How does a fantasy book reviewer critique a work that he unabashedly loves? Do I try to make up bad things about Josiah Bancroft’s newest Book of Babel? Do I scour it for the tiniest typo and the smallest grammatical error simply so I don’t come off as an advertisement for Orbit Books?

I mean, I guess it took me five days to read through The Hod King. I finished the final book in the Harry Potter series in a night (a feat I regret to this day because some things deserve to be savoured), so I clearly didn’t love this installment enough to glue it to my eyelids and never look away. Then again, see my statement in the parenthetical and maybe not finishing it so fast means I liked it even more.

What seems clear to this reviewer is that, with every book he writes, Josiah Bancroft proves he is more than just the winner of a self-publishing contest and better than a one-hit wonder. The Arm of the Sphinx was as good, if not better, than Senlin Ascends, and I think that The Hod King is maybe the best yet. How common is this in series fiction? Not very, in my experience. Sequels tend to be worse than their predecessors, even if later books in the same run can reverse the trend. But Bancroft keeps getting better, and if his fourth and final Babel book continues this upward trajectory, he has every right to be carved on to the Mount Rushmore of fantasy authorship.

But enough gushing - what is The Hod King about? Beware of spoilers now because I intended to talk of The Arm of the Sphinx in detail. At the end of the second novel, Senlin and his crew had met the legendary Sphinx, a figure deified in Babel lore and who wields more obvious power than any living thing in the Tower. Through some coercion and bargaining, the Sphinx gathered Senlin, Iren, and Voletta into his net, a web in which Edith had long ago been ensnared. The Hod King sees our heroes undertaking their first overt missions for the Sphinx, and Senlin’s just happens to take him to the very Pelphia where his long-lost wife Marya now resides. It also separates him from his crew, a crew which Edith now captains, and so for the first time since his initial foray into the Tower, Thomas is alone.

I admired the hell out of Bancroft’s bravery in changing viewpoints in The Arm of the Sphinx, and I continue to be impressed with his ability to do so in The Hod King. Senlin Ascends rarely, if ever, took us out of Senlin’s head, a viewpoint that I would wager is quite comfortable for Josiah Bancroft. Both subsequent novels see Bancroft diving into the heads of Edith, Iren, and Voletta, and they are such wildly different characters, and so far removed from Senlin, that watching him stretch his skills like this is like watching a monarch emerge from its chrysalis - you know it will be beautiful but it’s wondrous to watch. Bancroft nails these viewpoints, and lets us into the minds of characters who we could only wonder at in the first novel. We could never have known of Iren’s insecurities or Voletta’s flightiness in Senlin Ascends. We might never have known the depth of Edith’s feelings, nor of her desire to fly had her author not decided to step out of his comfort zone. It works, and it is part of the reason why The Hod King is so successful. This is no longer a story about a man traversing a tower. It’s become almost familial in its intimacy, and I find myself increasingly loving these characters in a way I seldom have for fictional beings. It’s become so bad that I have cajolingly threatened the author on Twitter should he George R.R. Martin any of them.

Aside from character, both the plot and setting of The Hod King continue to captivate and embrace the reader. Bancroft takes a Pulp Fiction approach to his story, with each section using the same basic time-frame to tell a different perspective of the same overall narrative. This is a technique that could end in utter failure, but Bancroft shows mastery over the style. By the last quarter of the book, my urgency to see the whole plot of The Hod King was so focused that I lost sleep about it, and I am continually amazed at the new vistas that this Tower has to offer. That one building can encompass more lore and mystery than many fully-fleshed fantasy worlds is an impressive feat. It helps that it’s likely one of the biggest structures ever imagined in literature.

There is not much more to say about The Hod King that will tempt anyone to read it or not read it. Let’s face it, if you read through the first two novels in this series, you will likely want to read through this one as well. I truly do believe that it is the best of the three, and I said in my review of Senlin Ascends that I thought maybe Bancroft had written one of the best fantasy novels of the last decade. I can’t really praise these books any more than that, even if I will continue to do so. I don’t know the name of the last book in the Babel series yet, but this is the first time in a long while that I will be eagerly scanning new release schedules and wishing I could get my hands on something that does not even exist yet. That’s a good feeling to have.

