Catch up here:

• Introduction

• The Cuckoo’s Calling

• The Silkworm

• Career of Evil

On Waiting

After the bombastic ending of Career of Evil, readers had to wait three years to find out what happened after Strike got to Robin’s wedding.

Three years!

After a yearly pace of books and at such a dramatic and emotional cliffhanger, this likely felt endless. For me, I just reached over and grabbed the next book waiting for me at the library.

But before we get on with it, I’d like to mention something that I don’t think I got around to when I was reviewing Harry Potter.

JK Rowling impresses me as a writer. And I mean this in a very specific way. I’m not the biggest fan of her writing, but I want you to consider a few data points from other big time authors.

By the time Lethal White was published, it had been seven years since George RR Martin’s A Dance with Dragons was published. We were just a few months from the premier of the final season of Game of Thrones. Eight years later, we still have no idea when or if The Winds of Winter is coming.

There are many theories as to why there’s been such a long wait, but I do think the weight of expectation is part of it. A Song of Ice & Fire was very successful before the TV show, but it became one of the most popular book series in history due to the success of the TV show. Along with this, people generally consider the third book to be the best one and many people think the way the TV show condensed the 4th and 5th books was an improvement.

That’s gotta sting!

And so there’s this monumental expectation for the rest of the series and also this belief that the series is getting worse. So ol George likely felt the pressure to not just complete the book and get it out but return to the quality of book three. No easy feat, that. I think A Storm of Swords is probably one of the best fantasy books you’re likely to encounter.

Most of you may not know Scott Lynch but he was a promising author in 2006, when his debut The Lies of Locke Lamora became a critical and commercial success. He, along with Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, and Patrick Rothfuss, seemed like the new face of the fantasy genre, but only he and Rothfuss also became critical darlings.

Since 2006, he’s published two more books in his series, which is meant to be seven books. He’s been quite open about how his mental health struggled in dealing with the success and expectations that came with this. And you must understand, he’s had a fraction of the success Martin has had. Though, at the same time, Martin had had a long and illustrious career in publishing and Hollywood before he ever wrote a word of A Game of Thrones.

Scott Lynch was just some fireman in his twenties.

And then there’s Patrick Rothfuss. Due to some sort of derangement caused by the no good very bad year that was 2025, I read his unfinished trilogy from front to back four times in 2025. Like Lynch, Rothfuss was just some random guy when success fell upon him.

However, unlike Lynch, his debut novel became a critically acclaimed and international bestseller. He scored blurbs from Ursula K Le Guin and George RR Martin himself! For people who were into fantasy in 2007, he was the cherubic bearded face of the future of the genre. And despite telling anyone who asked that his trilogy was wholly complete and that each book would come out with just a year in between, it took four years for his second book to come out in 2011. While enormously successful, it was much less loved by the critics and fans, though George RR Martin once again gave it a very positive review, saying that he gulped it down, that he was up until dawn reading.

It’s now been fifteen years since that second novel came out and there’s no indication that the third book will ever come.

He, too, has been very open about how his mental health struggled to cope with the success, with the enormous weight of expectation.

Now, to put this all into context, if you combined all the sales of every book by these three authors, they would not even equal the sales number for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

A Song of Ice and Fire is one of the most successful series of all time, yet it’s 100 million sales are a molehill compared to the 600 million copies of Harry Potter sold.

Consider the weight of expectation on each new Harry Potter book. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was and remains the fastest selling book of all time, selling over 10 million copies in its first day. The degree to which people were impatiently waiting for these novels—and not just children, but, famously, adults too—cannot be overstated. And yet she published seven novels over the course of ten years.

Now, sales numbers aren’t measures of quality, but I think it’s inarguable that JK Rowling never failed her fans. You cannot imagine a more satisfied fandom than the Harry Potter fans. Each book is considered better than the last, and I’d probably agree with that, more or less. And the longest wait fans had was about three years.

Between the publication of her first novel and Lethal White, 21 years had passed and she’d published 12 full length novels, along with some screenplays and various kinds of Harry Potter related material. But if we just stick to the novels, she had a book come out every 1.75 years.

A pretty good pace! She’s no Brandon Sanderson, publishing 71 books over the course of about 20 years, but most people don’t have that kind of productivity.

When you consider the expectation, the book bannings she’s received, the backlashes from religious and rightwing groups, and now the torrent of criticisms and boycotts from former fans, from activists, from celebrities, from writers and publishers, you might think that she would not have the mental capacity or the determination and mental toughness to keep going, to keep writing, to keep publishing.

After all, people with far less success and far fewer lights shining on them absolutely crumbled and fell apart.

This does impress me. I don’t imagine many people with the success, with the expectations, with the criticisms and backlashes would be able to keep going.

After all, she doesn’t need to!

She could rest comfortably in her literal castle counting her money.

Many wish she had done just that after finishing the Harry Potter series.

The Ache

Three Years, three minutes. Time traveling dissonantly between us and these characters.

While audiences waited three years to find out what happens next with Robin and Strike, the novel begins within minutes of the end of Career of Evil.

For three years, we have known how Matthew betrayed Robin’s privacy and trust by deleting the voicemail from Strike, the call history from Strike, and blocking his number. For three years we’ve known that Strike raced to be at that wedding, maybe even attempting to stop it, to shut it down, to whisk her away, but he was too late.

More than that, we know that Strike has caught the Shacklewell Ripper but Robin does not. Nor does she know that he nearly died in catching him.

But for Strike and Robin it’s only been a few minutes. Maybe an hour. The wedding is over and the reception is under way. Strike only wants to see Robin but knows that this is easier said than done considering it’s her wedding. He’s not interested in talking to the rest of these people. So he’s kinda sorta hiding out, trying not to be conspicuous or make another scene like the one he inadvertently caused when he broke the vase during the ceremony.

But finally he’s able to speak with Robin and he tells her that he wants her back. As a partner. A fully salaried partner in the agency. Not a secretary. Not a contract employee. Not just another detective.

A partner.

And for a moment, standing there, the two of them feel it. I mean, they feel IT, if you get me. This is the whole series, by the way. This is why we’re here now in this fourth book.

This is a will-they-won’t-they, yes, but it feels more than that to me. Perhaps because I’ve never read a book series with this structure. I’m more familiar with this in a sitcom.

And I remember Jim and Pam like I was there, like it happened to me, like I was living this same life. And perhaps that’s because we’ve all be there, in some way. We’ve felt the echo of it thrumming through our bones at 3am when we’re sixteen, smoking cigarettes on rooftops, staring at the moon, thinking only, always, endlessly about her.

About love. About all that you want. All that you need.

You think about your brokenness. The sorrow within you. The gaping hole carved into your heart that only love can fill.

And so when Jim almost tells Pam how he feels on Christmas and a dozen other times, when he finally kisses her only to know that’s the end, that there’s no going back, that she’s not coming with you—

We have all known such hurts, such aches.

I feel them still. I don’t even need to close my eyes. Can conjure it wide eyed like it was yesterday, like it was this very moment. I’m there again, your hand in mine, your breath in my own mouth, the smell of the bonfire and cigarette smoke and cheap vodka. Seventeen forever, or so it seemed. The longing ache so powerful that it was sometimes hard for me to breathe and I staggered through life in a daze.

Reading Strike and Robin’s relationship reminds me of being young, of all the words I never said, of all the things I could have done that may have changed my life, may have made love blossom between us.

Which us?

There were so many of you. I fell in love so often, so rapidly, so deliriously because I was hopeless.

And who is more hopeless than Strike? A man as an island who discovers, step by step, that his island is a horrifyingly lonely place, that it has become a prison. Every word he never said, every time he refused to reach out, to touch her hand, to hold it tight—

Do you feel it?

Do you remember?

Do you remember your head in her lap, her fingers in your hair? Do you remember the stink of smoke, the cheap Abercrombie perfumes, the American Eagle jeans, the Urban Outfitter coats, the CD players and the flip phones, the scent of love, the taste of desire, the hint of it in the air, permeating from our pores, congealing over every inch of skin?

Do you remember her?

Do you remember that moment when you choked on your words instead of let them breathe into the air? Do you remember the time you finally spoke those words, those awful, dangerous, devastating words and watched as they shattered on the shore, unwanted, unlooked for, and now you sit there in your car at a park at 5am trying not to cry, trying to act like you didn’t break this relationship to pieces because you fell in love when she didn’t, and so you smile, unable to speak, and you drive her home, hug her goodbye, and then cry the whole way home, sneaking into your house, into your bed, only to hear your mother wake up twenty minutes later.

In another twenty minutes, your alarm will go off and you’ll have to go to school and you hope that she’s not there because you cannot bear it.

Do you remember?

Strike and Robin on those steps, all those unsaid words, but especially the few brief ones that both of you need.

Come with me.

Take my hand.

Don’t wake me. I’m not dreaming.

Why we’re here

Lethal White is the longest book yet in the series. Each book is slowly growing longer. From the brisk 400ish pages of The Cuckoo’s Calling to Career of Evil’s sprawling 500ish pages, we’re now tiptoeing towards 700. Perhaps that’s what two extra years gets you.

And though this is the longest yet in the series, it’s actually the one that I remember the least and I think this is because of the case at the heart of this novel. It’s the most convoluted and, to be perfectly honest, least interesting one to me. And perhaps this is the trouble with hooking us so hard with the Robin/Strike almost-romance.

I just…I was not here for the complicated yet intricate plotting happening here.

For one thing, Rowling dips her toes into contemporary radical politics, and this really isn’t her strength. It never has been. Rowling is, I think, weakest when she’s commenting or critiquing politics directly. We saw this in The Chamber of Secrets when she starts digging into elf slavery but also genetic purity. It’s…well, I wrote a sequence of essays about this already so I needn’t linger on it here, but it’s all quite clumsy and messy and not so well thought out.

And I feel that here too. The case involves politicians but also a populist, working class movement against the 2012 London Olympic Games (the novel is set in the lead up to the Olympics), but also a bunch of other stuff.

One problem I have trying to talk about these books is how stuffed full of plot they are. It makes for an addictive read but it makes even a broad summary difficult because there are so many threads, so many red herrings, and an expanding cast of people relevant to the case but less relevant to the larger series.

And so I’m really not going to get into the case this time. Not that that’s something I’ve spent much time describing in any of these reviews anyway, but I’m really just going to sidestep the whole affair.

I will say that Rowling is still playing with form and structure. Not as much as in Career of Evil, but here the case at the center of this novel that the novel is really about doesn’t even happen until the middle of the book. Now, Strike and Robin have already been investigating for a while, but it’s not until Chiswell’s death that the ins and outs of what all these rich people are doing actually comes together.

Along with that, I think, more than any of the other books, this case is used as a plot complication. Like, much of the interpersonal problems between various people could have been solved had they not had to deal with all this shit. But instead, interpersonal fallout happens and the case escalates in such a way and at such a pace that the two interfere with one another. Or rather, Strike and Robin cannot speak the way they need to because the case is keeping them apart, keeping them busy, because Matthew is ruining Robin’s life, because Charlotte is here again.

Perhaps the most important detail to know about the case this time is that Robin gets to wear a bunch of disguises. This is played straight but it is very funny. It’s not something I consciously recognized while reading this novel, but looking back at it is making me giggle. It is a genuinely funny bit. A visual gag that really plays into the detective trope. Especially since her disguises are usually just a wig! Maybe some false contacts to change her eye color.

Would you recognize someone if you saw them with a different haircut? What if they dyed their hair?

It really is funny.

Of course, the disguise isn’t actually meant to fool someone who knows Robin or even who has met her. It’s meant to create a bit of distance between Robin and the character she’s playing. Because it is possible that they’ve heard of Robin or even seen a picture of her, since she’s the partner at an increasingly famous detective agency. But if you’ve only seen a thumbnail image of her online or maybe a small picture in the paper, you probably wouldn’t be able to recognize her in real life, especially if she’s wearing a bit of a disguise.

But this novel has a whole bunch of stuff about British politicians in it and is ultimately about class, and though Rowling seems extremely dismissive of working class leftists, I’d say her sympathies are generally with the working class and positioned against the moneyed classes that own and run the government, that defraud the public ceaselessly.

Eventually, Strike figures it out with a healthy dose of Robin’s help and Robin is nearly murdered by murderer.

A Ballad of Robin and Cormoran

With that out of the way, let us now talk about the real novel.

After that moment shared at the wedding, we jump forward an entire year. The agency is stable, on solid footing, and we honestly never hear much about the finances of the agency again. But success has led to steady work and even the hiring on of other freelance detectives.

Robin and Matthew are married but the strain in their relationship before the marriage persists. Robin knows that Matthew invaded her privacy, deleted Strike’s voicemail and call, blocked his number. Quite the betrayal!

During their honeymoon, Robin waited for Strike to call, to reach out, to make that moment shared mean what she believed it meant.

She needed him to say it. To reach his hand out and take hers.

But he didn’t. Doesn’t.

Determined to leave Matthew, she finally calls Strike from her honeymoon in the Maldives but there’s already another woman, or so she believes. This forces her to examine her feelings.

Does she truly love Strike or does she simply admire him? Has her respect for him, her desire for his approval, become confused within her? Is this love or something else?

Regardless, she decides to leave Matthew and so a plot complication must arise: Matthew comes down with a life threatening infection.

She can’t leave him while he’s dying on their honeymoon, so she toughs it out until they’re back in London. Once there, Strike seems distant and she fears she invented the entire thing. His attraction, that moment at the wedding.

Did I dream this?

Does he remember the way I remember? Who does he see when he looks at me? How does he see me?

And so she decides to try to save her marriage with Matthew, which has predictable results. A year later, they’re formal and distant with one another. She cannot forget his betrayal, nor can she forget her feelings for Strike or the desire she had on their honeymoon to leave him entirely.

She’s been going to therapy to deal with her PTSD and while she knows this is something that will always be with her—the rape, the almost-murder—she feels that she has gotten as much as she can out of therapy.

This is an interesting decision, since it’s really out of fashion. There’s a sense, now and in 2018 when this was published, that everyone should be in therapy and that therapy is essentially a lifelong commitment. We all have something to work on and we will always have things to work on, and so you should treat your mental health like your physical health. Which is to say that going to therapy should be as a regular part of your health maintenance, no different from yearly physicals or biweekly workouts.

And this may be controversial now, but I think Robin actually makes the healthier choice. What you should learn in therapy is how to get past whatever is troubling you. Strategies to overcome. And then you have those tools the next time something rises in your life. Sure, go back if you need it, but therapy is not meant to be a lifelong commitment.

Then there’s the house party where so many tensions bubble up to the surface. Robin and Sarah, Matthew’s friend and former lover. Sarah’s fiancée, Matthew, Sarah, Robin—it’s a deliriously bad mix of people. Everything feels off about it. And then Strike shows up with his new girlfriend, Lorelei, who ran in the same circles as Charlotte Campbell, now Charlotte Ross after her recent wedding. And then there’s the rented house that Matthew wants to present as his own, since he’s a status obsessed loser.

Everything with Matthew in this novel is uncomfortable. The marriage is so obviously a disaster with barely the pretense of them getting along. We know and she knows and Strike knows that they never should have gotten married, that they shouldn’t stay together, and yet here they are, together. Their anniversary dinner is thick with discomfort. Robin allows Matthew to have sex with her out of obligation, out of a simple desire not to fight. Afterwards, she quietly cries.

This is a harrowing moment that is shockingly common. I wouldn’t say this is marital rape but living inside Robin’s head, her justification for having sex against her own wishes—the banality of it is what hits you. Not because this is mundane to Robin but because you know that there are millions of women telling themselves this exact story every year. Having sex to avoid the fight that would come from refusing sex. Having sex to avoid his moods, his anger, his disappointments.

