Here's author Alexis Deacon talking about what a geis (pronounced gesh) is.

I’d grown up with this book of Celtic mythology and folk tales and they very often used this concept of "geis." The idea is that we all have these "geisa," these rules we mustn’t break, but you don’t necessarily know what they are. You go to a priest or a wise woman and they would say, you must never speak to a woman wearing purple or you must never eat five peanuts consecutively or you must never jump over one black sheep and two red sheep. You go, okay, got it, no problem–but then you inevitably do all those things. There’s no way of escaping it. Often in the stories the more things they do to get away, the quicker they bring the events about. I really liked that idea of an inescapable fate. I don’t use it in exactly that way but the core is the same.

Geis a dark fantasy series, kind of a dark fantasy version of Hunger Games or Battle Royale. But not dark fantasy in the overly chatty, grimdark, ironically self-assured manner of we've seen become common today. This is understated and confident without being jabbery. Deacon seemingly effortlessly (though I'm sure he put in plenty of effort) draws the reader into a world and story that doesn't let go. I am delighted by this book and hungry to see where it goes next—Deacon so far excels at defying expected routes and carving new paths through the adjacent thicket. And the art is reminiscent of Kerascoet's in Beautiful Darkness. Lovely, tricky, sinister work.

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