All of us here at the Pink Palace adore the Murderbot series by Martha Wells, so I was very excited about her new fantasy standalone, Witch King. The biggest thing you need to know about Witch King is that it is very different from Murderbot. If you are hoping for a fantasy version of Murderbot you will be disappointed. The tone is different, the humor, when it exists, is dryer, the scope is different, and the violence is dialed waaayyy up. However, on its own merits, Witch King is a complex, interesting fantasy novel that keeps two timelines moving and introduces a group of allies who gel into a found family.

Here’s the publisher’s plot summary:

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well.

But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?

Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions.

He’s not going to like the answers.

The book begins with Kai, the Witch King, awakening in a watery prison. He has to escape, find his friends, and figure out how he ended up there. The story alternates chapters set in the past and chapters set in the present. The reader is dropped into the middle of events, and information about the history and context is spread out throughout the book.

Readers, I am not the sharpest tack on the bulletin board these days. Even though the book is dense with detailed and beautiful world-building, I would have sold my soul for a prologue that politely spelled out the entire history of the world in a linear fashion. I suspect that sharper minds than I, especially people who read a lot of epic fantasy, will have an easier time piercing all of this together. Once I read it I went back and did some skimming and a lot of things came together for me. So just know that the book is detail rich and nonlinear.

As it was, I was able to figure out who we are fighting and who we aren’t in any given scene, and that was enough to get me through the book, which is basically one long action scene with periodic pauses in which the characters read maps and argue about politics before being flung headlong into another action scene. There’s so much drama that even the quiet scenes feel like action scenes. My favorite moment in the book involved someone finally falling asleep and everyone whispering so as not to wake him up.

It’s also worthy of note that even though I didn’t grasp the big picture here, I still wrote “who WE are fighting” not “who the characters are fighting.” It’s one of those Freudian slips that indicates how quickly I became attached to the main character, Kai, the Witch King, a person who, when referred to as a demon, grumbles, “You idiot. I’m THE demon.” It’s not that the characters are deeply developed – we barely know some of them. But they are such vivid characters, so very firmly alive, that you can see them walking around and hear their voices. I especially loved furious and sardonic Ziede who is desperately searching for her wife, and the human Bashasa whose leadership skills are so fabulous that I developed a huge crush on him, as does Kai.

The dialogue is sharp and the action scenes are gripping and gory. This is the kind of book in which a head gets carried around in a bag for a while. A fun aspect of the story is that Kai is a demon, and they are able to inhabit human bodies. Since they can inhabit bodies of any gender, gender is not a big deal for them. Kai is always described as “he” but is not always in a male body. In flashbacks Kai inhabits the body of a mortal girl. For most of the book he is in a male body. He’s always very matter-of-fact about these changes. In the male body, he doesn’t so much as pause over the change in gender, but he is very annoyed at needing more food and more sleep (the new body is older than his last one was).

I got lost in both good and bad ways when reading the book. I was lost in a bad way in that I never fully grasped what was going on, and I would love a Wikipedia-style blog just for information about the world. However, as I mentioned earlier, when I did some re-reading, things made more sense.

And I was lost in a good way in that I was ALL IN with regard to wanting Kai and his chaotic found family to come out ahead even when I was somewhat unclear on what we were fighting (imperialism and colonialism, basically). Fans of epic fantasy will be right at home here, and newcomers to fantasy will find their way with some patience. Just be sure to read the book on its own merits. Kai may not be Murderbot but he is, in his own way, delightful.