“Naomi, Naomi — I don’t know how many times the name was repeated between us. It was the appetizer that accompanied our sake. We relished its smooth sound, licked it with our saliva, and raised it to our lips, as though it were a delicacy even tastier than beef.”

It is almost impossible in modern times to talk about Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi without mentioning Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita; even if Naomi was written half a century before Lolita. The above quote could easily be a passage in Nabokov’s masterpiece, with the names transposed and bourbon or gin taking the place of sake. The novels both center around an older man’s obsession with a young girl. Each novel somehow manages to create complex, sympathetic narrators that we pity, loathe, and perhaps, ultimately, understand. When I read Lolita, some ten years ago, I assumed that I would never again see its equal, both in terms of quality and content. How many novels can we accept about pseudo-pedophiles in our literary canon, after all? I guess for me the answer is at least two. Naomi rises to the level of Lolita in every conceivable way. Or perhaps its more accurate to say that Lolita rises to the level of its predecessor.

Naomi’s central character is a man named Joji Kawai. As with so many Japanese novels written by men, Naomi’s protagonist is nondescript and outwardly boring. He exists within Japanese society as a pre-cursor to the now-common salary-man, and he does so without attracting any attention or distinguishing himself in any way. The only thing that makes Joji unique among his peers is his distaste for traditional marriage. In 1920s Japan, arranged marriages were common, and the ceremony was more of a rite of passage or an expected tradition than it was an expression of love between two people. Joji refuses the norm, which sets the stage for the entire novel’s nontraditional viewpoints because much like Joji, Japan at this time was going through a heavy transitional period influenced largely by the intrusion of Western culture.

Joji finds Naomi working in a teahouse as a hostess – a hostess in this case being a lower class version of a geisha. Naomi is an unusual Japanese woman in that she has Western features – larger eyes and a lighter skin tone than most. Though she is only 15 when he meets her, Joji is almost immediately smitten with Naomi and devises a plan to raise her as his own child with the hopes of one day making her his wife.

This is the point in the story, within the first few pages, where many readers will stop, look around, and wonder what they hell it is they are reading. This is disgusting behavior in almost any society, and we are left feeling soiled by even reading it. Tanizaki does not shy away from revulsion and takes us on a journey through Naomi’s upbringing and into her adulthood in a violent progression of dramatic scenes and storm-like outbursts. As a reader, I was at various times repelled by Joji, felt a deep sorrow for him, was ashamed at his behavior, and ultimately astonished at the outcome of his relationship with this child-turned-woman. I can not remember feeling so many conflicting emotions within the pages of one novel, except perhaps when I read, you guessed it, Lolita.

It would be easy to see Naomi as an allegory for Japan’s transition into a more Westernized culture. There are numerous parallels, and Naomi’s obvious Western appearance is as blunt a metaphor as you’re likely to find. But to me, this novel is more about obsession and empowerment than it is about Japan’s desertion of its own culture. Maybe Tanizaki began with the intent of creating a microcosm of Japan’s macrocosm, but what he ended up with was an alarming look into human psychology. And it is that peek into the warped human mind that makes Naomi so incredibly good.

It would also be simple to view Naomi as a misogynistic tale about a pervert and his trophy wife, but that would be too shallow of an interpretation. Naomi, as a child, begins this story with very little power. She is a slave, essentially, and though the life Joji shows her is one far above what she knows – she grows up in a brothel – her choices are extremely limited and in order to gain the things she wants in the world, she is forced to do and act as Joji wants. Over the course of 200 pages, Tanazaki completely flips this power structure. Naomi takes over the role of villain, seizes every shred of power from every other character in the novel, and becomes the focus of every scene. Her ability to take what she wants from the world borders on sociopathic, but there is no doubt that she is empowered by the end of Naomi in a way that few women of her time would have been. Even today’s Japan might raise eyebrows at her ability to rule in her own queendom.

