u/KenMcEwen

Seems a simple question. One (you’d think) a fantasy author ought to be able to answer quickly. And sometimes the answer comes naturally, over beers with friends and neighbors or facing down a few bemused strangers in a bar. 

But when it’s just me, asking the question of the stillness in my office or the darkness before sleep, I find it’s not so simple.

Why did I write a fantasy novel? 

Partly, I am what I ate. I’ve read fantasy for most of my life. From Animorphs to Arabian Nights, Goosebumps to Green Angel Tower, my blood has always stirred at the fantastic: Brian Jacques, Carol Berg, RA Salvatore, Jim Butcher, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, Tad Williams, Robin Hobb, Ursula K. Le Guin – these names are electrodes on a battery that powered me through life. 

Partly, I thought it would be easy: I’d knock out a simple story about pirates, secret treasures, and leviathans before moving on to more challenging fiction. One page a day for a year, and I’d have a 365-page banger I could toss up for a sail and let it carry me to greater things. 

Fifteen years and five books later, I have a 488-page banger that burned every preconceived notion of ease on a pyre of humility. 

But to take the question through its heart and pin it to the board…I write fantasy because it fits. It was our first voice – our earliest forebears crowded in the dirt around a fire, telling stories to help them understand the world through which they passed. They called the sun an eye because they couldn’t comprehend the atom. The wind was a sigh and the sea a fickle mistress. There was no veil between fact and fantasy—and who’s to say they were wrong? Take a good look at the proton and tell me you understand exactly how it works. Lie beneath the stars, stare into the infinite space between them, and explain the concept of forever. Walk the old forests at night, and see if you take comfort from that textbook explaining there are no gods or monsters. 

There’s a common stigma attached to fantasy literature, that it is all escapism and foolishness. I’ve often found it to be the opposite; that in stories outlandish, whimsical, or impossible can be found some of the brightest and most imperishable truths. 

During World War II, Tolkein and Lewis lectured regularly at Oxford on their works; an attendee named Helen Terrel Wheeler said of one afterward, “What happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life. Indeed, that they were the same.” 

Stories are lives, distilled.

And a life without imagination is no life at all. 

So why did I write a fantasy novel? Today, the answer is simple. 

Because it was fun.

Comment your answer below!

Back in March, I asked the r/fantasy community for help finding exceptional reads – books in that narrow band of the fantasy spectrum combining exceptional prose with emotional depth, a deep sense of meaning, and original characters who kept or found hope and joy amid suffering. 

You can find the resulting discussion here, but in the end I made nine purchases: 

• The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay (1995) 
• The Curse of Chalion – Lois McMaster Bujold (2001) 
• The Grace of Kings – Ken Liu (2015) 
• Kings of the Wyld – Nicholas Eames (2017) 
• The Bone Ships – RJ Barker (2019) 
• Tuyo – Rachel Neumeier (2020) 
• The Spear Cuts Through Water – Simon Jimenez (2022) 
• The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera (2023) 
• Slow Gods – Claire North (2025)

 

My goal is to read them all within a year. I’ll post my thoughts on each, in no particular order, always spoiler free. Do with them as you will. 

You can find reviews for books I’ve finished in the list above. But now... 

Tuyo

I didn’t know what to expect wading into this one. Any book read for the first time will have some element of mystery to it, but Tuyo had the added curiosity of being the only self-published title on the list. Right or wrong, historically such titles carry a stigma in the general public – the idea that the world of self-pub is the catch-all grease trap beneath the lofty Trad Pub Utopia, printed on the cheap and rife with errors. 

However, if you’ve read my original post asking for recommendations, you know I’ve been disappointed with many “bestsellers” over the years. Rubber-stamp tropes abound, picked up because of hot trends rather than any spectacular quality. The more I’ve learned about how that lauded sausage is made, the more disillusioned I’ve become. The exceptionalism of fantasy – the raw gems of imagination cut and polished by a disciplined pen – has been sacrificed to algorithms, keywords, and expediency. Countless bloody revolutions, cookie cutter dystopian societies, and fairy smut. 