Strike’s relationship with Lorelei is much lower stakes but no less disastrous. For their entire relationship, he has refused to engage emotionally or take that next step. Something he’s afraid to do, really, ever since leaving Charlotte. And so when she tells him that she loves him, he refuses to return the statement.

Now, how many of us have said I love you without really meaning it? It seems so trivial and mean to hold it back. And yet Cormoran cannot. He will not. Not until he means it again.

And so we already know this relationship is on borrowed time, that it can go nowhere.

Since we are in Strike’s and Robin’s POVs, it’s easy to sympathize most with them. Well, less easy to sympathize with Strike’s relationships, I think. He’s often cold and indifferent, more concerned with protecting himself than causing harm to another.

But Robin feels like a person trapped in a miserable relationship with a miserable person. I think that’s well established and well delivered, but I also think it would suck ass to have Robin as a girlfriend or wife. Like, she does prioritize her job over her relationship with Matthew. That’s shitty behavior! And, sure, her job is quite a bit different than the email jobs most of us have, so her prioritizing a missing person or catching a murderer is substantially different from someone prioritizing their job when their job is making tiktok videos or marketing emails or whatever. But still!

Especially because his justifiable concern for her safety is treated as an attack on Robin. I mean, if my wife got stabbed at work and I discovered that getting stabbed at work isn’t actually that unusual in her line of work, I’d also probably pressure her to quit! Might not be fair—I get that. But come on. I don’t want the love of my life to get stabbed to death by some psycho.

And since the job is essentially spending the majority of your day with another man who you clearly admire, I might have some feelings about that too. I wouldn’t be proud of being jealous. I might even recognize that the jealousy is unfair and unprovoked and based on nothing but my own anxieties, but there it is.

So while Matthew is certainly a terrible husband, Robin isn’t exactly a very good wife.

Robin and Strike see one another in these relationships and it eats them up. They both won’t say—can’t say—what needs to be said. Can’t do what needs to be done. And so they live miserably, dragging along long dead relationships.

And then Charlotte returns. Pregnant with twins.

She’s haunted the entire series so far. We come to understand that the reason Strike is the world’s worst boyfriend is because he’s broken by Charlotte. She tore him apart, shattered him to pieces, and now he fears love. Fears emotional intimacy, fears lowering his walls, letting down his guard.

And now she’s back on the page for the first time since the first chapter of The Cuckoo’s Calling.

You see, this case involves the uber rich of London, and Charlotte is one of those filthy rich who is now married to another filthy rich animal. She unsettles him but also tries to rekindle what they had, tells him that he is still the one, that there is only him, even as she’s pregnant with Ross’ children.

But we see the ease she has with him. We see how unsettled he becomes yet how intoxicating she is to him.

The weight of all this and his aching stump threaten to topple Strike entirely. The pain he has seeing Robin, being unable to love her, to share his love, to be her lover, and his fear for her safety. Charlotte hounding him, all the pain and guilt associated with her. Then Lorelei who clearly wants more.

But he doesn’t.

At least not with her.

For there’s Robin.

They had that moment. Did it mean so little? How could she remain with Matthew? How could he have misinterpreted their relationship so badly?

All this swirls around them, around Robin and Strike.

Robin discovers her marriage is over, not because she left Matthew but because she discovered his infidelity. He’s been fucking Sarah while she’s at work. His fears about her and Strike are more projections than simple jealousy. Because he has cheated, he assumes that she will too.

She leaves him and it is bitter and miserable and he says foul, mean things, and she says the meanest thing of all, and then she’s gone.

This is a book of things falling apart.

And perhaps that’s why the case itself felt so trivial and, honestly, confusing. This was what I wanted. Every chapter with the Chiswells felt like it was stealing time from the real story.

And this is part of Rowling’s excellent control and construction. Not to make you not care about the case, but to use it as a plot device that forces more and more tension into these already tense relationships. Robin can’t just go and deal with Matthew’s infidelity because she also needs to sort out who killed Chiswell.

It’s too much. It’s all too much for the characters and yet they must carry on anyway, do what needs to be done.

We begin this novel with a moment that feels like what we’ve been waiting for since Strike first nearly knocked Robin down those stairs on Denmark Street. Then Rowling dumps cold water on us and we see a distance in their relationship because they both misinterpret the other. Strike believes her relationship with Matthew is going better, growing closer, even believes, near the climax of the novel, that she’s pregnant, that she’s going to leave the agency, only to discover that she’s left Matthew.

There’s a childishness to Strike because only then is he able to open himself back up to Robin, to invite her back in, to rebuild this relationship.

As I said way back when, these books are interested in the ways men hurt women, the ways society constrains and controls women. And we see that even with Strike, who is one of the good ones. Even a good man weighs women down. Even the woman he loves.

He cannot be honest with her until she lets her guard down. He cannot be mature and simply take her aside and tell her.

Strike tells her that he needs her. That the agency is nothing without her. They admit to what they’ve been hiding from one another. Or, all but one thing. Perhaps the most important thing.

But they also share a dream. A dream of what the agency could be. What it will be.

It’s a stand in for a child. For a marriage. This building a life together. This planning for the future, for what their relationship will create.

There’s a sweetness to it.

And then Robin is nearly murdered again and Strike saves her.

a weak spot

Like I said way back in the introduction to this series of reviews: I blasted through these books. And while the experience of reading them all in succession was one of increasing enjoyment, of addiction, of unputdownable narrative, looking back at this one, I think it’s weaker than what came before but also weaker than what comes next. It’s still a dizzying, fast paced, intoxicating read. You’ll be addicted to it.

But it also feels the messiest. Too many threads cast in too many directions and while the case is closed and solved and Robin and Strike make up, none of this is the closure we want, nor is it what we need.

And we don’t need them to get together, but after all the tension, all the miscommunications, all the things left unsaid, I think we need a bit more than that single conversation of them making up and planning for the future.

Though it is also just damn clever.

Because the pressure is so high and everything feels so fraught, when we get that relief valve, it feels so much larger. We’re able to breathe easy for the first time, just like Robin and Strike.

Their relationship is repaired and, for a moment, they’re able to pretend that everything will be like before. Just friends. Just partners.

But we know.

We have seen the words etched on the insides of their hearts.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve written tens of thousands of words about George RR Martin and his work, but every few weeks I seem to come across posts online talking about how George RR Martin is a nihilist and ruined fantasy.

Here are all the things I’ve written about Martin and his work so far:

• Intro

• A Game of Thrones

• A Clash of Kings

• A Storm of Swords

• A Feast for Crows

• A Dance with Dragons

• Fire & Blood

And the weekly reviews of House of the Dragon:

• Episode One

• Episode Two

• Episode Three

• Episode Four

• Episode Five

• Episode Six

• Episode Seven

• Episode Eight

• Episode Nine

• Episode Ten

And then there’s this previous point I made about people misunderstanding George RR Martin.

And while I disagree with these people who make this claim, I’m going to, first, present the idea that Martin is a nihilist who wanted to destroy fantasy, and then I’m going to…well, explain why that’s silly.

But first and pedantically, a definition:

Nihilism (ni-hil-ism)

1. A viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless

2. A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths

3. A doctrine that no reality exists

4. A doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility

Nihilism in Westeros

Many of the haters of good ol George would prefer for their fantasy to remain heroic. They view Tolkien’s version of epic fantasy as the ideal in every way, but especially in the hopefilled way it views humanity and heroism.

Heroism may be in short supply, even in Middle Earth, but the trilogy is populated by men who believe in honor and duty. They’re all quite chivalric, in their own varied ways. And while I could veer off here to describe the darkness of Tolkien and how I think grimdark as reaction to Tolkien is also a misunderstanding of Tolkien, we’ll remain focused on the task at hand.

Martin’s knights and knighthood in Westeros is anything but heroic. It is much more political, to put it a certain way. Knights see their role as knights to be a platform for privilege, prestige, and a pedestal for advancement to greater and greater titles and powers.

The good and honorable knight and lord Ned Stark famously fails in such a way that it sent tidal waves through fantasy literature and eventually popular culture when it became a TV show that defined the Golden Age of TV.

Ned was, in many ways, a man out of Tolkien. He was of the First Men, his name and family stretching back into the mists of time. His ancestors built wonders of the world. They founded kingdoms. They alone never bent the knee to the Targaryens. And Ned himself is an honorable man. He believes in truth, in duty. The problems he encounters in the Red Keep and King’s Landing are easily solved by rooting out the many Wormtongues hounding his good friend the king.

But what we see in the first novel is the many ways this is insufficient. The world was not made for men like Ned Stark. It’s a place of betrayal and power grasping, full of plotters and schemers, people willing to toss a child out the window in order to rise one rung up the social and political ladder, or simply to maintain what they already have.

In this way, and if you never read past the first novel, I will agree that the world feels quite nihilistic! The bad guys win the day! The only honorable man in Westeros is beheaded as a traitor!

The character who we believe is the hero of this series, who is so obviously positioned as the hero, ends up murdered in disgrace, his family also branded as traitors, and his eldest daughter held captive by the schemers who got him killed.

Such utter brutality.

Of course, the problem with this view is that there are four more books (and two more as yet unpublished ones).

And while these four books continue to show how men like Ned Stark fail, how the cruel and grasping often win the day, how betrayal and assassination can be a far more powerful tool than diplomacy or an honorable duel, I think it’s quite clear that Martin is setting up something full of hope.

The problem, and I think the reason why some fail to see this, is that the series remains unfinished. Worse than that, it’s been stuck for nearly fifteen years at the point where hope is furthest from view, where our heroes are drowning in darkness, in doubt, in failure, and even in Death.

The Role of Subversion

So what was Martin up to when he began this grand series that earned him the respect and admiration of his peers and an enormous fandom with wealth and riches that has now twisted into hate and despair?

Well, he’s spoken of this in many places and at many times, but the gist of it is that he was dissatisfied with the state of fantasy literature. He loved and still loves Tolkien—despite what you may have heard or believed—but he was not a fan of the many Tolkien imitators. On top of that, he read Tad Williams’ four-book-trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and it lit his brain on fire with possibility.

He saw, perhaps for the first time, how you could build on top of Tolkien, how you could stand on the shoulders of that giant to see a bit farther.

Even so, he had a whole career before he ever wrote a word of A Song of Ice & Fire. Much of that career dealt with subverting tropes. You can see that quite clearly in Fever Dream, his steamboat vampire novel. You can see it in his many award winning short stories and novellas. You can even see it in his television work from the 80s on The Twilight Zone and Beauty & the Beast.

So when he came to his own Tolkienesque fantasy, he approached it as a writer who turns tropes on their head. And we see this all so clearly in just a few pages of A Game of Thrones.

There are ice zombies! The hero gets beheaded as a traitor! Nobility and honor are liabilities, given the right context!

What Martin is doing is subverting our expectations, yes, to destabilize us, to present us with a world that feels dangerously alive. Good men die and fail. Yes. Sometimes villains win and succeed and thrive.

He is subverting our expectations and tropes in order to bring us to a canyon of despair. But remember, there is still more to the story. When you hit the bottom of a story, there’s only one direction to go.

More importantly than literary tricks and playing with tropes, Martin was drawing on history, much as Tolkien drew upon mythology.

And what you find if you read history, even medieval history, is that the world was full of betrayers and schemers, of plotters and backstabbers, of power grabs and dynastic struggles. Martin has mentioned often that he drew upon The War of the Roses, which was an English civil war between noble families (sometimes called the Cousins’ War) that basically reads as brutal and Machiavellian as anything Martin wrote.

And who ends up on the throne after all that? The usurper Henry VII! The damn Tudors!

And so I do think it’s worth asking people who accuse Martin of nihilism:

Is history nihilistic?

I mean, perhaps yes. Some would say it’s all been downhill since Eve met Adam and some would say it’s all gone wrong since Christ returned to heaven. After all, we are a fallen race, born tainted by Sin. Beloved by our God but always failing him.

You can even see this in Tolkien, honestly. It’s significant that Frodo fails at the end and Sauron’s ring is destroyed not because of his heroism but because of Gollum’s greed.

And so, no, I do not believe that Martin is nihilistic. I think this is a gross misreading of him, and I’ll now tell you why.

The Hope in Westeros

Hope is a complicated, tender, delicate thing in Westeros. It’s difficult to come by, harder to find, and yet harder still to hold onto. We see this in the Brotherhood Without Banners. Their only goal is to protect the smallfolk from the lords and knights of Westeros. Sometimes this means engaging in brutal, terrifying acts of violence. But at the heart of these men is one of nobility.

These are knights who feel betrayed by the Lannisters and all the rest of the nobles warring across the Seven Kingdoms. More than any organization within Westeros, the Brotherhood attempts to keep to the chivalric code. And Beric Dondarrion does his best to make new knights who will uphold these ideals.

Bravery. Duty. Honor.

And while this organization does begin to become polluted by Lady Stoneheart, we still see how they are holding to hope and to an ideal. It becomes more complex, yes, due to what Catelyn Stark experienced at the Red Wedding, but they remain as a complicated force in Westeros.

A counterpoint to the corruption and depravity of many of the knights and lords we’ve encountered.

They are presented as a terror on the land because what is more terrifying to the ruling elite than men with conviction? What could be more destructive to avarice and oppression than true believers in chivalry?

Consider Jon Snow.

In order to survive, it is true that he must do things he never thought he would. He must seem to betray Qhorin Halfhand and the Night’s Watch in order to survive. Yet he holds onto the true Jon, even as who that is becomes increasingly complicated.

Like his father Ned, he sees the world in a more black and white way, but he must learn to see the shades of grey. He must dabble in darkness in order to bring light. He must, at certain times, even break his oaths, betray his ideals or at least hold to them more loosely than he ever thought possible.

In doing so, he finds a way forward.

And then, yes, he is murdered by his own, including some of his friends. And that, sadly, is where the books remain.

However, we know that he goes on to save the day!

While the TV show may have failed in many ways, we can see the shape of what’s to come in the novels, or what would have come if they ever got finished.

And so when we see Jon Snow Stark Targaryen fail and fail and fail, we also see him hold onto his ideals and beliefs. We see him as a man, descended from both the First Men and the blood of dragons, rising to meet true evil. We see him rise to fight against despair and death and extinction.

He is a hero in the traditional and classic sense. As much a hero as Aragorn, though with a much more complex psychology and complicated journey to heroism. Really, he is Campbellian. He is about as archetypally on the Hero’s Journey as is possible, though perhaps you failed to see it because of Martin’s skill for misdirection.

I could keep listing characters and how they portray or demonstrate a classical ideal of heroism that is common to Campbell or Tolkien’s work but also would be recognized by medieval and ancient people, but Jon Snow really is at the heart of all this.

How can you read (watch) Jon Snow and not see the hopeful heroism there?

Why so dark, so grim, so hopeless?

Consider Jaime.

If any a knight in the Seven Kingdoms seems antithetical to the ideals of chivalry or Tolkien’s heroic themes, Jaime may as well be their standard bearer.

He throws Bran from a tower, hoping to kill him. He’s breaking his oath to chastity by fucking his sister, fathering three children on her. He is brutal and vain and seems to delight in the failures of others. He is bound only to his family, caring nothing of the oaths that tie him to the king, the kingdoms, or even the smallfolk. If you’re not a Lannister—and, really, if you’re not a Lannister in his immediate family—he has no time or consideration for you.

Or so he seems.

And so if you only read the first novel and learn that the greatest of knights, Westeros’ Lancelot, is an incestuous oathbreaker without convictions or ideals, yeah, I could understand the accusation of nihilism.

