Witch King
by Martha Wells
May 30, 2023

I’ve been having trouble focusing on books recently, but this wonderful book managed to break through that malaise. Possibly in part because at the beginning it fit right in with The Untamed fanfic that I’ve been reading.

In many ways it felt like Wells might have seen that show and/or read that book and decided to write her own take on it: The titular Witch King is awoken from the dead, has a new body, and has to figure out what happened and why. The story also alternates between current events and prior events when he was an adolescent fighting what seemed like an impossible battle against powerful villains, with uneasy allies.

It is very much Wells’ own story, though, with fascinating, complex characters and even more fascinating, complex societal world-building, and turning so many stereotypes just ninety degrees, so that they’re not inverted so much as just going off in unexpected new directions. I love this author’s writing so much, but her Murderbot series has been so fabulous recently that I just hadn’t thought about how much I love her fantasy books as well. Wells’ fantasy worlds are all multicultural, in a wonderful way, such that it’s not the plot, but it’s important background the characters and how they interact with each other and the plot.

This book has a lot of action and adventure and fights and rescues and escapes in both the current events and the past events plot lines, but it also has a remarkably calm and focused perspective that reminds me a bit of The Empress of Salt and Fortune. The past plot line is many decades in the past and time has had a chance to heal some of those wounds, or at least scar them over. And in the present plot line, Kai (the Witch King) is an experienced adult with those scars giving him perspective and distance even from the current events.

Wells also does an amazing job of running both plot lines in parallel such that they interact with and give important context to each other. Although it did take several chapters for me to get over being dismayed each time it switched because I’d gotten so invested in one plot line that I couldn’t remember how invested I was in the other until I was back in and dismayed to swap back.

The whole book was fascinating and fun and kept me focused to the point where even as I set it down nearly as often as I had any other book I’ve tried to read recently, I consistently picked it up again, and read it over the course of four days. I highly recommend it.