And listen, if that’s your jam, more power to you. Reading trends in this country are far too dire for me to yuck somebody’s yum. Still, I wonder if the reading crisis is due in part to stories becoming more about raging against something than an ideal to pursue or protect. 

Meanwhile, in the past few years I’ve seen some titles float to the top of the aforementioned grease trap, buoyed by small but ardent pockets of the internet exclaiming the hidden values of self-pub. 

So, against this highly opinionated backdrop, I slipped a request for a few non-traditional recommendations into my original post. The result was Tuyo. 

At first glance, it comes with some of the usual self-pub blemishes. The cover looks like photoshop work, the paper has that too-white and too-flat feel of a Print-on-Demand production, and the interior formatting is a bit plain. But honestly, all that can be expected of a title that doesn’t have the production budget of a major publishing house, and none of it slowed me down. The story itself is what really matters, and on that front, Rachel Neumeier delivers an original tale told with impressive creativity. 

The protagonist Ryo’s adventure gets off to a fast start, pulling the reader in through a few clever plot devices I appreciated. The concept is interesting, the world unique (a river divides a land of perpetual summer from one of perpetual winter, and the cultures are about as different as you’d expect), but where the book really shines is its use and description of sorcery – specifically, the problems caused by magic that can invade and strongly influence the mind. The idea that someone can change or implant false memories and dramatically change your perspective is stressful as hell, and the consequences are dire.  

On this single point, Ms. Neumeier balances characters of empathy and cruelty, kindness and brutality, loyalty and betrayal. You can tell she loved them, loved knowing their hearts and minds, and enriching their lives with meaningful relationships. 

The prose left something to be desired. 

Ms. Neumeier often repeats words that are unnecessary; in one instance, the word “tent” is repeated six times in two short paragraphs. The more common issue, for me anyway, was the word “that” – it’s everywhere. “I understand that...I think that...I was worried that...if you can manage that...” The story was good enough I wanted to fall into it, but I kept stumbling over these unwieldy sentences. 

Partly, I think the clipped, formal language was intentional to show the formality of the cultures. But this formality was another issue for me: the lengths “good” characters go to avoid offending each other (even among friends and allies) was excessive, to the point it weighed down the dialogue. Respect and honor as linchpins of culture is a time-honored theme, but you still need flashes of unrestrained human passion. Failing that, you need real consequences to upholding that honor. James Clavell’s Shogun does this brilliantly – the rigidity of feudal Japan is a character in itself, with its own flaws and contradictions. The respect costs something, and we see that cost compounding over time. Ms. Neumeier’s characters act as if they’ve all read the script and know their roles in it, and everything just sort of rolls along, navigating what should be brink-of-death scenes with stern nods and good manners. Which, if that were really the culture, it’s hard to believe there’d be any enmity between these peoples in the first place. I never felt the tension. 

Still, Tuyo’s peaks are higher than its valleys. The concept was strong enough I wanted to keep reading, with plenty of originality and world building that promised greater depth in subsequent novels (including frequent reference to a third, powerful race farther to the south). 

In short, not a favorite but still better than several traditionally published works I’ve read in recent years. Worth reading. 

Question for the community: what are your all-time favorite self-published books? This is an experiment I want to continue. 

In that vein, I’m stepping back from “The List” for a minute to read an Advance Reader Copy (ARC) for a friend, but then I’ll be back to it with RJ Barker’s The Bone Ships! 

Cheers. 

And hey, if you're enjoying the reviews, make sure to follow! 

Back in March, I asked the r/fantasy community for help finding exceptional reads - books in that narrow band of the fantasy spectrum combining exceptional prose with emotional depth, a deep sense of meaning, and original characters who kept or found hope and joy amid suffering.