But Jaime’s story is one of salvation. And as we come to learn about Jaime, we come to understand him. More than that, we come to agree with him. To see the heroism in him. Yes, he betrayed his king, but he did it to save his family and the entire kingdom.

When you first come to one of his POV chapters, you groan and moan. You don’t want to be in his head. Fuck this guy! But by the middle of that book, you kind of can’t wait to get back in his head. You need him. Need to know more. Want to see the world through his eyes.

This narrative alone—which could be the subject of its own epic fantasy series—should demonstrate to any reader with even passable fluency in the English language that Jaime is on a long road of redemption. Yes, he has done horrible and horrifying things, but he is trying to become a good man. He is trying, at last, to live up to his status as a knight.

It is a tragedy that someone like Jaime only understood what it was to be a knight when he lost his hand.

Last night my son was interested to hear that some Catholic saints were villainous before they became saints. Some of them persecuted Christians or even terrorized Christ as they led him to the cross. Even Saint Paul admits that he terrorized and persecuted Christians before he was struck blind on the road to Damascus.

If we all stopped reading of his life then and there, we might angrily type into some social media site how Saul was a terrible man, an anti-Christian of the worst kind!

Of course, if you read on, you come to learn that Saul became Paul, one of the father’s of Christianity, one of Christ’s fiercest evangelizers.

When I see or hear people call this series nihilistic or that Martin himself is a nihilist, I wonder what these people would make of someone like Longinus, who speared Christ while he hung limp and dead on the cross, and went on to become a Christian, or of the penitent thief who hung on the cross beside Christ, who Christ said, Amen, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.

Or perhaps a better example is John Rabe, the Nazi businessman who saved 250,000 Chinese civilians from the Nanjing Massacre, which was one of the worst atrocities of WWII.

Then What is his Point?

What if the point of A Song of Ice & Fire is not that everyone is evil and honorable men deserve to die for their naivety, but that the world is a dark, brutal, and cold place, but we must attempt to navigate it anyway, as honorably as we can.

What if he is telling us a story of redemption, of salvation, of fighting for hope even as evil surrounds us, chokes out all the good we see?

In many ways, his series is the antithesis of nihilism. It is a reflection of the world we live in. For do villains not succeed in the world we live in? Do we not see daily how good, honorable people fail and the most unscrupulous maniacs thrive?

Is reality nihilistic? Is life itself nihilistic?

Some of you need to read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.

Despite how people continually try to pin Martin as an anti-Tolkien villain, his series mirrors Lord of the Rings in many ways.

If you only read The Fellowship of the Ring, you will find yourself at the end of a book where Gandalf dies, where the fellowship is broken, where Boromir tries to steal the ring from Frodo, where all we see is loss and failure.

If you stop there, you might even consider Tolkien a nihilist!

But what Martin is doing is telling a very similar story, except instead of one Saruman and one Wormtongue, there are hundreds of people like this filling the nobility. All grasping for power, throttling out the lives of those beneath them on the pyramid of State.

In both cases, Martin and Tolkien are interested, primarily, in heroism and redemptions, salvation.

It is significant that Frodo fails at the final moment. He does not cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom, but chooses, at the very last, to keep it. When Gollum steals the ring and falls into the fires, Frodo must live ever after knowing that he failed the final test. His missing finger a constant reminder that when he was given the chance to save everyone, to destroy Sauron and all his evil, he failed.

Yes, there’s the more traditional trajectory of Aragorn’s heroism, but the heart of the story is Frodo’s. And Sam’s.

Can we be saved?

Do we deserve to be saved, after all that we’ve done, after all our failures?

These questions gnaw at Martin’s narrative in a dozen different ways, as characterized by dozens of characters. Like Tolkien, we see how characters respond to this in different ways.

Jon Snow must learn to be flexible while holding tight to his convictions. Sansa learns to be cunning and cold and calculating. Arya becomes a weapon. Tyrion discovers that, perhaps, there is indeed a hero, a good person, a good queen in waiting. Daenerys learns that the tangled web of politics can be cut through, but only if you’re willing and determined to cut all the way through.

Of course, some of these characters fall from grace. In learning the harsh lessons of life, they find that they are, in fact, a villain rather than a savior.

It’s quite I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, in a way. Or, for you TV watchers, it shares much in common with Breaking Bad.

But let us return, again, to the definition.

Is this Nihilism?

Nihilism (ni-hil-ism)

1. A viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless

2. A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths

3. A doctrine that no reality exists

4. A doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility

We’ll go through these one by one, pedantically, which is why I put it here at the end, in case you feel you’ve gotten the point. I feel I must continue since this topic constantly bubbles back up to the sruface though.

A viewpoint that traditional values and beliefs are unfounded and that existence is senseless and useless

There are certainly characters in A Song of Ice & Fire who believe exactly this. They are, almost uniformly, villains. That should tell you all you need to know.

But what we find over and over again is characters striving for meaning.

Take Tyrion.

He has lost faith in everything. Especially by the time he’s fleeing King’s Landing after murdering Tywin.

But then he meets Daenerys and it’s like he sees for the first time. He finds faith. He finds belief. While he rejected the seven gods and chivalry and all the rest, he finds, at last, after losing everything, that perhaps these things are worth fighting for, when the person fighting for them is Daenerys.

Take Jaime, his brother, who discovers the power and strength and hope in tradition. In being appointed to a position he does not deserve, he discovers exactly how important these traditional values and beliefs are.

A doctrine that denies any objective ground of truth and especially of moral truths

Many characters in the series reject objective truth or moral truth. But what does the whole series hinge upon?

The fight against the objective extinction event of the Others as they head south to annihilate humanity. What we hear from some characters is that all gods are one or that all fights are one. And while we get these seeds of knowledge from a dozen different seemingly untrustworthy sources, the fact that they exist in multiplicity might point us, the reader, towards an overall structural belief in Truth.

Admittedly, this may be one that is more difficult to see for the casual reader, but it is there.

A doctrine that no reality exists

I actually don’t see a point to address this one. Nothing like this is ever even waved towards.

A doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility

Again, I don’t think this is one seriously worth engaging with, but since we’re here and someone somewhere might say that Martin’s answer to the corruption of Westeros is to burn it all down…

The corruption and rot in Westeros is a fulcrum of the series. The Brotherhood without Banners wouldn’t exist without this desire to fix the current social order. But there is no one who wants only destruction, except for the Others. Perhaps Petyr Baelish, who would rather reign over a kingdom of ash than see anyone else win the throne.

But this is also leading towards Daenerys’ villain turn. She believes that the nobles of Westeros will rise up and overthrow the usurpers as soon as she lands with her dragons. She believes the Westerosi have been waiting for her return.

When the reality will not match this, I do believe we’ll see how the death of her personal hopes will lead her to greater and greater atrocities. When she is met with sword and pike rather than open arms, she will turn to total war.

But that will make her a villain. She will shrug off her role as heroine.

Because what is more terrifying than an idealist who loses hope but retains the drive and determination to win?

Perhaps that’s the true reason the world is currently the way it is.

And when the series ends, I do believe it will be bittersweet. Jon will save humanity but become exiled from the Seven Kingdoms. Daenerys will become a tyrant before she is murdered. The Seven Kingdoms will suffer unimaginably, with destruction and devastation and starvation spread far and wide.

But there will be those who pick up the cracked crown and decide to build on top of the ashes.

Hope for a better world. A hope that we must make a better world, after all the misery and death.

And while it will be a hardened hope, it will be hope.

A nihilist sinks beneath the hopelessness, seeing a blighted, benighted future. It takes courage to have hope. To fight for it.

In this way, I find A Song of Ice & Fire a profound statement of hope.

Catch up here:

• Introduction

• The Cuckoo’s Calling

• The Silkworm

Stranger Come Knocking

He sees her so clearly right there. Would be almost nothing to grab her, to kill her. Doesn’t even realize the danger, how close she is to him, to an ending, to the end of all things.

Robin has now been working for Strike for a year and is now, finally, a full-time investigator. Though she’s also his secretary. Rowling doesn’t overly draw attention to this here, but what we see between Robin and Strike mirrors what many, many married couples experience in their own relationships, much to the frustration of many women.

Times being what they are in the global economy, most people work a full time job. Gone are the days of a majority of women being stay at home moms or just stay at home anythings. And so women are working full time at some soul crushing job, just like their men. The difference comes at home, with many women doing the vast majority of housework and/or childcare as well. And so the woman in the relationship (homosexual relationships are not immune to this, mind, with one partner doing the majority of non-paid labor) have a full time job at home on top of their full time job in the office.

Though Robin is not engaged to Strike or even in a romantic relationship with him, they do share this job, and that job involves Robin doing two jobs while Strike only does the one.

Is this fair? I mean, obviously not. But at the same time, how many people would even remark upon it? Strike is the founder, owner, and employer here. Robin, on the other hand, came with no qualifications to work as an investigator and had to basically beg Strike to let her do the work, so isn’t the reward the ability to do the work itself?

Thus and so, many employers exploit their workers.

Anyway, Robin remains engaged to Matthew, still grieving his mother, still disapproving of her choice of employment, still hating Strike, still jealous of him and suspicious of Robin’s relationship with him. Strike has begun a relationship with a radio presenter named Elin, though his feelings for Robin continue to ferment and burble in his chest.

Add to this, Robin is getting more and more frustrated and annoyed by Matthew’s friend Sarah Shadlock, who keeps bringing up the working relationship between Robin and Strike in front of Matthew. This heightens his suspicions towards Strike and Robin, and he simply cannot or refuses to see that Sarah is meddling to cause friction between the Matthew and Robin.

Anyway, with all that seething tension, a package arrives for Robin at Denmark Street and she opens it to stare at a woman’s severed leg.

The Case

Uh, well, there isn’t one.

Three books in, Rowling decides it’s time to play with the structure.

For one thing, there are several chapters—including the opening chapter—from the perspective of the killer. This invitation into the killer’s mind allows tensions to build in new ways.

This actually makes the investigative work in this novel far more urgent, I think, than it was in the previous two. While I sort of perfunctorily made my way through the case work in reviews of previous novels, this one feels so much more dangerous and, well, relevant.

And of course it does. Robin was sent a severed leg! But more than that, we see how the killer is targeting Robin.

On top of all that, we don’t have a central case to this novel, which means that Robin and Strike must do a whole lot of investigative work for free. This is a problem. After two high profile cases where Strike has caused the police to look foolish, Strike is economically able to breathe for the first time since starting the agency. Despite that, he’s not in a position where he can just not work cases. Bills still have to be paid. People gotta eat. Robin is still an employee who needs to be paid, and though she takes a near criminally low salary relative to the work she does, he still does have to pay her.

There are three problems that come with a rising profile after these two cases. The first is that the police are embarrassed and not feeling so kindly towards ol Cormoran. Another is that there’s increased media attention on Strike, especially after the story of the severed leg is leaked to the press. This makes it nearly impossible for them to take on new cases. The third is that, to put it simply: fame attracts crazies.

And, apparently, one of them is targeting Robin.

A message came with the severed leg that quotes the band Blue Oyster Cult, which Strike recognizes immediately. He also sees how this message is for him, even if the leg was delivered to Robin.

You see, Blue Oyster Cult was Cormoran’s mother’s favorite band.

After some figurin, Strike comes to the conclusion that this was sent by one of four people:

• Terrence “Digger” Malley - notorious gangster with a history of mailing body parts to people. He went to prison based on Strike’s anonymous testimony against him.

• Noel Brockbank - A Gulf War veteran and pedophile who blames Strike for losing his family.

• Donald Laing - As a member of the SIB (military police), Strike investigated Laing and had him dishonorably discharged and sent to prison for abusing his wife and child.

• Jeff Whitaker - Strike’s stepfather, who Strike believes murdered his mother, even though he was acquitted. Strike’s mother overdosed and it was deemed suicide.

The novel revolves around Robin and Strike investigating these four men, trying to figure out who is behind all this, and why.

The police, unhelpfully, are convinced that Malley is the likely culprit and they’re not soo keen on listening to Strike, who thinks that’s the least likely man behind this.

Buried Bones

Because there’s no case to draw us into some specific world full of colorful characters that Strike and Robin are unfamiliar with, Rowling instead takes this novel to dig through the lives of our detectives. Who they each were before the series began comes into focus for the first time, while also revealing how their relationship has transformed who they now are.

Before we get to Cormoran Strike’s childhood, let us begin with Robin.

Robin goes back to Yorkshire, her hometown, for a wedding dress fitting. The trip is not great. She and Matthew are still fighting about her relationship with Strike. Robin’s mother, Linda, is concerned in the way that all mothers can and should be. Like all mothers, she also has an uncanny understanding of her daughter, and so she knows that Matthew must be jealous of Strike, which Robin admits, though also clarifying that there’s nothing between her and Strike.

Linda quietly supports her daughter and is willing to let her lead her own life. Whether she stays with Matthew or leaves Matthew, Linda will be there.

Such are mothers.

The fighting continues back in London until she gives him back his ring and leaves, refusing to answer his calls or texts.

Robin carries on with a surveillance job the agency has to help keep the lights out and despite Strike constantly haranguing her about not being out alone at night, she finds herself both alone and at night and with a dying cellphone battery. Feeling uncomfortable and strangely exposed, she ducks into a pub where she orders a wine and tries to act like a woman who is not alone but waiting for someone to arrive.

This scene in the pub is fascinating in the ways Rowling changes the dynamics.

We have been in many pubs in this series. So many scenes happen over a pint or over a plate of chips at one of the near countless pubs dotting London. Usually the atmosphere is rather cozy, comfortable, familiar. It’s almost like an oasis from the noise and pace of London, form the grisly cases they investigate. You hop into a dark pub, grab a beer, some chips, and go over the notes of the case.

But this time, everything feels different. In part because we know the killer watched her enter the pub, was trailing her, ready to pounce, and Strike is desperate to find her to ensure she’s safe.

The pub itself is nothing sinister. It has the same familiar kind of feel, but Rowling manages to twist this into dangerous territory. The pub is mostly empty, with just a handful of men there, drinking. Though they leave her alone, she feels the presence of them. And we and Robin feel the prickling of fear as another man enters the pub, taking a seat in the corner.

It’s a tricky little bit of magic to turn a place so mundane and familiar into a haunted house pregnant with terror and potential violence. But while Robin sits there alone, our dread blooms and blossoms and the flowering heads unfurl to face a horrible darkness staring back.

We know something bad is about to happen. We feel it in our blood and bones. The anticipation is making it worse. The narrative tension of knowing the killer is right there, that Robin is vulnerable, while Robin only feels a disquiet that she begins drowning with wine causes our skin to crawl, our stomach to knot.

We feel acutely the fear of being a woman. It’s something statistics can’t really do for you. Hearing about the percentage of women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted, of the many gendered crimes against women happening around the globe—including in first world nations—doesn’t really prepare you for that kind of physical fear a woman might feel surrounded by strange men at night in a dark pub when no one you know knows that you’re there.

And then when we can barely take it, Strike is there.

He found her.

He’s there for her.

Because of course he is.

Of course this big gruff man is there. Of course, because he cares. He cares about her, not only as an employee but maybe as a friend or maybe…

In some ways, Robin reminds me of my own wife, and not just because my wife is a clever, beautiful woman. My wife has a tendency that I think many people have, which is that she wants authority figures to think well of her or even like her. I am either blessed or cursed to lack any similar desire.

But I think this is what we’ve seen in Robin since the start of the series. When she first met Strike, there was nothing about him that should have made her seek his approval. Except he was her boss. As she came to know him and respect him, his approval became more important to her, and gaining that respect and encouragement from him meant the world to her.