I have a hard time imagining this novel during its release almost a hundred years ago. How was it received? Was it banned and burned? It is progressive by even today’s standards, both in its empowerment of a female character and in its sheer creepiness. It is also a classic example of the ability of even the most sordid storytelling to affect and teach us something about the human condition. Humans can be depraved and loving and manipulative and pitiable. Naomi puts this all on display, and we are not allowed to ignore it.

Book reviews are largely an attempt by one person to tell lots of other people whether or not they should spend time and money on an endeavor. I say this to illustrate the warning that my review of Senlin Ascends will be full of praise and will attempt to persuade you to buy this book and savor it like you would a glass of barrel-aged scotch - a delicate flavor that must be experienced for oneself. Josiah Bancroft, in this reviewer’s opinion, has written the best fantasy novel published in the last ten years.

Thomas Senlin is the school headmaster of a fishing village called Isaugh in the speculative land of Ur. Having recently wed his fiancee, Marya, he has decided to take his new wife on a honeymoon to the world’s largest and most spectacular destination: The Tower of Babel. In our own earthly mythologies, the Tower of Babel is a structure from antiquity built to reach the heavens, and thus God. In rage at the audacity of humans, God takes away humanity’s collective ability to understand one another, thus giving us the mythical explanation for why there are so many languages in the world. The Tower of Babel in Bancroft’s imagination might carry such metaphysical weight, but it is no myth to Thomas Senlin. It is a very solid, unimaginably huge structure that dominates the land- and mindscape of the world’s people.

The concept of the Tower is simple and brilliant. The Tower is a magnet that draws all of humanity towards it, but it also serves as a world completely different from the one Thomas, and other tourists, know. This is made evident within the first chapter, as Thomas and Marya struggle through the mass of humanity surrounding the monolith and very quickly lose one another. Language is not the barrier that separates them because everyone speaks a common tongue. Thomas soon discovers that the machinations and politics of the Tower, a place he had studied exhaustively in his nifty and misleading guidebook, are the true wall between them.

The theme of Senlin Ascends is one of searching for something (or someone) who is lost, which Thomas must do by entering the Tower and climbing it, as people tend to do in towers, floor by floor. The levels in The Tower of Babel are so large that they are dubbed ‘ringdoms,’ each having their own ruling structure and social mire to struggle through. Along the way, Thomas meets friends and foes, titles that become interchangeable on a whim, as well as a host of marvelous and pseudo-magical delights and horrors. As he searches for Marya, he finds in himself things he would never have dreamed of back in his schoolhouse in Isaugh. “It is easier to accept who you’ve become than to recollect who you were,” a loquacious man named Tarrou tells him at one point.

In the hands of an amateur, the story of Senlin Ascends would be well worth a read because it pulls us along floor by floor through sheer curiosity. Senlin even says at one point that “the easiest way to make the world mysterious and terrifying to a man is to chase him through it.” Any setting can make for good plot, but Josiah Bancroft has a talent for prose to the point that every sentence in this novel feels meaningful. Go ahead, open a page and read a sentence and tell me that it isn’t both beautiful but also important. I’ll wait.

When I mentioned that Senlin Ascends needs to be savored, in no way was I condoning an all-night binge - this book is not chips and pizza. This book is a 200 dollar main course at a restaurant that I can’t afford and am only speculating about. Thanks to generous souls like Josiah Bancroft, I can at least consume the literary equivalent of such a meal.

Thomas’ ascension of the Tower brings him in contact with any number of rogues and villains, and a scarce but meaningful troupe of good guys - though like any “good” character, these adventurers are full of their own pathologies and skeleton-filled closets. “We shouldn’t have to go around congratulating each other for behaving with basic human dignity,” Thomas says to another character at one point, encapsulating in one sentence what the Tower does to the soul. Whether it’s the over-protective brother in the form of Adam, or Edith, a young woman making deals with devils in order to grasp the power that she is denied in her pre-Tower life, everyone is a globe of well-roundedness with only one or two mustache-twirling villains to provide character contrast. By the end of the book, Thomas himself is unrecognizable from the man who entered the Tower, transforming from a stuffy professor-type to a man who just might like a good adventure.