You can find the resulting discussion here, but in the end I made nine purchases: 

• The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay (1995) 
• The Curse of Chalion – Lois McMaster Bujold (2001) 
• The Grace of Kings – Ken Liu (2015) 
• Kings of the Wyld – Nicholas Eames (2017) 
• The Bone Ships – RJ Barker (2019) 
• Tuyo – Rachel Neumeier (2020) 
• The Spear Cuts Through Water – Simon Jimenez (2022) 
• The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera (2023) 
• Slow Gods – Claire North (2025)

 

My goal is to read them all within a year. I’ll post my thoughts on each, in no particular order, always spoiler free. Do with them as you will. 

You can find reviews for books I’ve finished in the list above. But now... 

The Curse of Chalion. 

I don’t have any strict fantasy allergies – hard passes every time – but I do have aversions. One of those aversions is anything to do with “courts”. The word conjures stuffy brocades, longing glances, forbidden romances at the bal masqué. Lots of gasps, sighs, collapsing onto chaise lounges, and getting sweaty over fairies. Basically, the French. 

Reading Chalion’s description, I knew this book would have courts. Maybe not fairies, but very probably a forbidden romance or two. Nonetheless, I soldiered forth, keeping out a wary eye for chaise lounges. 

My interest in this book followed a sharp J-curve. It dragged at the start, mostly because of the prose – Ms. Bujold loves a comma. Throughout the novel (but especially in the first few chapters), her lines forced me to stop and read them twice or thrice before catching their meaning. The concepts, dialogue, and characters were interesting, but the prose was wandering and dense. A bit like following a path through an overgrown rose garden, catching my sleeves on thorns of overly complex sentences, words archaic or invented (ex., “roya” and “royina” for king and queen, “royse” and “royesse” for prince and princess, “provincara” for...I guess the head of a province, but also specifically a city of that province? I’m still unsure). 

At first, I could tell the persons and events described mattered, but I had a hard time picking out who any of them really were, or their loose relationships to the haunted protagonist Cazaril. Also, I don’t need a map to enjoy a story, but it helps when so much of the plot revolves around political alliances or hostilities between nations and/or cities. 

All this contributed to the bramble I had to wriggle through to find the heart of the story... 

...which I greatly enjoyed, once I decoded the language! 

At its core, The Curse of Chalion is the tale of a damaged man finding new meaning to his life. Through means both magical and mundane, Cazaril goes to great lengths to protect newfound friends, putting their good and that of the kingdom (royadom?) ahead of his own while navigating the perils of courtly intrigue. 

After a sluggish start, I was engrossed by the blossoming relationships between Cazaril and his friends. Their genuine care for each other warmed the chill castles in which they dined, pined, and politicked. The magic was vague but potent and clever, with lasting consequences instead of the popular flashy gimmicks conjured for convenience. Obscure references to people or places at the beginning came around again to become relevant and exciting – one of my favorite techniques in writing of any kind. Around the halfway mark, I was truly hooked. 

And the courts, well...they were actually pretty fun. The dialogue in particular: I marked multiple lines as damned clever, smoothly delivered but not in a way that felt ostentatious. There was a forbidden romance (called it), but it was tasteful garnish that didn’t overpower the main course, with nary a fairy or apathetic couch in sight. 

I struggle to put this book in neat boxes. I want to say it was stuffy and restrained...but for the parts where it broke free and excited. I could describe the plot as wandering...except it all drove toward a central theme and delivered on all points. I could gripe about certain “deus ex machina” moments, but as those were directly related to the core concepts, they felt purposeful and well-executed. I cared about characters who – beyond their names and a few core traits – I could tell you nothing about. I felt the tugs on threads of geopolitical gameplay, the full tapestry of which I couldn’t see. 

This is a story one explores through touch, rather than by sight or sound: small, intimate revelations steadily reveal the whole, and if one is unbalanced at first, he comes to know the whole better than if he’d walked the halls by torchlight. 

By its end, The Curse of Chalion had me bemusedly enchanted, with a bit of a headache from all the concentration required. I can see why this book is so beloved, and also why I’d never heard of it. It is not a book that lends itself to effortless recommendations. 