Which is normal. We all seek respect and recognition from people we respect, whether that person is your boss or mom or friend or artist you admire.

Perhaps it’s the wine or the death of her engagement or the simple fact that Strike is there, big and solid as a mountain, steady and reliable, shrouding her in safety. Whatever it is, Robin begins opening up to Strike in a way she’s tried to avoid.

And so Strike discovers that Matthew cheated on Robin when they were in university, sleeping with his friend Sarah. Sarah, who Matthew still spends time with. Sarah, who is very obviously—at least to Robin—sowing discord between Matthew and Robin with her many insinuations about Strike. Making it worse, she realizes that he was cheating on her while she had left college after being brutally raped and left for dead.

While Robin fears that Strike will now only see her as a victim, Strike is only astounded by her strength, how she has continued working and seeming so steady and capable since receiving the severed leg in the mail.

Having left Matthew, Robin doesn’t have a place to stay and so she wants to check in at a cheap hotel nearby. Worried about her, Strike insists on accompanying her to a hotel that he believes will be safer.

After dropping her off and checking her in, he sees someone who he remembered seeing at the pub. He gives chase, believing, perhaps, that this man is stalking Robin. Might even be the limb-mailer. Of course, Strike is overweight and missing a leg so he loses him. But this only confirms his fears, the danger, the direct and violent threat to Robin.

This moment honestly took me by surprise. I did not suspect nor expect Robin to be a victim of rape. It’s not the kind of thing common to heroines. Rather than function as a cheap and tawdry detail to wave before the reader, to demonstrate how even our heroes may suffer, I think it’s handled quite well and embodied in Robin.

I’ll return to this a bit later.

For now, let us shift to Strike and his childhood.

Because of the Blue Oyster Cult connection between the killer and Strike’s mother, we spend a lot of time digging into his upbringing and his family history. To put it mildly, it was unpleasant. A drug addict mother, a collection of transient men through his life, taking advantage of his mother. Many of them musicians. Including, of course, Jonny Rokeby, his father.

Strike grew up as both protector of his mother and victim of her carelessness. She dragged him and his sister to briefly live with a cult in between various trap houses where these children with different fathers were surrounded by drugs and criminals, by dangerous men, by broken people.

It’s how he met and became friends with Shanker, who is one of my favorite characters in the series. Shanker was almost like a brother to Strike when they were young and he viewed Strike’s mother fondly. Loved her, even, like a mother.

Where Strike turned away from drugs and crime that seemed well suited to the son of an addict, Shanker has made a career in the underworld. It’s unclear exactly what Shanker does when Strike isn’t around, but the general sense is that he’s a criminal in numerous capacities. A jack of all trades, if you will.

One of the funny quirks of Shanker that I most appreciate is that even though he loves Strike like a brother, he won’t do anything for Strike without being paid for it.

Let the proletariat rise, I always say.

Much of Strike’s regimented life, even him joining the military, seems obviously a response to his mother. The way he doesn’t want children and doesn’t particularly want to be around children feels like a response to his troubled childhood, which I have seen reflected in several people that I real lifely know. At the same time, his doomed and delirious relationship with Charlotte Campbell may have much to do with the instability that sits as the foundation of his life. Because of his mother’s careless love, her selfishness, Cormoran never really learned how to love or how to be loved.

He tried. He tries. But he fails almost always. Even his current relationship with Elin is mostly one of convenience. In Strike’s internal monologues, we come to learn that one of the best parts of dating Elin is her irregular schedule, allowing him to be a mostly absent boyfriend until she invites him over to have dinner and sex.

We may as well finally talk a bit more about Lucy, Strike’s sister, and Uncle Ted and Aunt Joan.

Lucy left their mother when she was thirteen or so, in part, Strike suspects, because of the threat she perceived in Jeff Whitaker. But according to Lucy, it was to get away from the destabilizing nature of their mother and the life she led.

Covered in Mud

“My dad beat the shit out of me,” he laughed with the saddest eyes.

We were twelve. I didn’t know how to react. I laughed a bit with him, knowing that this joke wasn’t really a joke. I’d met his dad. He scared the shit out of me, though I didn’t know why back then. He was nice and friendly, but I was afraid in his presence.

Like a cat before a thunderstorm.

It was the first time he made such a joke, but not the last time. I remember when I came to school with a black eye because I slipped on the stairs and hit my eye on a doorknob.

It sounds like a fake excuse from a child abuser, and I think when I explained my black eye this way, he thought we understood each other.

All I can really say now is that I’m glad we didn’t. That my dad never beat the shit out of me. But I think that was the moment when I really understood my friend, and it broke my heart. Broke my heart when I was twelve and again when I was sixteen, when he ran away, and again when we were eighteen and, finally, long after we lost touch, when I saw that he was getting married when we were in our early twenties.

I cannot explain the simple yet profound joy I felt seeing him succeed in life. Seeing him go to college as the first person in his family to do so. To see him fall in love and form a family.

I just searched around for a few minutes to see if I could find him again, to see what his life is like now, all these years later, but I don’t even know how to begin such a search.

My only hope is that he’s happy.

But I think of this friend when I think of Lucy. I think of other people I’ve known, who I met when we were too young to know such horrors, like my friend who told me that his belt broke when he tried to hang himself over the weekend, or the one who whispered to me on a quiet stairwell during a party when we were sixteen of the horrors her father inflicted upon her and how I could not help.

All the things I could not do. All the people I could not save.

Broken lives. Broken before they even had a chance to live them. Broken by mothers and fathers. Most often fathers, if we’re being honest. Almost always the fathers.

But who I think of most when I think of Lucy is a little boy who I cannot speak about here or anywhere. But my heart breaks continually for him. His father is the only saving grace in all of this, and one of my sincerest hopes is that this little boy will never have to live with his mother again. Helpless, the father can only be there to pick up the pieces, to hold him close, to let him know that he is loved.

Such savage days. Such woeful days. Such a misery.

This life.

This terrible, beautiful, wonderful, horrible life.

Lucy ran away from her mother to her aunt Joan and uncle Ted while Cormoran remained with his mother, perhaps out of some boyish sense of duty.

Joan and Ted hover around the series, often sneaking into the narrative here and there, just as Lucy does.

Joan was the mother Strike never had and Ted was the father he never had. Both of them gave him so much. Gave him a sense of stability. When his mother died, they took him in. No questions asked. Just like they’d taken in Lucy when she was thirteen.

Joan and Ted had no children of their own, but they had Lucy and Cormoran, and they did everything they could for those two.

And even this guts me. I’d explain why here, but I fear this is one more thing I cannot speak about.

The point of all this toeing around a subject is simply to say that if you have ever known hurt children, if you have ever been a hurt child, Joan and Ted might make you weep. Quietly yet fiercely for those children, for the child you were, for all the unrepeatable, unspeakable conversations you’ve had about these hurt children.

What I mean to say is that amidst all the blood and guts, the severed legs and pedophilia, the shattered engagements and vicious murderer, there is an ineffable sweetness hiding within this novel, and this series more broadly.

If these novels are cloaked in violence, caked with grime and guts, you will also find beams of light that shine bright enough to blind, and their names are Joan and Ted.

Lucy, in contrast to Cormoran, seeks stability in her relationships. She has three kids and is happily married in a quiet suburb of London, though her husband is a bit of a jackass who Strike has never gotten along with well.

This differences between Lucy and Cormoran tell us much, though. Perhaps what they demonstrate most is the gentle guiding hands of Joan and Ted.

The Meat and Bones of this Broth

Way back in my introduction to this series, I said that the implicit foundation driving the series is essentially how society constrains and brutalizes women. While there has been some of this in the previous novels, it’s really pushed to the front of the line here.

Robin finally gets what she wants. She sees that Strike respects her enough and considers her competent enough to become an investigator. But now that her life may be in danger, Strike doesn’t want her going out alone, especially after dark. This infuriates her because in practice this means that she cannot do investigative work. She’s forced back to the office as a secretary and a secretary alone.

Strike’s understandable fear for Robin’s physical safety constrain her.

And, I mean, at the same time, we understand Strike’s worry. We’re in the head of the killer intermittently and we see him stalking Robin, hear his internal monologue, his plans to murder her. The way he sees her as Strike’s weak point. If he can kill Robin, he will destroy Strike’s life and shatter his business.

We know she’s in danger.

This is an interesting sort of narrative tension Rowling weaves here. We know that Robin is being foolish, that she’s wrong, because we have information that she doesn’t. We know that she is being hounded by a psycho! And so we sympathize with Strike, knowing he’s correct.

And yet, if we were Robin, how would we feel?

Especially given everything that’s happening with Matthew.

Because she has nowhere to stay, she eventually moves back into the apartment they share. A strange kind of peace settles between them as they both live there.

Out of fear for her safety, Strike has her working at home and so she ends up spending a lot of quiet time with Matthew while she researches the three men Strike suspects.

With all of that as the backdrop, Robin forgives Matthew and they continue on with their wedding, which Matthew. The wedding is happening very soon. Shockingly soon.

She returns to the office and gives Strike an ultimatum. She wants to do surveillance and stop sitting at home. Perhaps blindsided by the revelation that she’s back with Matthew, he agrees, but only during the daytime.

All this investigative work leads them to a few things.

One, they discover that there are a serial string of murders in London. The victims, in case you can’t guess, are all women.

Two, Robin is meets Whitaker’s current girlfriend and things don’t go well there either, and we feel the threat of Whitaker, the dread of having Robin in his presence. Worse, as Robin is leaving, she ends up alone on a street and gets grabbed by the killer. Robin has been taking self-defense classes and manages to get away and make enough noise to draw someone’s attention, but not before getting stabbed in the arm.

While at the hospital, the police strongly encourage Strike to fuck right off. Who mailed the leg to Robin is a police matter, especially since the suspect is now considered a serial killer, and now that Robin has been literally stabbed.

Matthew also shows up at the hospital.

The third thing their investigation leads them towards is Noel, the pedophile, who is now living with a woman and her kids. Strike refuses to do anything about this because the police have told them not to get involved in the case, but Robin goes in and tries to save these kids after she’s recovered a bit.

It doesn’t go well! First the mother nearly beats the shit out of her and then Noel does, but Shanker is there to save the day. At the same time, one of the woman’s daughters reveals to her mother and Robin that she is being abused.

All these vulnerable people. All the violence done against them, and no one cares. Strike doesn’t even care. He tells her not to do anything about this pedophile living with a child, with a woman ignorant of his crimes.

Adding insult to injury, Strike fires Robin afterwards, at her home, when Matthew and her mother are there.

Call it stress and fear, but Strike thought for the second time during this case that Robin was being killed. Perhaps, too, he’s just pissed. Infuriated that she would get back with Matthew.

He loves her. He can’t admit it to her, but he does. Watching her get together with Matthew, the slimy fuck, a weak man, a cheater, drives him insane. It makes him resent her, even as he loves her. But he also doesn’t want her thrown into danger anymore, especially when she won’t listen to him.

And it’s all so unfair.

It’s not her fault that woman are vulnerable to physical violence from men. No matter how many action movies we make about waifish women beating the shit out of dozens of men in sequence, it just remains true that most men are physically stronger than most women. Men are also more prone to violence and perpetrate far more violence than women, and often this violence is perpetrated against women.

Ambition meets physical limitation.

Robin has fought through much. She was raped and left for dead in college. She was cheated on. Now she’s been stabbed by a serial killer. Her life has been in danger and, in her view, her life is always at least a bit in danger.

Nothing that she did as a young women made it so that her rape was more likely. No, instead she was victimized by a violent man who picked her to attack because she was there.

Women are at risk, for simply existing. Walking down the street puts them at risk because violent men target them. They’re subject to violence and sexual assault and sexual violence by virtue of being women available to be hurt.

And people can quibble about this, about how the threat of violence to women is overstated, but the statistics are not encouraging. Perhaps the most shocking statistic is that, globally, about one in three women have been sexually assaulted.

One in three!

And I do think this informs much of the series from the very start. This novel in particular forces us to witness women be assaulted and murdered. We learn that our heroine has been raped and we watch her get nearly murdered in the street. We watch how she is forced to become prey, how this changes everyone’s view of her, and even her own view of herself, her own experience of living in her body.

And what could be more depersonalizing or humiliating and dehumanizing than having your own identity forged by the ones who have committed unspeakable violence against you?

Wrapping up the case

Before we tie a bow on it, it must be mentioned that Strike does call Robin and offer her job back. He tries to make amends and he does it via voicemail.

You see, she’s out somewhere with Matthew and leaves her phone when she goes to the bathroom. He listens to the voicemail, deletes it, deletes the call from her call log, and blocks his number.

A stunning invasion and coercion, but this is Matthew.

Strike figures it out, obviously, but it’s no easy thing, and in figuring it out he realizes, once more, how much he needs Robin. More importantly, he knows there’s no point in any of it—his life, the agency—if she’s not there with him. With Shanker’s help, he tracks down the killer, lays a trap, and has a knock down, drag out fight with him. With Shanker’s help and the help of the police, he gets the maniac locked up.

Even tells the cops he won’t take credit. Gives them a freebie, if you will, to try to make a more cordial relationship between his agency and the police.

It also happens to be the day of Robin’s wedding. Strike has an invite. He never RSVPd but he has it, and he gets Shanker to take him there.

Battered and bruised, he enters the church while Robin is saying her vows, accidentally knocking over a vase in the back of the church.

Robin sees him, smiles, and marries Matthew.

Had I had to wait a whole year for the next novel, this would have driven me off a dang cliff!

Rowling is working with a lot of different kinds of tensions and most of them lead us, the reader, to really fucking want Strike and Robin to tell each other how they feel. We know in our bones that Matthew is going to be a terrible husband, the absolute worst person for Robin to be with for a number of reasons.

While Strike has his many problems, we see how he admires and respects her.

And that is no small thing.

It may, in fact, be everything.

A Trans Analogue

Before we leave this novel behind, we must spend some time with what I consider a clear early indication of how Rowling viewed trans people at the time. It’s not explicit, mind, but I think, in retrospect and with a lot of the rhetoric that followed, we can see the seeds here.

I do wonder if this came about as a response to some of the reactions to her depiction of a trans character in The Silkworm. While I don’t think she had a cruel or even mean spirited depiction in that novel, I can see how some people would have had issues with it. And so not for the first time in Rowling’s career do we see her making a pointed jab at some of her critics.

There’s a subplot in the novel—one that actually leads directly to discovering who the killer is—about people who desire having a limb amputated. They meet in online forums to discuss their desire for amputation and they have invented a sort of backstory for the true reason for Strike’s missing leg: he was able to convince a doctor to amputate it.

Eventually, Strike and Robin meet a group of these people and they are not treated kindly. It is a funny scene, honestly, because you do meet a handful of people so severely deluded, who project an identity onto Strike, and are so insufferable in their behavior that we silently cheer when Strike finally tells them off.

How this relates to trans people maybe isn’t a straight line for all readers, but it seemed clear as day to me.

Maybe it would not have in 2015, before trans people were a point of national discussion in the US, but it stood out to me here in 2025.

People who describe themselves as born in the wrong body, who want surgery to affirm who they truly are, and so on. They are also refused medical treatment because of course they are. What doctor would amputate the limbs of healthy people? And so they want to meet with Strike to figure out how he did it.

They know there are doctors who will give proper care to people like them, but they’re hard to come by.

So, Strike, where did you find your doctor? How did you get him to cut off your leg? Did it make you finally feel whole?

That these people come off as ridiculous and absurd but also badly delusional and possibly caught in a horrible cycle of nurturing their delusions makes me, in 2025, see a rightwing explanation for how and why people become trans.

