Shadow of Night

Into the Past

At the end of A Discovery of Witches, Diana Bishop and vampire Matthew Clairmont timewalk from the present into Elizabethan London — September 1590. The second All Souls novel picks up immediately: Diana must find a teacher to help her understand and control her unusual witchcraft; Matthew must navigate his complicated position in Elizabethan society (he is, we discover, an Elizabethan spy); and they must search for Ashmole 782, the enchanted manuscript that holds the secrets of creatures’ origins.

The Historian’s Novel

Harkness is a professor of early modern history, and Shadow of Night is where that expertise becomes the novel’s greatest asset. The Elizabethan sections are dense with period detail — the specific smells and sounds of London in 1590, the social hierarchies of the Queen’s court, the distinction between different magical traditions — rendered with the confidence of someone who has spent years in primary sources.

Christopher Marlowe appears as a secondary character with enough historical specificity to feel real rather than merely atmospheric. John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court astrologer and the historical figure most associated with Renaissance magic, plays a significant role, and Harkness threads in the so-called School of Night — the circle of freethinkers associated with Walter Raleigh — to populate her London with the actual intellectual radicals of the age.

The School of Night

The cleverest move in Shadow of Night is the decision to embed Matthew within a real coterie of Elizabethan thinkers rather than inventing a fictional one. Diana and Matthew take lodgings in the company of poets, mathematicians, and natural philosophers who treated the boundary between magic and emerging science as porous, because to their contemporaries it genuinely was. This is the period Harkness studies as a working historian, and it shows: the daemons, witches, and vampires of her world map neatly onto a moment when astrology, alchemy, and the new experimental philosophy coexisted in the same minds. The conceit lets her dramatize a real historical argument — that the modern separation of science from the occult was a later invention — using the machinery of fantasy. For readers it means the magic never feels arbitrary; it is rooted in how Elizabethans actually understood the cosmos.

Diana’s Apprenticeship

Where A Discovery of Witches coasted on the chemistry of forbidden romance, the middle volume slows down to do something harder: it makes its heroine learn. Diana, a witch who has spent her life suppressing her own power, must finally submit to teachers, and the novel is structured around her gradual, frustrating, often humbling education in craft. Harkness uses the past as a classroom — the present-day Diana could find no one willing to instruct her, but Elizabethan London still holds witches who practice openly. The cost of this design is pacing; the book trades the propulsion of the first novel for the patience of a training arc, and not every reader will accept the bargain. But it deepens Diana from a vessel for plot into a protagonist with a discipline of her own, and it sets up the stakes of the trilogy’s finale.

Series Context and Adaptation

Shadow of Night is the structural keystone of the All Souls trilogy, bridging the contemporary romance of the first book and the present-tense reckoning of The Book of Life. Harkness, a professor at the University of Southern California specializing in the history of science, came to fiction late and reportedly conceived the series while wondering what vampires would actually do for a living given centuries to accumulate expertise. The trilogy was adapted into the Sky and AMC television series A Discovery of Witches, whose second season dramatizes this volume’s Elizabethan timewalking; the screen version tightens the pacing that some readers find slack on the page. For newcomers, the order is non-negotiable — this is emphatically a middle book, and reading it cold would squander both its payoffs and its setups.

Limitations

Requires A Discovery of Witches — cannot be read standalone. At 584 pages it is significantly slower-paced than the first novel. The romance, while satisfying to fans, occasionally dominates over the historical and magical plot. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

This is a book for readers who came out of A Discovery of Witches wanting more — more world, more history, more time with Diana and Matthew — and who are willing to accept a slower burn in exchange. It rewards anyone with an interest in Tudor and Elizabethan England, in the history of science, or in the way fantasy can be used to smuggle real intellectual history past the reader’s defenses. It is not the place to start the trilogy, and it is not for readers who prize plot momentum above texture; the historical immersion that fans treasure is the same density that impatient readers find slow. Approach it as the trilogy’s deep middle, read with the first novel fresh in mind, and it pays off the patience it demands.

The Real History Underneath the Fantasy

Part of what gives the Elizabethan sections their density is that Harkness is not improvising her period; she is dramatizing the world she has studied professionally. Her scholarly work includes a history of John Dee’s angel conversations and a study of the natural philosophy of Elizabethan London, and both feed directly into the novel. Dee really did keep a celebrated library and really did believe he could converse with angels through a scryer; the alchemical and astrological pursuits that swirl around Diana’s education were genuine intellectual programs, not decorative window dressing. Even small touches — the way money changes hands, the hazards of childbirth, the etiquette of approaching the Queen — carry the weight of research rather than pastiche. Readers who enjoy spotting the seam between invention and record will find the book unusually rewarding, because Harkness has hidden very little; the fiction is draped over a recognizable historical frame, and the join is part of the pleasure.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — The most historically substantial volume of the trilogy: slower but denser, and rewarding for readers interested in Elizabethan England.

Reading Guides

• A Discovery of Witches — Full Review
• The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness — Full Review