Still, if you like courts (or even if you don’t) give it a shot. 

Next up: TUYO! 

Back in March, I asked the r/fantasy community for help finding exceptional reads - books in that narrow band of the fantasy spectrum combining exceptional prose with emotional depth, a deep sense of meaning, and original characters who kept or found hope and joy amid suffering.

You can find the resulting discussion here, but in the end I made nine purchases:

·      The Lions of Al-Rassan – Guy Gavriel Kay (1995)

·      The Curse of Chalion – Lois McMaster Bujold (2001)

·      The Grace of Kings – Ken Liu (2015)

·      Kings of the Wyld – Nicholas Eames (2017)

·      The Bone Ships – RJ Barker (2019)

·      Tuyo – Rachel Neumeier (2020)

·      The Spear Cuts Through Water – Simon Jimenez (2022)

·      The Saint of Bright Doors – Vajra Chandrasekera (2023)

·      Slow Gods – Claire North (2025)

My goal is to finish them all within a year. I’ll post my thoughts on each, in no particular order, always spoiler free. Do with them as you will.

You can find my Kings of the Wyld review in the list above, but in short, I thought it was great fun with a few flaws. I put it down, satisfied, but ready for something deeper.

So, I turned to The Lions of Al-Rassan, my first experience with the esteemed Guy Gavirel Kay.

I was not ready.

Within the fantasy spectrum, I’m usually a traditional swords and magic kinda guy. Historical fiction was not my bag, baby – and this book could be described as such. It is a fantastical skin drawn over the Reconquista period of fifteenth century Spain, the places and religions changed but the geography and sentiments much the same: the Muslims became the Asharites, the Christians the Jaddites, and the Jews the Kindath. Al-Andalus became Al-Rassan. In truth, this book only qualifies as “fantasy” because of this invented skin (and because one side character has a kind of farsight skill that lets him keep track of his father across great distances).

All that to say, one could be forgiven for expecting something dry and overly political, or so abstract as to lose sight of the characters crawling through the context.

Instead, I found a story as rich and delicately woven as Andalusian silk.

There could and should be an entire novel around each of the three central figures (one from each of the sects described above). I have rarely found such depth and nuance in a single character, let alone all three. From Jehane’s alchemy of clever self-assurance and honest vulnerability, to Rodrigo’s martial prowess edged with genuine love for his family and his men, to Ammar’s unmatched political genius that shelters a poet’s soul – these were characters that lived fuller lives in the span of 504 shared pages than some protagonists achieve in sweeping series. They felt so beautifully alive.

There were heroes, certainly, but they came in many sizes and their victories ranged from grandiose to achingly small. There was no great villain; rather, the antagonist was a looming, inevitable future, wherein the forces aligned behind each member of the trio would clash and shatter their delicate harmony.

Yet for all that sense of inevitability, Mr. Kay has a wonderful talent for surprise. On at least three separate occasions, as I strolled along convinced of what lay ahead, I found my expectations blindfolded, spun about, then ushered down a side alley at knifepoint to a hidden courtyard, as surprising as it was beautiful. I can describe the experience as watching a rose bloom: what starts as a simple shape opens and expands in many-colored layers – each distinct – to finish as a work of unified art.

This felt like a book tailor-made to enthrall me, specifically. I was skeptical for the first fifteen pages (which fit my expectation of a dusty retelling of history, laden with exposition) but from the first movement of the plot, I walked through a different place in a different time. Somewhere exotic without falling into stereotype, lush without becoming gaudy. The prose was excellent, the pacing spot on, and filled with such heart as to beat in time with the reader’s.

Most of all, there was a practicality to Mr. Kay’s story that gave its luxury a sharp edge, reminding the characters and the reader that life is fleeting, and to be enjoyed even knowing that all will come to an end. The cup will empty, the music fade, but while they last the night is ours to relish.

Damn, I loved this book.

I recommend The Lions of Al-Rassan to everyone, on the single condition they have the patience to appreciate the journey.