That Rowling wrote this in 2013 or 2014 to be published in 2015 is interesting, especially because the year within the novel is a few years earlier. And, I mean, there’s no way to know if Rowling meant this to be a trans analogue, but I feel like it very clearly is. And since we must discuss Rowling periodically while writing about these novels that she wrote, I can’t just pretend that this isn’t here.

Though it is worth noting in this novel about pedophiles, serial murderers, rapists, and abusers, the most harmless people that Strike and Robin come across are these people dreaming of becoming amputees.

And maybe this will throw you completely out of the novel and series. Maybe it will be a sign to you that she’s always been bigoted against trans people. I mean, I don’t think that’s wrong, having read this. Feels like she spells out quite clearly how she feels here, and almost everything she says afterwards in public life seems to confirm these beliefs about trans people. And so maybe you will never read these or you stopped reading here, but I think that if you were found yourself burning through this novel at a rapid pace, needing to know what happens next, you should keep going.

For all that, though, I do think this is really the only place in the series where we get a sense of this. Where she seems very clearly to be commenting on trans people.

Even after the controversy and the canceling that never took, she has yet to put trans people back into these novels as villains or heroes. Nor have the novels commented on trans people more broadly.

And, again, for what it is worth, the one trans character in the last novel is a harmless, sad individual. The people certainly meant to represent trans people in this novel are also sad, harmless people.

It’s not exactly kind but this isn’t the kind of trans person you might hear about in rightwing media, who are all dangers to women and children.

Catch up here:

• Introduction

• The Cuckoo’s Calling

• The Silkworm

She Takes Aim

There were various points throughout the Harry Potter series where Rowling seemed to be taking direct aim at some of her critics, but especially at media more broadly. The only journalist we meet in the wizarding world, Rita Skeeter, is an unscrupulous jackal seeking only tabloid style stories, who had a very flexible relationship with truth and facts and accuracy.

We also saw her taking aim at the famous, most obviously with the fraud Gilderoy Lockhart, who became famous through stories of exploits and adventures he never had. Worse, he stole those stories from real wizards who underwent all those ordeals and adventures. We might now call this stolen valo(u)r.

Now, by this point, in 2014, Rowling has been an author for almost twenty years. She’s been an extremely famous author for almost just as long, and perhaps the most successful author in modern history for nearly a decade. Which is to say that she has spent time in the literary world. She’s met agents and publishers and other famous authors and I’m sure she’s met with thousands of aspiring writers and on and on. More than that, England’s publishing world is much smaller than the US, and so it’s not unlikely that she has met some of the most famous living British authors. Or, if not met them, she knows people who know them. Has probably shared dinners with mutual friends, colleagues, acquaintances.

The publishing world has treated her relatively well, at least if you look at her bank account. One thing the literary world did do, though, is try to exclude her from award eligibility at various times. Not because of how successful she was, but because she was a children’s author.

Here, in The Silkworm, she decides to have some fun with the publishing and literary world. Now, I do think she’s both more biting and more lighthearted in her satire of the literary world here than she was in Harry Potter. And this manages to make for a lot of fun, despite this being a novel about an extremely gruesome and grotesque murder.

Also, I do think it’s worth remembering that when she was writing this novel, no one yet knew who Robert Galbraith was. So she was having quite a lot of private fun during the composition of this novel, which she almost certainly began writing before The Cuckoo’s Calling was even published. It’s even completely possible she had finished writing this novel well before The Cuckoo’s Calling was published.

By the time the novel was coming out, however, the secret was well and truly out there. And so while this may have been written in quiet privacy, it was released with the eyes of the world aimed in her direction.

For all the many things to be said about Rowling as an author and person, I do think there’s a certain kind of belligerent bravery to her. I mean, there’s no way to read this novel knowing who she is and not see how she is satirizing her own industry, which I’m sure led to some private hurt feelings or frustrations.

When word was out that she was Robert Galbraith, she could have massaged this novel a bit to be less biting. Could have pulled some of the delightfully vicious satire out of the novel. I mean, she’s JK Rowling! She could have pushed off the second novel of this series for half a decade or more and people would have happily waited with mouths open wide like baby birds waiting to feast on momma’s regurgitation.

If she ever even considered pulling back, I’m glad she didn’t because I do think it makes the novel quite a bit more fun for people like me. Which is to say, if you’ve spent a long time in the literary world or gotten to know many writers, you will appreciate this aspect of the novel.

Because I really must say that writers are the worst. Some of the pettiest, most annoying, most self-involved people you’ll ever meet. Worst, I find many, many of them to be tremendous cowards.

But maybe we’ll talk about all that some other day. We’re already 600 words in and I’ve yet to even talk about the book I’m meant to be talking about.

The Case

Leonara Quine shows up at the small office on Denmark Street to meet Cormoran Strike. She tasks him with finding her missing husband, the infamous author, Owen Quine, who has been missing for two weeks.

Who is Owen Quine?

He’s the l’enfant terrible of Strike’s London. A composite, surely of thousands of infamous and famous writers of the last few centuries, but I keep thinking of Michel Houellebecq, in that he’s a literary star but also a pariah. Controversial but also talented. Of interest, too, is that his debut novel was a scorching success but nothing he’s written since has been anywhere near as successful. He’s hoping, however, that his newest as yet unpublished novel, Bombyx Mori, brings him back into the spotlight.

Bombyx Mori has been deemed unpublishable by his agent, editor, and publisher due to its graphic depictions of torture, sexual assault, and cannibalism, as well as its slanderous depictions of people in Owen’s life, including other famous writers, like Michael Fancourt.

And here I must take a brief aside to remind everyone that the UK does not have the same kind of protections on speech that the good ol USA does. In fact, no other country protects speech the way the US does. Perhaps you’ve heard of people going to jail in the UK for things they say online or how libel laws are much more aggressive in the UK - this is related to the unpublishable nature of Bombyx Mori.

So the case begins quite simple: a missing person. A missing famous person.

Should be easy enough, yeah?

The Robin of it all

Have you ever met someone who you cannot love?

For whatever reason, you can feel it. Taste it. Their gravity tugs at you, pulling you ever after them, and you coast along in their wake, drawn to them, yet knowing you can never touch, can never taste, can never be—

Can never be so many things.

Can never be the everything you want to be for them.

And it hurts and you ache and so instead, you find ways to fill up your time, your days, and you put them out of your head to the degree that that’s even possible especially when you see them every day, spend most of your days with them.

I remember—

I remember so many things. So many women who have come and gone in my life, who have punched holes in my chest because of the way they looked at me at 11:15am on a Tuesday in Mr Skov’s class or the way her eyes lit up when I stumbled through Dr Pritchard’s door at 1:30pm, the snow still unmelted on my shoulders, in my hair, and she scooted over just enough for me to sneak behind her, to sit beside her, or the way she sighed and called me an idiot on the way to Neuschwanstein and then looked away from me, out the window, one of her earbuds in my left ear while the other was in her right, and the years collapse in this way, the faces and bodies mesh together, all these impossible loves, all the words left fermenting in my lungs, all the ways I held back instead of reached out, and I wonder sometimes what my life would have become had I been braver at certain times.

And perhaps this is part of what makes Cormoran Strike sink beneath my skin.

I can see the many versions of myself that could have become him. I mean, not the war veteran with half a leg who became a private detective in London. Obviously. But there are versions of me drifting through ether who did what I didn’t do when I was sixteen or twenty or twenty five, who made a choice I didn’t and they may have led me to emptiness, to nothingness, to loss and hopelessness, to thicker walls, to walls I never learned how to pull down.

But at the same time, I’ve been Strike, so close to love but so afraid of what comes next, so terrified of all the ways it could end, of the way that loss would suffocate me.

And so Strike denies his desire for Robin and pushes it away, buries it, but in doing so he erects a new kind of wall between himself and Robin.

In the first novel, the wall precedes their meeting. The weight of his failed relationship and his failing business make him completely disinterested in Robin as a person. But slowly she finds a door through his wall and he begins to see her not only as a person or an object of desire but as an asset. He is impressed by her. And this only increases his desire, which was initially only physical.

That fancy dress he gave her was meant to be farewell and good luck. But now it stands between them as an obvious sign of his affection for her.

Worse, her fiancé Matthew is not thrilled by this gift. Is not thrilled by the fact that she chose to stay working for this penniless detective. Not thrilled by her obvious admiration for Strike.

And Strike is aware of the fact that Matthew doesn’t want her working there.

He does his best to keep from adding to that stress. He doesn’t want Robin to have to choose between him and her fiancé. Doesn’t want to put her in that position. Doesn’t want to ruin her relationship.

But this is maddening to Robin. Infuriating. Frustrating.

Where she felt like an asset, like part of the investigative team in the previous case, she now feels increasingly sidelined, forced to be nothing but a secretary. Which is all well and good, she tells herself. After all, that is her job.

But she knows that she helped him. That he would not have solved the previous case without her.

She knows she can help. That she’s good at this. More than that, she wants this. Not just to be a secretary, to fetch his mail and answer calls, but to track down leads, to research the case, to talk through the case with him, to even lighten his investigative load.

Besides, the job is already driving a wedge between her and Matthew, who wants her, basically, to just be his wife.

She wants that, yeah?

I mean, of course she does. She’s his fiancée, after all.

Dear reader, do you see the symmetry here?

Shall I spell it out, lay it out nice and clean and clear?

With the job she sees freedom and with Matthew she sees constraint.

Strike opened the door to that possibility, that vast avenue of freedom, and this is what makes it so intolerable that he is now shutting that door, erecting barriers on that avenue to confine her to her place as a secretary, as a woman who needs to be shielded from the grisly details of investigative work, of long hours and personal sacrifices.

What is the point in working for Strike if he won’t let her do the detective work? She can be a secretary anywhere, for anyone, and for more money. She chose to stay with Strike because of the implied promise that her position would remain as it was or even expand, allowing her to become a detective.

Worse, rather than talk it over with her, he unilaterally makes these decisions for her to make it all easier for Matthew.

She is pinioned between two men who claim her identity, who seek to define her and her role.

On top of that, though Strike is bearish and has the face of an unsuccessful boxer, she found herself attracted to Strike in ways she never expected. A feeling she tries to deny and yet one that grows and grows, like an ember in her chest threatening to flare into a bonfire if given enough air.

My wife has a theory that women cannot love men they don’t admire. While this seems quite obvious once stated—not only for women but also for men—I think this helps explain the Robin/Cormoran relationship.

While there was no initial physical attraction for Robin, she becomes increasingly attracted to him because of the way she begins to admire and respect him. Contrast that with Strike who could not help but notice how physically attractive Robin was upon meeting her. And, yes, physical attraction is powerful, but it’s really not so difficult to set that kind of desire aside. It’s only when she demonstrates her cleverness, her competency, that Strike’s attraction blossoms and blooms like an invasive fungus colonizing his brain.

And this really is the draw, what keeps us reading, what keeps us hooked, inching towards the edge of our seat. It’s not the mystery but this heat, the accretion of tensions on this core relationship.

We could call it a will they, won’t they because it really is, but I also feel, somehow, that that sells it short. And perhaps it’s because of how Rowling cleverly keeps them ever apart, ever driving one another mad.

And then pops a bubble right in their faces. Like when Robin realizes that Strike has sex with Nina Lascelles. She feels a great many things, including betrayal.

Betrayal.

It twists like a knife in her, that he would sleep with her. And yet, she must remind herself that she’s about to be married to Matthew. That she loves Matthew.

But how could he sleep with her?

And Strike, for his part, has sex with Nina because, well, there’s a deep and boundless hole inside him. Still broken over the collapse of his relationship with Charlotte, who continues to haunt him and every narrative, especially since he sees the announcement of her engagement shortly before meeting Nina, but also because he cannot take that next step towards Robin. Cannot even dream of saying a word that might hint at how he feels about her.

So he buries it and fucks Nina.

And perhaps I should explain who Nina is, but each of these novels swell with characters and personalities that form complex constellations, geometries of relationships that are bound up in the specific case of each novel. We’re in the literary world of London and so Strike goes about meeting a bunch of literary people, including those who are slanderously depicted in Bombyx Mori.

Isn’t this a detective story?

It is. And maybe you read these novels for the mystery, for the case and the case work, for all the logical steps and connections that Strike makes in order to pull everything together, but I must admit here, again, that this is the least interesting part of the books for me.

These novels use the detective structure as a frame to hang a different kind of story on. A story of love and friendship, of camaraderie and desire, of two damaged people who find one another through a complete accident, who find that they fit together.

They fit.

Do you know how rare that is?

Not in books, no, but in life. Perhaps, dear reader, you have never felt that. Never experienced the warm embrace of finding another whose body and mind simply fit into you.

This is the magic of Rowling’s Cormoran Strike novels. She captures these two so fully that they feel as if they could step off the page. And part of this is the way she breathes into their London. All these lives and personalities that flutter across the page. You can feel the heavy hand of Dickens here more than you could even in Harry Potter. Her London becomes populated by strange and wonderfully alive people, by people you like and admire, by some you despise and can’t wait to get off the page, but others who you’d like to just sit down with and have a pint.

Anyway, I suppose we may as well return to the case at hand.

The Case, again

Strike discovers Owen Quine brutally murdered at a rental house that he co-owns with Michael Fancourt. It is a death straight out of David Fincher’s Se7en. Grotesque as possible and mirroring the finale of Bombyx Mori.

Suspicion gets cast around, but the police land upon the obvious culprit: his wife, Leonora.

Sadly for her and Strike, she is a woman who seems incapable of self-preservation, and so her every statement and act seem to make her guilt more obvious until she’s arrested as the prime suspect.

Strike doesn’t think it’s her, though. And he really can’t have it be her, because he needs her to pay him for investigating this case, which has now transformed from missing person to brutal murder.

Or possibly suicide.

Strike runs all over England talking to people to try to find out who may have killed Owen and what this has to do with Bombyx Mori.

And since this novel is 450 pages, I cannot summarize all the goings on without boring you or forcing my brain to leak out my eyes, so you’ll just have to read it all and find out all the twists and turns yourself.

After talking and meeting with all these self-important authors and publishers and editors, Strike discovers that the killer was Owen’s longtime agent, who he was also blackmailing. The blackmail doesn’t matter so much, honestly, except that it drags Michael Fancourt, famed and respected author, more deeply into this net. And, honestly, I thought the big reveal was going to be that Fancourt was the murderer. Which, I guess, should have made it obvious to me that he wasn’t the killer.

But I am only a humble idiot.

Why did his agent kill him?

Like many agents, she was a failed writer. Never appreciated for her cleverness, forced to be a humble yet successful agent for major British authors. When Owen came to her with the concept for Bombyx Mori, she began developing a complicated plan that she sold to him as a way to bring him back into the limelight. He would fake his disappearance in order to drum up controversy and so on. Well, instead, she wrote her own version of Bombyx Mori and killed him. With this new slanderous version of Bombyx Mori leaked all over the literary world, suspicion would fall all over town, but never at her feet.

Interestingly, Strike’s half-brother Alex—one of Rokeby’s acknowledged children—helps with the finale here. We discover that Rokeby’s children have a bit of a fascination with Strike owing to how different he is from them and how he’s managed to make his own way without their famous father.

When Quine’s agent tries to escape after Strike confronts her, it’s Robin and Alex who stop her. Though this requires Robin to put herself in danger and end up in a carwreck.

This will have a rippling effect moving forward.

Anyway, the most fascinating aspect of the case, to me, leads to Strike’s first meeting with Michael Fancourt. Despite the capture of the killer coming after this, the Fancourt dialogue feels like the true climax of the novel.

The first novel ends in a bit of a chase with Strike nearly getting stabbed. A physical altercation, essentially. Rowling handled this well, making for a thrilling action setpiece.

