Angels Before Man by Rafael Nicolás

A queer retelling of Satan's fall –

In an eternal paradise, the most beautiful angel, Lucifer, struggles with shame, identity, and timidity, with little more than the desire to worship his creator.

It isn't until the strongest angel, Michael, comes into his life that Lucifer learns to love himself. Along the way, their friendship begins to bloom into something else. Maybe the first romance in the history of everything.

But this God is a jealous one, and maybe paradise is not paradise.

PUBLISHER: Rafaelnicolas
YEAR: 2023
LENGTH: 380 pages 
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy, Mythology, Romance
RECOMMENDED: Highly

Queer Rep Summary: Gay/Achillean Main Character(s).

ANGELS BEFORE MAN is a story of heartbreaking beauty and existential longing. The first half is filled with love and exploration, with Lucifer seeking to worship God, the Father, but disturbed by how the other angels treat his own beauty. Gradually he grows close to the Archangel Michael, for whom Lucifer is teeming with longing and adoration. Even though I knew what was coming, because of it, I wanted the first part of the book to never end. The first half ends with Lucifer and Michael intimate, but not quite satisfied, orbiting each other, endlessly drawn to one another’s company and not yet disturbed by everyone else’s reactions to their closeness.

The second half is where things begin to fall apart, as Lucifer starts to realize the toxic possessiveness of God's omniscience and jealous nature. God seems to want all the angels to only ever worship him, but in a way that is meant to exclude the possibility of them growing close with each other. As other angels grow jealous, Lucifer is punished repeatedly by God in ways where the abuse far outstrips the supposed severity of whatever he did.

The vary text is slowly corrupted, with a narrative threads distorting and scenes becoming disjointed. The perspective begins changes on random pages, to a degree where at first I thought something was wrong with my copy of the ebook.

I grew up religious in a way that left me familiar with the names of various angels and demons, so as things started to break down I had a sense of who was going to end up on what side. Part of the beauty and tragedy in this as a retelling of Lucifer‘s Fall is that knowing the end doesn’t spoil anything, it is the way the story was always going to go. Part of what I love about this version of it is that every angel ends up on each side for their own reasons and in a way that makes a tragic amount of sense.

If you like this you may like:

• The Fall That Saved Us by Tamara Jerée

Graphic/Explicit CW for sexual content, violence, animal death, death.

Moderate CW for cursing, alcohol, blood, gore, body horror, grooming, body horror, emotional abuse, physical abuse, injury detail, self harm, torture, murder, war.

Minor CW for ableist language, misogyny, sexual assault.

CWs from the Author: "Blasphemy, graphic violence, graphic animal death, sexual content, self-harm, use of terms with incestuous connotations, grooming, mental instability, off-page sexual assault, on-page sexual trauma, abuse. These themes are minor or absent in Part I. It isn’t necessary to read Part II."

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