Obviously, this book is not perfect. No book is, and the flaws in Senlin Ascends are not without their own weight. They could be enough to pull a lesser author down, but Bancroft rolls with his mistakes enough to make us look the other way while he performs his literary magic. There is no doubt that the plot at times seems to fold together too neatly, and that Senlin continually meets and re-meets characters that, in an environment so large, should not keep running into one another. Thomas Senlin also has an extraordinary ability to plan things that seem to go in his favor, despite having no experience in espionage or deceit before entering the Tower. This can be explained by the very nature of Babel, that it changes a person, but he is often a little too proficient to believe.

In all, my complaints are as overshadowed by the book’s excellence as Thomas standing before the Tower. This book is simply too good to get caught up in nitty-gritty details. Josiah Bancroft has proven that self-publishing is as legitimate of a route as climbing the spire of the traditional publishing world, and his success story is a beautiful reminder that if we have the right idea and we believe in that idea, that we can traverse any obstacle, no matter the height. The Arm of the Sphinx, the second installment in The Books of Babel, is available for purchase as of this review with The Hod King hopefully coming later this year. Welcome Josiah Bancroft to the fantasy world, dear readers, because he is one to watch.

To see life through eyes so different from my own, yet not. Beautiful.

Kings of Paradise begins unlike any book I have ever read. I young boy sits before a fire, roasting parts of a human child over a fire so that he might cannibalize the dead remains. This circumstantial cannibal is Ruka, and he is one of the most complicated and intriguing characters I have ever read – in fantasy or otherwise. His cannibalism is inconsequential to the depth that Richard Nell instills into this character, which is saying something because the act of eating another human being is one full of consequence and meaning. In some ways, I question Nell’s use of this act as an opener for a story because I think it might put some readers off, and that would be a massive shame because Kings of Paradise is one of the best fantasy novels I have ever read. I can be fairly critical in my reading of any book, but this one is almost perfect.

In direct contrast to Ruka is one of the novel’s other main characters, Kale. Kale is the fourth son of a king, privileged where Ruka lives destitute in the wild, barely surviving. Kale’s home is a tropical paradise, while Ruka struggles in the cold environs of a Norwegian-like land. Despite their differences, Ruka and Kale share many similar traits. They are both tenacious when set to something. Ruka’s goal is simple, revenge, though the path he takes to achieve that goal is anything but. Kale’s goal is to prove himself worthy to an unloving father and to make something of himself despite the privilege that goes along with being a king’s son. And at every turn, they are each beset by other people and events that seek to stop their progress.

And then there’s Dala. Richard Nell gave an interview to Fantasy Book Critic where he talked about Dala’s story, and how it basically took him by surprise and forced him to write about her. That is obvious in the bones of Kings of Paradise, which conceptually seems to be about two people who will eventually clash in some sort of titanic way, and in fact the novel does bring Ruka and Kale closer and closer as it progresses. Dala’s story takes place in the same land as Ruka’s, and they have several points of convergence despite their differing plots. In some ways Dala is the female equivalent of Ruka – she grows up in harsh environs, is abandoned by her parents and forced to make her own way in the world. Unlike Ruka, Dala has no need for revenge, but they each seek to change the world to their version of paradise. For Dala, she sees the suffering of her people and the hypocrisy of an unjust church as problems to be solved. Ruka has similar goals, only his solutions are violent where Dala seeks to earn her way to the top of society so that she may change it from above. How she will figure into the larger story of Ruka and Kale’s eventual clash is something I am eager to learn.