But it pales in comparison to how utterly thrilling the Fancourt meeting is.

Dear reader, if you have not read this novel or even the previous one, they’re both worth it if only for this dialogue. I think it’s the single most impressive piece of writing I’ve read this year, and certainly the best writing Rowling’s ever done in her storied career.

If you have read it and didn’t think much of it at the time, you must read it again. If it doesn’t sink in this time, I don’t know. Maybe you’re blind or deaf. I cannot fix these things for you, cannot teach you to read, to dance to language, to feel the rapiers of conversation.

It reminds me of something David C Smith told me: Dialogue is action.

I’ve rarely seen a better example of what David meant than this scene with Fancourt. It is a masterclass not only in dialogue but in narrative and interpersonal tension and dynamics.

It stunned me, honestly. It stunned me as a piece of writing but stunned me all the more because it was written by JK goddamn Rowling.

I have, perhaps, been uncharitable to Rowling’s ability as a writer at times, but I really do think she achieves something so dramatically audacious here. To have 400 pages of detective fiction lead to this, a conversation with a famous author who is not the killer.

One of my deepest loves as a reader is encountering something that shouldn’t work. Something that no one should attempt because it’s too absurd, too difficult, too singular. It’s why, for example, Milan Kundera has no literary descendants: his work is too singular.

When finally I could return to myself and consider the shape of the novel, the dialogue it’s all hanged around, I realized that I had just encountered one of the best dialogues I think I’ve ever encountered.

Perhaps, someday, I’ll write something about this chapter and only this.

What’s all this then?

After it’s all said and done, we must now return to the relationship between Strike and Robin.

There’s an extended section in the middle of the case where Strike must drive cross country for some casework. Because he’s only got the one leg and no car, he must find a way there.

Robin borrows her parents’ Land Rover, and she offers to take him.

This is complicated by the fact that Matthew’s mother has just died unexpectedly. Because of the death, Matthew decides they must postpone the wedding, which Robin happily agrees to. Well, Matthew also needs her to come to the funeral back at their hometown, of course. She agrees because of course she does.

She’s not insane or a monster.

But the funeral, which she knows about in advance, is that weekend. When Strike needs a ride, she offers to drive him, certain there’s time to do both.

Reader, of course there’s not. At least not without consequences.

Complicating things further is that Strike hates having other people drive for him. Blame it on his general cantankerous nature, but the real culprit is that he lost his leg while in the backseat of a car. He spotted the IED from the backseat, but it was too late. A dead driver, a lost leg, and a friend who feels forever indebted to him because he’s alive only because of Strike.

On top of that, his knee is in such bad shape from his prosthetic that he can’t drive himself. An ongoing gag is the way Strike constantly shoves food in his mouth. By his own admission, he’s about thirty pounds overweight, and as my wife tells me, every extra pound you carry adds four pounds of weight to your knees and joints.

Strike does a poor job of taking care of himself and so now he must be at the mercy of someone else driving him. Complicating it somehow further, he knows that Matthew will not like Robin driving him cross country.

He even goes so far as to tell her, finally, once she confronts him about the state of the job and her position at the agency, that he does not want to train her because, eventually, he will have to ask her to do something that Matthew will not like.

Knives in her chest, in her sides, a burning anger, a scorching sorrow.

Anyway, the drive goes very well. As it turns out, Robin has gone through some kind of elite driving training, which only makes Strike respect her more.

Thus and so, attractions grows.

At the end of their long journey, Robin nearly misses the funeral entirely. Matthew believes she’s attracted to Strike, which hits her powerfully, unfairly, because she knows it’s true.

And the result, after the case is solved, is that Matthew goes from a broad dislike of Strike to near hatred, but Strike’s admiration for Robin steadily grows. More than that, he realizes that he cannot do this without her.

Without her, there is no agency. There’s just a one legged, overweight detective.

As a Christmas gift—another gift!—Strike enrolls Robin in an investigative course to train her to become a detective.

It is a moment of such quiet beauty and power. After 450 pages of denial, of two men deciding who and what she must be, after 450 pages of her fighting for her position, proving herself over and over again, in a dozen ways, she finally gets what she wants.

Significantly, Strike gives it to her, while Matthew continues to disapprove.

I mean, I’m not a romance reader in general, but if this stirs nothing in you, you might need a pacemaker.

Oh, and one more thing

We really must talk about the trans issue here, because I do suspect much of what follows with Rowling as a person can be traced back to this book and a single trans character that she included.

Owen Quine’s girlfriend—yes, he has a girlfriend and a wife—Kathryn Kent is an author of fantasy erotica, but she’s been rejected by everywhere in town. Kathryn has a transgender friend who she also mentors as an author named Pippa.

Pippa becomes attached to both Kathryn and Owen after being rejected by her family as she began her transition. When we meet her in the novel, she has socially transitioned and is waiting to have what we might not call gender affirming surgery.

So Kathryn is a frustrated writer and the mistress of a famous controversial author. Pippa sees the two as mentors, and she, herself, is a frustrated author writing an autobiography that Owen said held real literary promise.

It would be stretching credulity to say that either Kathryn or Pippa come off well in the novel. They are positioned, honestly, as very bad writers full of self-importance and belief in their own artistic voice and vision. This leads to some very funny scenes. Or at least they’re funny if you’ve ever had to listen to writers talk about their own work.

This paints them, at best, as very annoying.

But I don’t think this is transphobic, and when the novel came out, it was not universally pointed to as some startlingly bigoted portrayal or anything like that. Some reviewers did point to it as a potential weak spot or ill considered part of the novel. Of course, back in 2014, Rowling was viewed as a good liberal with the right kind of progressive views on race, sex, and class and so she was given the benefit of the doubt.

Later, though, people have pointed to this as a very problematic and even transphobic depiction. And so I think it is worth examining this a bit.

For one thing, I do think Rowling took the pushback on this character somewhat personally. We’ll talk about that in The Ink Black Heart, where I think it most obviously comes out. Like, I can imagine fans or people in her life or even in the literary world reached out to her and said something like, “Hey, maybe try better at this.”

And I don’t think it’s a perfect depiction of a transwoman. How could it be? Who is the ideal, perfect example of any identity?

Anyway, I do think part of what people find transphobic about it now is that Rowling draws attention to the aspects of a transgender woman transitioning and trying to pass. If you’ve never heard that word used in this context, it basically means that many people who transition struggle to look like the gender they are transitioning to.

For a simple example, a transman who is 5’2” or a transwoman who is 6’3” is going to have a harder time appearing to strangers as a man and a woman, respectively.

Now, it might be kinder to just act as if these are not things people notice, but Strike very much notices the ways Pippa does not pass. Descriptions of her hands, her Adam’s apple, her voice—all of these are very real concerns of transwomen, especially in the process of transitioning. We can pretend that none of these difficulties exist, and some will tell you that you should at least in media representation, but I think that’s kind of silly.

Pretending that transitioning is an easy process will not help people who are newly transitioning. If you tell a teenager that transitioning is simple and seamless, you are lying to them. And those lies may actually harm them, once they discover the rather unpleasant and slow process of transitioning from one gender to the other.

Like how taking testosterone might make you bald or how taking estrogen might make you gain weight or have sexual difficulties in various ways.

Pretending these don’t exist will do no one any favors.

And while Pippa comes off rather badly, she also comes off as a person. A recognizable one! Also, I think she’s more sympathetic than Kathryn and certainly more sympathetic than Owen, both of whom feel somewhat exploitative with regard to Pippa.

Pippa is a deeply hurt person. Rejected by her family, rejected by the arts, and then the leaked manuscript of Bombyx Mori treats her in a way that is easily described as transphobic. Hostilely so.

Now, could Pippa have been rendered better as a character and specifically as a trans character?

Sure. Probably. But that’s true of almost anyone ever depicted in a novel. And the truth is that Pippa is a very minor character. So minor that if she had been removed, you probably wouldn’t even notice.

I do think she’s a well-intentioned character. As in, I don’t believe Rowling wrote her to demean trans people. While many trans people may have been hurt by this character, that does not mean she is written poorly or even with obvious intention to hurt people’s feelings.

Now, this isn’t the first time that Rowling has written a specific identity clumsily or handled culture clumsily, but I don’t think she does these things maliciously.

Which was interesting when I came across this character. Reading these books in 2025, after Rowling has said all the things she’s said about trans people, you almost expect to find a smoking gun.

She wrote a trans character in 2014!

And yet, I don’t find this hateful. Really, at worse, I’d say it’s clumsy.

I mean, it is a mean spirited character to write, but not because she’s trans. It’s a mean spirited depiction of aspiring writers who will never make it because they’re simply bad writers.

But there’s also a lot of humor in that.

Really, though, I think the only significance of Pippa in the novel at all, and the only reason she’s worth commenting on now is because of Rowling’s public statements about trans people. Had she went on with her life and never uttered a single word about trans people, Pippa would remain as a tiny blip in her career. A character who maybe could have deserved a bit more care in the writing, but ultimately such a minor character that you didn’t even remember she was in the novel if the last time you read this book was in 2014 or 2017.

Now, some of this is just the normal churn of subscribers. There are a thousand reasons why someone might unsubscribe or stop paying for a subscription, but I suspect it’s related to writing about JK Rowling.

When I wrote about the Harry Potter series, every new review led to a flood of unsubscribes. I persisted in writing about Harry Potter against any kind of business sense because, well, I wanted to.

I did expect this. It’s why I took note of how many subscribers I had before I published that piece in order to compare it to how many are left right now.

You don’t have to believe me when I say this but I really do not look at the numbers on here. There was a time when that was not true, where I kept track of subscriber growth and views and things like that, which is why I knew exactly how many people were leaving when I wrote a new review of Harry Potter. But for the last two years or so, I just stopped looking. It’s why I stopped putting prompts to share and subscribe in my posts. What does it matter if this review you’re reading is read by 300 people or 30,000 people? What does it matter if this costs me another 100 subscribers or gains me 1,000?

I suppose if it mattered more to me I wouldn’t be doing this at all because it’s so obviously a bad business decision and maybe even bad for my career as a writer. But again, who cares?

You’re either here or you’re not. I’ll be writing it anyway.

If you’d like to catch up on the series:

• Introduction

• The Cuckoo’s Calling

• The Silkworm

Now let’s get on with it.

What’s in a Name?

Before we dive into the novel, I think it’s worth discussing why this is a Robert Galbraith novel and not a JK Rowling novel.

After Harry Potter, Rowling put out an adult realist novel called A Casual Vacancy. The novel wasn’t very well received but it was successful, no doubt, because of the author attached to it. Perhaps out of curiosity or frustration, Rowling picked up a pseudonym—a male pseudonym—and wrote a detective novel.

She was revealed as the author relatively quickly. You can read a bit about how it happened here.

She described writing pseudonymously as liberating, which makes sense, considering she was and remains the most famous writer on the planet. And I think we may as well take her word for it.

It’s not like she needed the financial success of these books. But I imagine part of the impetus behind this name change was to see if she could do it again. Could she become a bestseller without the weight of her name on the cover? Would her new books be successful dropped into the world as if by a debut author?

Sadly, we’ll never know.

I mean, it sold all right out the gate! Not well for a Rowling novel, but certainly pretty well for a debut mystery writer. But once Rowling was revealed as the author, this catapulted in popularity and justified all the subsequent sequels.

Disasters Hound Him

We’re introduced first to Robin Ellacott. Young. Pretty. Newly engaged. She’s walking to her first day as a temp at a detective agency. What could be more exciting! Sure, she’ll be a secretary and not, you know, a detective. But still!

When she arrives, the first thing that happens is a beautiful woman storms out and past her. A moment later, a very large man rips the door open and nearly knocks Robin over. She stumbles back and is about to fall down the stairs but this large man reaches out to save her and inadvertently grabs her tightly by the breast. Awkward, humiliating, but it saves her from falling backwards down the stairs.

This is our introduction to Cormoran Strike and this series, and I think it’s worth stopping right here to examine, for a moment, what this foreshadows.

We don’t begin with the case or the mystery. Instead, we begin with these two very different people. Rather than a femme fatale walking in through the door to send the detective on towards the case that will drive the novel, we have the beautiful dark haired woman rushing away from our detective. And though he chases after, he runs face first into a woman who will define much of his future, into the relationship that will drive this novel and series onward, into a woman who gives everything to make him a success.

And in the immediate short term, rather than a femme fatale, she just wants her new boss to think well of her. Possibly even to like her as a person. There’s no calculation in her. No scheming to take down this man or any other. She’s a bit of Hermione. Clever, perky, and desperate to please, which may very well be her greatest weakness.

And this is where we start. With people. With relationship. Not with grisly crime and some new case for our detective to work. An archetypal bad girl walking out on Strike and an archetypal good girl walking in on Strike’s life.

But let us meet Strike.

The one-legged bastard son of Jonny Rokeby, a famous rockstar, Cormoran is gruff and short tempered and generally unfriendly and miserably, horribly broke.

So broke that he had canceled the temp agency’s placement, though no one passed this information on to Robin. So now she’s here with this large, unfriendly man who doesn’t want her there when John Bristow enters wanting Strike to investigate the suicide of his adopted supermodel sister, Lula Landry.

Bristow is sort of an acquaintance of Strike. His elder brother, Charlie, was one of Strike’s childhood friends, though Charlie died tragically when he was about ten years old. This tragedy led the Bristows to adopt Lula.

The Bristows are very wealthy, it’s worth stating, and so when John offers to pay Strike to investigate his sister’s suicide while he’s facing eviction, he can’t help but agree, even though, morally, he believes he should not take the case.

After all, it seems an open and shut case that Lula killed herself by leaping from her balcony—which is why the police deemed it a suicide a few months earlier, when she died.

Why We’re Really Here

Bristow leaves and we return to Strike’s life outside the work. The woman who left his office earlier is Charlotte Campbell, his on again off again girlfriend/fiancée of the last sixteen years. She’s a wealthy socialite and Strike was her live-in boyfriend/fiancée ever since having his leg blown off in Afghanistan. Now that they’re broken up and he’s penniless, he comes to realize that his office is his home. And Robin does her best to not let Strike know that she knows that he’s sleeping on a cot in his office.

Strike and Robin are in a bit of limbo. Thanks to the Bristow case, Strike can now pay Robin but not for long. She’s pleasant and accommodating and clever and he’s just a man in the midst of a sequence of the worst days of his life.

It’s a brilliant set up, honestly.

We won’t go into the nitty gritty of the case or all the detective work that gets us there, because, for me, this isn’t really what hooks me, what keeps me going. Like I said, I’m not really a mystery reader. Never have been. I’ve read, I would bet, fewer than fifty mysteries in my life. In adulthood, I’ve probably read twenty, with the vast majority of those happening this year (remember, this series is itself eight books). People being cops and doing detective work just doesn’t do a lot for me.

The strength of this novel comes from the ways Rowling stacks tensions.

Robin’s fiancé, Matthew Cunliffe, is an accountant moving up in the world. He and Robin have been together for years and he does not approve of Strike, nor does he approve of Robin working there. But he’s a nice guy, yeah?

He’s nice.

Anyway, he wants her to move onto a better paying job at a company that doesn’t seem about to collapse, which is pretty good advice, by any metric. But Robin is finding she likes the work. More than that, she’s able to help Strike, and Strike is willing to accept and take her help.

She’s quite clever, after all. Has a bit of a knack for this detective business.

So we have a tension between Robin and her fiancé as one lever. Another is financial. Another is the difficulty of the case. Another is a growing tension between Strike (not a cop) and the police (the cops) he knows and whose help he needs. Still another is between Strike and his half-sister Lucy, who just wants Strike to be happy. And, finally, the tension between Robin and Strike, which begins here and carries us through the next 6,000 pages.

