50. Reviews at Tor.com and Locus
At Tor.com, we have GODKILLER and THE POMEGRANATE GATE, while Locus has made my reviews of GODS OF THE WYRDWOOD, MASTER OF SAMAR, and HE WHO DROWNED THE WORLD freely available online
There never seems to be enough time. But while I’m bemoaning entropy, here are some reviews I wrote elsewhere:
Hannah Kaner’s debut Godkiller is unexpectedly excellent:
First published in the UK in January 2023, it received strong praise (including from Samantha Shannon and Tasha Suri) and rapidly became a UK bestseller. Despite my initial misgivings [about it], I can see why. Blood and demons and strained loyalties and families found and chosen, the aftermath of civil war and the consequences of past decisions coming back around again: Godkiller takes the fabric of epic fantasy and stitches it into a clean, tense, precisely measured and neatly designed tapestry. [Full review.]
I also found myself surprisingly pleased by Ariel Kaplan’s The Pomegranate Gate:
Kaplan weaves the strands of the narrative deftly together, with the solution to one mystery unfolding into the outlines of the next, each fresh revelation tightening the noose of tension around the characters and drawing the reader onwards. But tension and peril is balanced with wonder: The Pomegranate Gate is suffused with a sense of the numinous, with the marvelous and the strange. [Full review.]
R.J. Barker continues his interesting ways with epic fantasy in Gods of the Wyrdwood:
One of the most fascinating aspects of Gods of the Wyrdwood, though, is the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is a puzzle only gradually revealed (I doubt Barker has shown his whole hand in this one volume), with its array of strange gods, with its cowls and its Cowl-Rais and its constant war. Victory means the world will ‘‘tilt’’ and warmth return to the north – an idea I first thought was metaphor. It turns out to be literal. Barker creates an alien biosphere, filled with jellyfish-like gasmaws and spearmaws that float through the air, cow-like crownheads and large insect-like orits, in addition to the other strangenesses of the Wyrdwood: intelligent rootlings shaped by the impulses of the wood itself, skeletal swarden with their unknowable impulses, crown trees vast beyond imagining, and the of boughry, the gods of the deep wood, alien in their powers and necessities. [Full review.]
In The Master of Samar, Melissa Scott has written another excellent novel to add to her long career:
Scott’s novels are always atmospheric, richly detailed, with a sense that much more extends beyond the edges of the page than the reader gets to see. In this, The Master of Samar is no different: Bejanth, reminiscent of Venice with its canals and its oligarchic voting bodies, its orientation to the sea, its murky depths, its religious and educational institutions and its outcasts, feels much like a real place. The characters, too, feel real, worn at the edges by a life well- (and hard-) lived. Irichels and his lover, Envar Cassi, are men in their forties, with Arak seeming not more than a decade younger, and the hints we get of their lives before the novel begins makes me wish desperately for a prequel. (A fantastic sword-and-sorcery premise, this wandering cursebreaker stuff.) Irichels’s struggles and insecurities centre on his desire to leave Bejanth again, to not be forced to see his lover snubbed or to lose Envar entirely because of politics. [Full review.]
And Shelly Parker-Chan concludes their fascinating duology in He Who Drowned The World:
He Who Drowned the World is an incredibly compelling novel, vividly written, with fascinating thematic arguments about gender and power – there are entire essays to be composed on that aspect of this novel alone – and with a startlingly fresh approach to combining the fantastical with the historical. (At least for English-language media. My exposure to Chinese-language historical-fantastical drama is limited, but my impression there suggests that Chan may be drawing on existing genre models.) It could also be accurately subtitled Unlikeable People Making Really Terrible Life Choices. [Full review.]
That’s it for me for now.