The best books about the war between angels and demons

Anne Rice was one of my first favorite authors and a major inspiration in my wanting to become a writer. While not as well-known as other entries in her incredible Vampire Chronicles series, Memnoch is my personal favorite. Continuing her iconic style of sympathizing with the supernatural through first-person narrative, this is the first time Rice introduced a classic religious figure into her vampire mythos and gave us a brilliant, unique take on Heaven and Hell, angels, demons, and the eternal conflict between God and the devil. This book was truly foundational for me in creating my own voice and character dynamics for The Sabrael Confession.

Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness is the book that's most often mentioned to me when I tell people what my novel's about. I didn't have the pleasure of reading it until after my book was done, and I'm glad, because it's so good it probably would've influenced me too much. The beautiful and sometimes terrifying story of angels fighting demons in Ashton shares a lot of DNA with The Sabrael Confession. A covert group of angels protecting from the shadows. Fallen angels manipulating human affairs. Thrilling battles between them. It's everything I wanted my own novel to be, and the success of this masterpiece showed me there was an audience for this type of story and gave me the courage to publish mine. 

There’s no way my list would be complete without mentioning this classic. While it’s a comedy and has a totally different tone than The Sabrael Confession, I love the relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley (masterfully executed in the live-action series on Amazon) and wanted to bring some of that into Sabrael's relationship with Lucifer. The concept of both angels and demons falling in love with living among humans in plain sight and staying on Earth throughout the millennia had a big impact on the formation of my story, as well as the sense of adventure and the high stakes of the plot that's unfolding under the noses of the mostly unsuspecting human race. The lighter side of the impending apocalypse. 

One of the key references I used in writing The Sabrael Confession, this book is a comprehensive list of all the named angels throughout history, good or bad, complete with their rank in the angelic host and all mentions of them across the world's religions. My copy looks like it's been through a war with dog-eared pages, sticky notes protruding from the sides, and little scribbles in the margins. Whenever I needed a new angel in my book, I scoured this amazing resource to find the perfect fit. All my fallen angels are fallen angels found here. All my good angels are listed here. It's a truly fascinating read, and does well to point out inconsistencies where an angel has been listed as good by some, evil by others.

This is actually the second book of Zeigler's Tears of Heaven series, but I read this one first and it stands perfectly on its own. There's so much I love about it, from the concept of rebel dark angels working to overthrow Satan with the help and ingenuity of human scientists and soldiers they rescue from Hell's torments to Zeigler's masterful world-building based on scripture and classic depictions of Hell. He pulls no punches in vividly describing the agonies of damnation. But it's his clever use of scientific principles to explain Hell's supernatural rules as well as arm his protagonists that truly stands out for me. I strove to achieve that level of logic in my book, but Zeigler manages to weaponize it as only a trained scientist could.