Their tension is multifaceted. For one, Strike is immediately attracted to Robin. For another, Robin is inexperienced. For still another, he can’t pay her. For yet another, she wants to work there. She wants to help, even if the pay sucks and the hours are long.

She wants this.

The Case and all that

There are a few things hanging over this novel that make it all so difficult. We’ll go through them in turn.

1. Money - Strike ain’t got none of it, and this makes everything rather precarious. Every time Strike takes a cab, he’s counting the blocks, counting the pennies.

2. One leg - Strike, as I mentioned, only has one leg, and he’s not been taking care of it or himself to the degree that he needs to. Adding to his problem is a bit of vanity. He could use crutches or a cane, but he prefers to hobble along on his prosthetic, even when it causes him great pain. Which it often does because he’s about twenty or thirty pounds overweight (my wife told me something interesting - every extra pound you’re carrying is like adding four extra pounds to your knees).

3. Jonny Rokeby - Strike’s rockstar father, who does not appear in the novel, but whose fame and notoriety cast a far shadow. More than that, Strike took a loan from him to start the business. This galls Strike and he’s desperate to pay him back and clear himself of the debt, which also leads us back to point 1. He tries his very best to have no contact with Rokeby for reasons that are both complicated and not so complicated.

4. Charlotte Campbell - Strike’s longtime lover haunts nearly every page of this book despite only appearing in that brief moment at the start.

5. Class - Class is all over this novel and the series more broadly. Matthew is a middle class striver. Strike is a low class brute who can quote ancient Greek poetry. Charlotte is a rich girl and the Bristows are all rich kids. Strike swims with fishes made of money while he himself is so broke that he can barely afford to buy himself lunch.

6. The Cops - The London police are not thrilled that Strike is investigating an investigation that they ended. They deemed her death a suicide and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. But Strike also relies on his many contacts in the police force to pass him information. It’s a complicated situation, but Roy Carver is one man who seems to despise Strike.

And so we go on and get red herringed and find leads and come to the thrilling conclusion that is, to be completely honest, sort of hard to follow and maybe harder to believe, but it all makes enough sense. It’s just a circuitous route and I’m maybe dumber than the average mystery reader, but Strike solves the case!

He proves the police wrong, which is bad news, in the long term, for his relationship with the cops, but it does wonders for his agency’s prospects. After all, this becomes a very high profile case due to Lula’s fame. Add to that proving that the dang cops blew the case and that the man who solved the case is the bastard son of a famous rockstar and you have a bit of a media frenzy brewing.

Oh, and it is very important to know that at the end of the novel, as a goodbye gift to Robin, Strike buys her a fancy dress that she tried on during the investigation. His attraction for her has grown to the point where he can’t ignore it, but, at this point, he fully expects to never see her again.

She’s engaged to another man, leaving for a new job, and is over a decade younger than him. The chances of them running into one another is unlikely, and so he feels it’ll be okay to give her a gift that could easily be construed as romantic in nature.

Of course, the little sticking point is that she chooses to keep working for him, even though Strike can barely afford to pay her.

This is the perfect engine for narratives to spiral off of.

The Rowling of it all

We can see a line from Harry Potter to Cormoran Strike, as I discussed in the Introduction. But what we really see here is Rowling at the top of her game.

All the praise she received for making wonderful and distinct characters throughout Harry Potter is brought to another level here. Strike’s London is populated by weirdos and freaks but also kind, goodhearted people. People with their own motivations and internal tensions.

In Lucy, we see a bit of Molly Weasley. In Robin, a bit of Hermione. In Strike, a bit of Mad-Eye Moody, though tempered by Remus Lupin and with just enough dash of Harry Potter, if only by their similar circumstances.

Both Strike and Harry are haunted by their parents, by the fame thrust upon them, by the damage done to them. Harry cannot hide his lightning scar just as Strike cannot outpace his missing leg.

And the London she builds is not exactly thick as concrete, but it does feel substantial enough. There’s a texture to the place as she builds it. It’s not the whimsy of Harry Potter but it’s every bit as grounded and comprehensible and lived in as Hogwarts. Though how lived in does Hogwarts feel is a more complex question than you may think, at least at first.

But everything that Rowling did well in Harry Potter is improved here in Strike. The writing is simply better. Her command of action and mystery and character is stronger. There’s an effortlessness to this whole endeavor, and you feel that in the prose, in the structure.

For all the ways I may fault Rowling as a writer, she has always been propulsively readable. And these are some of the most readable books I’ve ever encountered.

I mean, it is rare for me to read a series from start to finish without taking a break for another book, but I just blasted my way through all eight, barely taking a breath to look at another book, to even think about picking up anything else.

A New Beginning

Look, I’m not interested in or invested in making you like Rowling or even her books. But if you have ever trusted my opinions here on art and specifically literature, I’m telling you that this book is at least worth a glance.

If you don’t like it, well, that’s fine. People don’t all like the same things.

But if you dig it, if you couldn’t put it down, then you’re going to enjoy this wild ride that we’re off to together.

So buckle up, because we’ve miles to go this year through Rowling’s London.

Catch up here:

• Introduction

• The Cuckoo’s Calling

• The Silkworm

An Itch

Call it morbid curiosity or some compulsion towards being coated in grime and dirt that I learned from my dear sweet long dead dog, but something’s been brewing in me. I sometimes get these urges to read books that I had never previously been interested in.

But perhaps my dad trying his best to die prepared me well to dive into some doomed literary project.

Two years ago, similar compulsions led me to reread Harry Potter for the first time.

Curiously, this was taken as a political act by some. With each review, people would unsubscribe by the bucketful and yet I pressed on against any kind of business or reputational reason. I had someone accuse me of engaging in genocide, which is quite an accusation. I cannot say that I was completely surprised, but I did find it somewhat annoying that culture had moved in such a way that we cannot talk about books as books, but must talk about them as badges of morality, of honor. And by simply engaging with certain books—some of the most popular books ever written—you are aiding and abetting some sort of political project.

And, I mean, not for nothing, I think it would be hard to read my reviews of Harry Potter and come to the conclusion that I like or approve of some kind of political messaging happening within them.

Yet there I was sitting in my family room while our kitchen remodel dragged on, with my family forced to essentially live in one room in the house, thinking to myself, I wonder if those Cormoran Strike novels are any good.

Give it a Scratch, fella

Well, I took a look at my library and they had the first four available. Just sitting there, waiting for this exact kind of curiosity to strike me at just such a moment when I could roll over and feast on a literary project while my life sways in a strange state of stasis but also constant flux, the ground perpetually unstable beneath my feet, the world sloshing all round me while my father does his best dying man’s dance, while our house is in an absolute state of disrepair before it’s reconstructed, while we try to sell my parents’ house to deal with some disastrous financial decisions my father made that may cause me to sink along with him unless I can cobble things together rapidly.

Thus and so, I cracked open the first book. After about a day and a half, I cracked open the next and then the next and then the next. Then I got the fifth and sixth books from the library, and after about a month from when I started, I had read all eight of these novels. With a ballooning page count per book, I read roughly 6,000 pages of good ol fashioned detective fiction over those brief yet endless September weeks.

Which is a genre I have a troubled relationship. Or rather, it’s cleaner to say that I generally don’t much care for detective fiction or even mysteries more broadly.

Those who have known me since my neo-noir days probably felt their jaws hit the floor, but I do consider noir, and especially neo-noir, considerably different from mysteries. Maybe that’s all quite superficial or hairsplitting to you, but this is my little corner of the internet where I get to be lord and master.

For reasons that I’ll explain at length over the eight coming reviews, I’ll get to why these novels worked so well for me where dozens of other mystery novels have not.

One simple reason that’s worth saying up front is that JK Rowling has improved as a writer. This is a rarer accomplishment than it should be, but Rowling has become a writer who I think is truly worth reading.

Which is difficult for many people who live online to handle. And so I suppose I must discuss Rowling herself a bit.

The Author as Enemy of the People

This is something I’ve discussed a few times, but you can find the most succinct example here, I think:

Though you may also want to look here:

Both of these essays are largely about engaging with art by people we find reprehensible (or, in the latter, engaging with art by someone who merely likes someone who you find reprehensible), so I won’t rehash everything here.

Now, I prefer to stick closely to the text and discuss a story based on the words on the page rather than what surrounds them beyond the text. My short story podcast is dedicated to this, for example. We analyze the text, rather than analyzing the author or the sociopolitical and cultural context of the work.

And so I’d like to be able to discuss JK Rowling in this way, since I do genuinely find her a fascinating author. I think her career as a writer is one of the more interesting careers to look at. However, this is trickier to do with Rowling, in part because her novels interact with her critics. We saw this with her depictions of fame and journalism in the Harry Potter series. We also saw how she purposefully drew real life parallels between her wizarding world—like the house elves—and real world political topics, like slavery.

This invites us to pull Rowling herself into the discussion of the text. And we’ll have to do that in several of the Cormoran Strike novels.

And this is part of what makes her fascinating to me. As does the fact that so many people have turned against her due to her public statements about trans people. It is genuinely interesting that such a beloved author, someone whose liberalism so deeply informed her work and even her public persona, has become one of the greatest enemies of liberals on Twitter and Bluesky. Interestingly, this has happened as she becomes a more interesting author.

And perhaps this is a strange perversion of mine, where I find controversial artists interesting and worth discussing. I find it fascinating that Knut Hamsun and Louis Ferdinand-Celine wrote some of the most interesting novels of the 20th Century and then went on to be Nazi propogandists. I find Kanye West’s turn towards extremism fascinating. And the list goes on, whether it’s Michael Jackson, the pedophile, or Roman Polanski, infamous rapist. I’m drawn to this tension, this conflict between the work and the person. Drawn, perhaps, to extreme behaviors, to extreme ideologies, the same way some are drawn to watch trains or shipwrecks.

To put it simply, this fascinates me. I cannot look away, cannot help but scratch at it.

At the same time, I think it’s worthwhile for many people to consider how Rowling’s controversies largely only dog her on Twitter and Bluesky. I wrote a bit about this last year:

And that piece was not unrelated to this previous piece here about the Hogwarts game and the media blacklisting of it, despite it going on to make a billion dollars or some such number.

What these two pieces get at is that the attempts to cancel Rowling have failed utterly. Bookstores will continue to carry Harry Potter, possibly until long past our great grandchildren are dead, and her movies will remain a yearly ritual for many families.

It’s worth noting, too, that her Cormoran Strike novels have sold over 20 million copies by themselves! That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the 600 million copies of Harry Potter, but it also makes them some of the more successful books of the last decade. So to say that her political views have materially harmed her is, honestly, absurd.

And perhaps you could say that the drop from 600 million to 20 million is purely because of politics, but I think the simpler answer is that most writers have one work that outsells all the rest by a sizeable margin. Sometimes this happens late in a writer’s career, like George RR Martin, but sometimes it’s at the start, with everything else lagging well behind.

For people who spend too much time online, Rowling may feel well and truly canceled, but you might be surprised just how many people have never even heard of the controversies you hate her for. More than that, it may come as an unpleasant surprise to learn that most people, at least in the anglophone world, agree with her views on trans people.

Now, if you showed them her Twitter page where she posts about trans people dozens of times per day and rarely posts about anything else, they might feel differently about her specific attitude towards trans people. If nothing else, they might consider this fixation unpalatable, especially for a beloved—or once beloved—children’s author.

So this is who JK Rowling has become to people who use sites like Twitter and Bluesky. It’s also who she has turned herself into online.

Can you deal with that?

Perhaps not!

Perhaps you cannot appreciate books written by someone you find unpleasant or vile.

That’s all up to you.

And so perhaps you’ve no interest in the coming essays about Cormoran Strike and would prefer to never hear about Rowling ever again.

I won’t blame you. We all must decide what to do with the precious minutes of this life. For me, that often means chasing strange obsessions.

But if you’re still reading, I’m going to briefly make an argument for why you should give these novels a shot.

Continuing Hogwarts

It may be surprising to many people who know Rowling for Harry Potter that she went on to write a series following a private detective who solves grisly murders that sometimes involve sexual violence. What would make a beloved children’s author shift her career so dramatically?

Well, the simple fact is that she didn’t. In fact, Cormoran Strike is almost a perfect continuation of Harry Potter.

I mean, in some ways, that’s obviously not true. There’s no magic school. There’s no magic at all! But in almost every other way, this feels like the plain and obvious next step after writing Harry Potter.

Each Harry Potter novel is structured more like a mystery than it is like a fantasy novel. Oh, sure, there’s all the magic to contend with, but each of those novels is more or less a detective novel where the detective is a student at a school. She’s not the first to do this, mind. The Boxcar Children, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, et cetera, et cetera, etc.

In fact, her Harry Potter novels often struggled most when she deviates from the mystery structure.

JK Rowling was always writing mysteries, was always writing detective fiction.

Along with that, the unique aspect to Harry Potter is how it aged up with its audience. If you were ten years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came out, you were twenty when The Deathly Hallows came out. You likely would not have been too invested in the series as you grew up had the content of the books not aged up with you.

She didn’t have to do this. The books could have remained books for ten year olds, even as Harry Potter got older, but she chose to have the content and storylines grow darker and more complicated as her core audience grew up.

Well, if you were ten years old in 1997 when the first Harry Potter came out and were twenty years old when the final one came out, you would have been 26 when the first Cormoran Strike novel came out and you’d be 38 right now, when the eighth Cormoran Strike novel came out.

You’re ready for your favorite author to continue writing for you at the age you are. And Rowling is still doing that. Still following those kids who picked up Harry Potter when they were eight or twelve, and she’s been growing with them, feeding them new books appropriate to their age as they hobble on towards middle age.

This is interesting.

If you don’t find this interesting, I just don’t know what else to say to you about it.

Now, we’re eight books into Cormoran Strike and Rowling promises the conclusion will be at ten books. We’re also twelve years into Cormoran Strike, which means she’s been writing this series already longer than she wrote the Harry Potter series. The volume of time she’s spent with these characters and the sheer volume of words demonstrate, to me at least, how she weighs these two series against one another.

And I do think that these novels are legitimately good. Not just good for mysteries or good as a follow up to The Deathly Hallows, but, like, actually good novels. More than that, I think Rowling has become a far more accomplished writer with each book (though I’ll have lots to say about this once we get to The Hallmarked Man).

We also see a much clearer political focus. Much of this is because she doesn’t chase a storyline as poorly thought out as the house elves again. But a much bigger piece of this is that there’s a real clarity to this series.

If I could sum it up in a single sentence, I would say that the Cormoran Strike series is obsessed with the ways society contains, constrains, and brutalizes women.

Yes, it sometimes dabbles beyond this and pokes around in other political fights or topics, but the main thrust of the series hinges around the threats to women, and the ways in which women must fight for even scraps of equality, even in this enlightened modern age of feminism and Good Men and Allyship.

What Now?

Well, if I’ve piqued your interest, I’m going to lead you through this series. What will the pace be? I cannot say right now. I should know, since all the posts will be written by the time this post comes out. I mean, I could just post it week after week, but I think I’ll post them monthly. That seems the right kind of cadence. It will also give those who want to read along with the series of essays time to read the novels.

So, yes, let us settle on a monthly schedule.

The Cuckoo’s Calling - January

The Silkworm - February

Career of Evil - March

Lethal White - April

Troubled Blood - May

The Ink Black Heart - June

The Running Grave - July

The Hallmarked Man - August

Addendum

I may also decide to watch the TV series adapting the books. If so, I’ll write about them as well. Maybe as a single post. We’ll see.

