Bitter Seeds

Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvelously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you.

—Habakkuk 1:5 (KJV)

There are no great men, only great challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet.

—Admiral William Halsey

Behold: I give you the Overman.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s 1939. The Nazis have supermen, the British have demons, and one perfectly normal man gets caught in between. Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him.

When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities — a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present — Marsh is the man who has to face them. He rallies the secret warlocks of Britain to hold the impending invasion at bay. But magic always exacts a price. Eventually, the sacrifice necessary to defeat the enemy will be as terrible as outright loss would be.

The novel Bitter Seeds by Ian Tregillis depicts an Alternate History World War II where a Nazi Mad Scientist figures out how to turn children into powerful psychic soldiers. As a result, the Nazis are indisputably winning the war. A clever British spy witnesses one of these kids doing their thing and realizes his countrymen need a paranormal equalizer of their own. Fortuitously, his best and oldest friend Lord William Beauclerk knows a thing or two about the supernatural and is willing to bleed for king and country. Thus, the Milkweed project is born and things then proceed to get worse. Oh, so very much worse.

The first book of The Milkweed Triptych. Followed by The Coldest War.

Tropes used in Bitter Seeds include:

Alternate History
Awesome but Impractical: The Nazis in charge of the psychics project are more focused on the more flashy psychics than on the more subtle ones despite the latter having a wider range of applications. Best exemplified when needing to eliminate a defector in a public area, instead of the psychics who can turn intangible, invisible, have precognition or telekinetic powers, they send out the pyrokinetic to make the defector spontaneously combust in the middle of a crowded hotel bar, despite it being a covert mission.
Badass Normal: Raybould Marsh has his moments.
Black and Gray Morality: Granted, they're fighting Nazis but still, the British do some exceedingly evil things in the name of king and country.
- While the Nazis are pretty much as bad if somehow not worse, even if only talking about the two side's respective supernatural weapons program, the British atrocities get more screen time then their Nazi counterparts. This is likely done on purpose to set a moralistic contrast.
Blood Magic - required to summon the Eidolons. Beyond that, it takes more and more blood to summon them each subsequent time.
Body Horror: You get psychic powers. Great! Too bad you have to have giant WWII-era batteries wired directly into your brain to fuel them.
Conditional Powers: The kids' powers only work as long as their batteries are charged.
Creepy Child: All the Nazi psychic children but Gretel is creepy even to the other Tyke Bombs.
Cool vs. Awesome: Battery-powered Nazi psychics vs. British warlocks summoning Eldritch Abominations.
Eldritch Abomination: The Eidolons.
EMP: Pixies, designed by the British to knock out the batteries. In the short story "What Doctor Gottlieb Saw", Gretel creates an improvised EMP device by sabotaging a diesel generator.
Fingore: When Will mucks up a negotiation, Marsh has to cut off one of his fingers with garden shears to appease the Eidolons.
Gentleman Wizard: Lord William Beauclerk
Ghostapo/Stupid Jetpack Hitler: The Gotterelektrongruppe started out as Thule Society occult hogwash, then Mad Scientist Doctor Von Westarp applied the scientific method to things and got his battery-operated psykers.
Intangible Man: Klaus' willenskrafte, which he can only use as long as he can hold his breath, but he doesn't have to worry about falling through the floor.
I Love the Dead: Reinhardt is so obsessed with Heike, he has sex with her corpse after she is Driven to Suicide.
Invisibility: Heike.
It Got Worse: Very much so for everyone concerned.
Kill All Humans: The ultimate aim of the Eidolons, as the mere existence of our form of life is abhorrent to them.
Kubrick Stare: Gretel on the cover of the paperback.
Language of Magic: Knowledge of Enochian is required to negotiate with the Eidolons once summoned.
Mad Scientist: Doctor Von Westarp.
Mind Over Matter: Kammler is an extremely powerful (and extremely brain-damaged) telekinetic.
Mundane Utility: Reinhardt comes up with a way to make roads in the desert with his pyrokinesis. It works -- barely. The group's efforts are more effective when clearing a path through snowfields and the Ardennes forest.
One Person, One Power: Each child gets one power and one power only.
Oracular Urchin: Gretel.
Playing with Fire: Reinhardt is a mean bullying pyrokinetic.
Powered by a Forsaken Child: The means by which the Enochian lexicon was derived.
Psychic Powers: The willenskrafte wielded by the children. Pyrokinesis, telekinesis, phase-shifting, invisibility and, scariest of all, decades-range precognition.
Spy Fiction: Of the Stale Beer variety.
Summon Magic: The British Warlocks can summon the Eidolons, whom they intend to negotiate with.
Teleporters and Transporters: Marsh figures out how to get the Eidolons to do this for them.
World War II
Xanatos Gambit: Everything Gretel does.