark, and it earns the darkness

Lorne Ryburn cites Mark Lawrence and Matthew Woodring Stover as influences, and you can feel both. This is grimdark-leaning progression with no comic relief valve, a death mage for a lead, and a tone that stays serious as the scope expands. The darkness has a purpose, which is the line I care about most. The body count and the cruelty point at the shape of the world and what surviving it costs, and they earn their place rather than decorating the page with misery.

The prose serves the story more than it dazzles. It is clean and direct, sometimes lean on description, and a few readers will want more texture from the sentences than they get. Book 1's world is on the narrow side too, confined by the loop to a handful of locations, so the setting really opens up once Ian does. Push through, because the series gets better as it goes, and the later books are where the affinity cosmology and the scale finally cash in.

The audio, and where it lands

Joe Hempel narrates all six books, roughly 83 and a half hours of him, averaging close to 14 per volume. He suits the material, a level, controlled read that matches a level, controlled protagonist, and he handles the dark turns without overplaying them. Given how internal book 1 is, one man alone in a looping day, a narrator who can hold a steady line carries more weight than usual, and Hempel does. Audio is a fine way in here, maybe the best one, since his pacing carries the leaner stretches.

Where to read or listen: Amazon for the ebooks and the print run, Audible for the Hempel narration, with the opening chunk of each book free on Royal Road where the series first ran. It is six books and ongoing, with a seventh serializing on Royal Road, so you are committing to an unfinished climb, eyes open.

Progression earns an 8 for an affinity system with real shape and a scope that keeps escalating, held back by the missing numbers some readers want. Story sits at 7 for a bold structure the middle books do not always fill. Characters land at 6, the one real caveat, a great premise paired with a guarded lead. Narration takes an 8 on Hempel's even, fitting read, and prose a 6, clean and direct if light on flourish. That averages to a divisive 7, a strong, dark, overpowered climb with one honest catch at its center. If you want grimdark progression and can live with a quiet protagonist, it is worth the 83 hours.