Nell’s writing, and his larger story, is proof that it is not world-building or plot that make for the best reading, but characters. In much the same way that Robin Hobb develops her heroes and villains, so too does Nell invest in his characters and forces his readers to love or hate them – or at least be invested in them. Nell’s world is not unfamiliar. Its shores mirror our own, its people often amalgamations of races on our own globe. The geography is well told, with scenes taking place in the frigid southern half of the world feeling cold, and those in the more tropic areas feeling humid and alight. There is a mythology built into Nell’s writing that contributes even more to the world-building. In Dala and Ruka’s land, the gods are worshiped and feared, and there is a clash of ideologies between older deities and their predecessors. In contrast, the gods of Kale’s people are feared and appeased – there is no worship other than whatever it takes to keep them from destroying the island on which they rest. These details are so often overlooked in fantasy, the idea that the very environs in which a people live can dictate how they worship the deities that have evolved over the course of their history. Ruka’s people seek to survive, struggling against a land that wishes to freeze them, and so their faiths reflect this. Kale’s people struggle, but not in the same way for their only true fear is a raging sea that might occasionally destroy their civilization.

Another theme that runs throughout Kings of Paradise is the notion of parenthood, with an emphasis on the role of a father. This obviously spoke to me as a newer father myself, but there are larger concepts at work here. Each character has an abandonment of sorts. Ruka’s father is largely unknown – he casts a shadow that Ruka never really feels connected with and it is Ruka’s mother, a remarkable woman by any standard, who becomes his mentor and raison d’être. Kale’s father is cold and uncaring, and even threatens lasting physical violence upon Kale at one point in the story simply for political gain. Dala’s father abandons her in the woods where she must band together with other orphaned children until she can eventually find her own power and seek out a new life. I love Nell’s explorations of what it means to be abandoned as a child and how it might shape any man or woman, despite what conditions they could be struggling under.

A theme that I’d like to touch on as well is that of power. Each character, at some point in Kings of Paradise, discovers that they have some kind of near supernatural ability. For Ruka, it is his ability to compartmentalize his life. Early on, he creates an entire world within his head, a place where he can meditate into and create things. It is reminiscent of the “mind palace” of Sherlock fame, and Nell writes about this retreat in such a way that it feels like Ruka is physically entering a different location. In this mind retreat, Ruka is able to teach himself things, whether its learning to fight or learning to forge. He meditates instead of sleeping, and his focus is so great that he can teach himself almost anything. It is unbelievable, but written so well that its amazing and a little frightening. Dala has a similar mental capacity, though hers is more recognizable. She combines a sharp intellect and an unwavering faith with an inborn ability to manipulate others into doing exactly as she wishes – and strangely does so without it feeling evil or damning. Kale’s power takes on a more traditional-style of supernatural ability that I won’t get into because it verges into some real spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that his own mental capabilities allow him to tap into some things that no one on Nell’s world seem to know anything about. In some ways, Kings of Paradise is this triple-origin story, with these characters slowly becoming super-humans that all veer towards one another in what I can only imagine will be the kind of clash we reserve for big-name fantasy/sci-fi action films. Then again, Nell has such a deft hand that it might be more subtle than that. I am eager to get into Kings of Ash so I can find out.

It is shocking to me, in a way that makes me kind of emotional, that Kings of Paradise was in the SPFBO of 2018, a contest where I was judge, but did not even make it into the last round. Had Nell’s book been in my batch, there is no question he would have made it to the finals, and I would have worked real hard to see him win the entire thing. Perhaps it doesn’t matter in the long run because I believe people will be discovering Nell’s work and that he will get the recognition that he deserves. When I put Kings of Paradise down, I was a little overcome. I had a similar feeling the first time that I read The Fellowship of the Ring, or Assassin’s Apprentice. I knew I had something special now that I would return to again and again throughout my life – a richness to be experienced on repeat for as long as needed. I hope people read this book, and its sequels. Buy it, find it on Kindle Unlimited, get it through inter-library loan at your local library. Just please read Kings of Paradise. Novels like this do not come along every day.

What would I even say?