My contention, often, is that most people are normal but that the algorithmic life has destroyed much of our shared humanity and our empathy for one another. Even so, most of these deranged gremlins make up the tiniest sliver of humanity and even were you to meet them in person, they would probably act quite normal.

And then there’s always the issue that you may be arguing with a twelve year old. Often when I see someone posting in a confidently ignorant manner, I just assume they’re a child and don’t give it a second thought.

This may be unfair to teenagers and preteens, but it will save you quite a lot of time by filtering out mass stupidity and silly delusions.

Anyway, I was thinking about this sort of thing when I came across the DISCOURSE and people writing about WORKING CLASS MALE LITERATURE, and I guess I may as well just point to what everyone pointed me towards, which is and this post he made on his newsletter:

Though if you’re expecting a takedown or something like that, maybe look elsewhere. It’s not even really a critique of this specifically, but more a way to look at this discussion happening all over the world wide web. Though I will say this: anyone so desperate for the approval and acceptance of his peers probably isn’t worth listening to; and, young men, do not take advice about what it means to be a man from someone with such a narrow view.

Though for the curious, I did actually write about some previous controversy stoked up by Alex Perez, though I used it more to poke at the indie literary scene more broadly.

But all of this brings me to something new: a positive view.

who is this for?

In the discussions of a working class male, there’s a sort of Noble Savage quality to the discourse, which often makes me feel like none of the people speaking on their behalf have ever spent time with anyone who’s not addicted to their smartphone.

I will poke a bit more fun at Perez’ essay, though, but only about his inclusion of Roberto Bolano, who is not American but who Perez says is very American. I honestly don’t know how someone could read Bolano and think this, especially since the essay also critiques the literary man for wanting to read really long books in translation, since Bolano’s reputation largely relies on his two very large novels that most of the world encountered in translation.

Ah, one more thing: It all starts with Hemingway is very, very funny, since he was a rich kid who was also overly obsessed with ideas about his own manhood.

Anyway, the discourse around working class literature and literary men, in general, seems to revolve around style. There’s a sense that more masculine a writer is, the more tied to literary minimalism he is, which is why, as Perez says, it all begins with Hemingway (though Knut Hamsun would likely want his name thrown in the ring—but there I go mentioning a European, and a Scandinavian no less!—since Hemingway is, in many ways, aping Hamsun). And then there’s Denis Johnson—who I like a lot!—who was also a rich kid.

And this isn’t all to say that rich kids can’t be great writers and artists—they often are. But that our ideas of working class are quite spongy and self serving and often, I think, rely on never interacting with actual working people.

And then there’s the curious case of Raymond Carver, whose best known stories are best known for a style that he didn’t write them in! Rather, Gordon Lish rewrote and butchered Carver’s prose into the exacting and precise prose that’s now become so renowned and influential.

If anything, Carver is an example of how often the working class are used, abused, and stolen from. Even his art was stolen and manipulated and sold.

So much of this discussion is so grievance based that it’s hard to take seriously, especially since there’s no curiosity about the people being spoken for. A polemic must have an enemy, I suppose, and so there’s these assertions that you’re not ALLOWED to talk about Carver or Johnson, two of the most celebrated authors of the last fifty years. They’re too AMERICAN, these writers scream, as if we’re still trapped in 2005, bombs raining down on Baghdad, George W Bush ducking those projectile shoes.

But I think this is honestly quite demeaning to working class people. First that they’re such suckers as to believe that they must find some school of literature to speak for them, to speak to them. As if they cannot speak for themselves or cannot understand all these ten dollar words the college folk use when they talk and write. And then there’s the idea that comes from the overly educated that you can’t understand what some might call High Literature without receiving special instruction.

I’d say I’m living proof that that isn’t true! I’ve written enough about James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy here to likely convince people that I’m the kind of idiot who reads big dumb books that smart people like, but I didn’t get a literature degree or have any kind of formal training in how to read a difficult text.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned in that I simply picked up the books and began reading them like any other novel, rather than making them a work of study. And perhaps some would say I read them wrong or must have missed the point or any other kind of notion, but I’ll just say, as I keep saying in my ongoing series on Stephen King, that I think Joyce gave birth to the 20th Century and his afterbirth keeps frothing forth into this 21st Century.

But here’s the thing about complexity, about difficult literature: it’s for everyone. And much of it was written by the working class, the desperate poor. James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy, for example, are known and lauded for their styles, for their inventiveness, for their linguistic and narrative ingenuity.

Both of them came from those working poor and lived the lives of the desperately poor. Looks at Hubert Selby Jr and William Faulkner, two of the more daring prose stylists of the 20th Century, and you’ll find their working class roots and how poverty shaped them and their world. We can talk about Steinbeck and Bradbury and George RR Martin and Jose Saramego (but, alas, again, European). Male writers whose working class backgrounds informed everything about their work.

There are many working class male writers writing right now! and are two of the best right here on substack, but there’s also Brian Allen Carr and Bud Smith and just dozens of others. Someone might even call me working class, though I think, technically, I’d have to disagree. I think it’s more accurate to say I’m among the Moneyed Poor (though my father comes from the abjectly poor, if that means anything).

None of them preen about how the Literary World doesn’t understand them because this kind of conversation is really one for the email and professorial classes. And maybe that’s what these people are all angling for: a gig where they can teach a class called Postwar Working Class Fiction or Masculinity in Post-postmodern America or some such thing, where they can lecture to the indebted bourgeoisie about what the savage poor need and what they think and what their spokesmen have to say about them all.

working class fiction

You know what working class men are really reading?

I hate to break it to you, but it’s not Raymond Carver. Maybe it should be! Maybe it would be, if we were having this discussion in 1985 or 1995. But it is, sadly, unavoidably, 2025, and working class men are mostly reading books like Cradle by Will Wight and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. They’re reading Bernard Cornwell and Stephen King. They’re still reading George RR Martin and Joe Abercrombie.

And maybe above all else, they’re reading Brandon fucking Sanderson.

And maybe that bums you out or lets the wind out of your sails, but let us ask why, because that’s far more interesting than bemoaning the what. Why are young men drawn to LitRPG and Progression Fantasy, to the worldcraftiness of Brandon Sanderson?

And the simple answer is, actually, because of the positive case for masculinity (among numerous other factors, for the working class man is not so fixated on the things that the educated may think) at the center of these. The works of Wight, Dinniman, and Sanderson present quite effortlessly what it means to be a man. What a man is.

And they do this by showing what a man does.

You won’t find polemics and screeds about what men ought to be or ought to do. And, yes, they show men who are flawed. Men who are despicable. But even these flawed examples of men create a spectrum of what it is to be a man, to live a masculine life. And it’s obviously not all being emotionally hard and physically strong.

They’re creating a framework. Maybe not even on purpose. Honestly, it’s probably not on purpose. Which is why it’s effective and why these stories resonate so much with young men and boys.

And, sure, I’d prefer young men read someone besides Sanderson, for example. There is a longing within me for more freaks to like the things that I love and that shaped me, but the youth have spoken and they keep speaking and the name that dribbles off their lips is Brandon Sanderson.

An interesting question would have something to do with the rise in genre fiction and how it came to dominate even the high reaches of academia, but the working class have always had an affinity for sword and sorcery, for lasers and spaceships, for superheroes and baseball cards.

What we see in Lord of the Rings (a series I love) and The Wheel of Time (a series I hate) is a full and well realized framework for masculinity. Tolkien and Jordan were both soldiers in war and what we see in their depictions of strength and masculinity is that it’s so much more than physicality. Rather, it’s this bonedeep strength of will.

But perhaps most importantly, it’s the ability to forgive. Not only those who have wronged you, but the ability to forgive yourself.

Because remember: Frodo doesn’t throw the ring into Mount Doom.

He fails. His story is one of failure. At the very last moment, at the final, crucial moment, his will gives out and he fails.

He fails.

And yet, he is our hero. He is the hero, both within the constructed world and within the text and out here, in the real life world we real lifely live in.

a positive view

And rather than write thousands of words about each of these series in turn and what they say about masculinity and manhood, I’ll save those for a later date and wrap this essay up. But this will be something I’ll keep returning to.

I’ve been thinking about masculinity, perhaps for the first time, these last few years. Maybe because I have a few sons now. Maybe because there’s so clearly a genuine crisis among young men and a dearth of outreach for them.

I haven’t really known how to approach the topic, to be honest. My goal has been to present a positive view.

Rather than describe narrowly what a man ought to be or should be, and so on, I suppose I hoped to present a framework. A working theory on choice and action. All topics that feel a bit too big to simply dive into without at least taking a few breaths.

But this conversation about literature and masculinity opens up a path for me. And so I’ll likely do what I have always done: write reviews that are a mix of personal essay, autobiography, and political dialogue.

Until next time.

More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

• It

• 11/23/63

• From a Buick 8

I have a growing theory about Stephen King that I didn’t fully appreciate or understand until I encountered this novel.

I think we can best understand King’s place in the literary canon as one of rehabilitation. Perhaps the word revival will also do here. While King is through and through a horror writer and has been subject to the literary crowd spending most of his career telling him and his fans that actually he sucks ass and can’t write for shit, you shit for brained goon.

Longevity has a way of turning this around and those who were denigrated become celebrated. And so much of King is seen now in a new light and many literary types—maybe even those previous detractors and naysayers!—will now sing his praises.

I do think King owes much to a much older style of storytelling. He feels, in very specific ways, like a 19th Century writer. Perhaps it’s his unhurried manner. His novels don’t leap with tension from the first page or start sprinting pulpishly or projectorally towards some conflict. In fact, often his books take quite a while to wander before it’s even entirely clear what the conflict is.

This novel is the best example of that that I’ve yet read. In fact, I wasn’t so sold on the first half of this novel! Had I just picked this up on a whim and not because of this project, I likely would have dumped it around page 200 or thereabouts.

I’m happy that I didn’t.

This isn’t my favorite of King’s novels but it is a very interesting one.

You see, my theory is that King’s career of revitalization is knee deep in horror as a genre and literary tradition.

Salem’s Lot is a vampire novel. Not so strange now, but vampires in the late 70s were not exactly driving the literary world wild. Much of the revival of vampire fiction has everything to do with King, here, and Anne Rice, there.

In Rice, we saw the romantic sheen of immortality, of vampirism. But in King we saw the horror. Vampires as monsters. In both, though, we see the ancient folklore stories brought to our modern age of cars and stereos, of moving pictures and electricity.

In this they both pick up Stoker’s legacy. After all, Stoker took the folk horror out of superstition and juxtaposed it with cutting edge technology (at least of that time).

So here we have one act of revival and it built his career.

Then we have The Shining, which brought the haunted house back from memory of bygone days and old fashioned stories. He shoved it in a hotel, transposing what place as horror can mean.

In Cujo we see a tale of possession, but in an I Am Legend manner, where the supernatural is given biological and psychological explanation.

It is an entire universe and perhaps best thought of as a mix of Ulysses, a haunted house, and Lord of the Rings. Probably I should explain that in more detail—spend a thousand or ten words to make it clearer—but I’ll trust you, dear reader, to fill in the gap, to tie these into a pleasing knot.

11/23/63 takes the high tech of time machines and strips the tech out entirely. But we also have a sort of Ghosts of Christmas past to it, with the unutterable, unchangeable past forever at our fingertips yet displayed before us in all the magnificent horror of time and distance.

From a Buick 8 is an off-kilter alien invasion. Once again, stripped of technology and instead shoved into a brokedown car. A transdimensional hole made in Detroit when Detroit was the richest city in the nation.

If you follow me through this, you see that King is revitalizing old worn tropes and spitshining them new. We see this in Revival and its revival of the mad scientist.

But King’s in no hurry to get there. First we must dance his song of americana nostalgia as our doped out hero ruins his life until he encounters the faithless pastor of his childhood who seeks only to turn back time, to change the past, to bring the dead back.

We cannot help but see Mary Shelley in this novel, even as we must wrestle with one of King’s most annoying protagonists (sorry). A failed rockstar who is kind of sort of trying to put his life back together. His story is small and humble, and so of course we must watch him attempt something uncanny, unbelievable, unbearably important and grave.

But this is a novel dominated by such figures. There are no heroes. No people who rise above and succeed and find their life enriched by the horrors they experienced. Rather, you see a cast of people weighed down by life, by what has happened, by what they’ve done and who they’ve been.

Do you hear Joyce and Dickens in this? How about Dostoevsky?

Do you hear the yawning past opening wide to swallow us, to regurgitate King?

There were a thousand ways to revitalize and restore the mad scientist, but King chose this way. He chose a cast of losers and failures and weirdos. He chose a man of faith who has god stripped from him, who then wages a war against god himself.

Do you hear it?

Can you heart it?

Or is this my own delusion spilling out, seeing the ghosts of the 19th Century everywhere, hearing Joyce’s peculiar form of anarchomarxism and maximalism in all things?

Despite parts of this novel feeling the weakest to me, I do think the second half makes up for much. Sure, it’s no It, but no other book is like It either.

For a novel that begins so mundane and lackadaisical, it really does twist into one of the wildest visions I’ve seen from King. And that is no small thing to say.

Also, just a quick question for the class: is this novel connected to From a Buick 8?

Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII

Six years ago, I released a book through CV Hunt's Grindhouse Press called Saint Sadist. If any of my books are going to outlive me, it will most likely be that one. This is the book that people bring up to me the most. I've had a reader ask to have its title tattooed across her knees. It was nominated for a Splatterpunk Award. When my partner came down to Killer Con for an afternoon, readers and friends who took the time to tell her how much they loved my writing used Saint Sadist as an example.

It's my most unique work. Is it my most extreme? That's hard to say. I guess that depends on what your triggers are. There's a scene in Gods of the Dark Web that gives it a run for its money.

But still, the book's success haunts me.

It came about through a perfect storm of personal growth, reading extensively outside my genre, and having time on my hands due to a long commute and a social media blackout that lasted several months.

Earlier that year, I wound up in the hospital. I was overwhelmed with unresolved trauma, keeping my family together, substance abuse, and the state of the world. I needed to check out temporarily from reality, or I was going to check out permanently from life.

I needed to handle my shit. Part of that was getting on the right medicine. Part of that was getting out there and broadening my friend circle. Part of that was taking a long weekend to do nothing but work on myself. The hospital stay helped me do all these things.

When I got back to life, I knew logging back onto the socials was a terrible idea because I was still in a vulnerable mental state. I stayed off them from May of 2018 until January of 2019. I also re-enrolled in school.

Traveling to Texas State University from my house in North Austin provided the opportunity to consume a ton of books on audio. As a student, I had access to the university's library, and instead of looking for my usual horror titles, I dug into the classics, stuff they make you read in school. Henry Miller. William Faulkner. Ovid. John Milton. Rebecca Du Maurier. Epic poetry meshed in my brain with stream-of-consciousness prose. All of it instilled vivid imagery in my subconscious. Perhaps none more than Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (a book that taught me how to depict the intrusive thoughts I experienced) and Milton's Paradise Lost (a poem that's heretical in its themes and beautiful in its construction).

Those works and others inspired me the way horror hadn't in a long time. Horror was and is in my heart, but at that stage of my life, I needed something else as a reader.

Because I was off social media, I took to writing on my phone instead of posting or doomscrolling. I began construction of a horror narrative written in a style uncommon to the genre. It was an organic process because of my headspace after the hospital stay and my excitement of reading books I'd never expected to read. Seriously, no one sets out to read Milton or Faulkner for fun, but I made it fun.

And I wrote my ass off. From October to December, I wrote on my phone as I walked to and from class, emailed my work to myself, and repeated the process throughout the week. Eventually, I had a book that has stuck with people like nothing else I've done.

As much as I'd like to say that such work is easily repeatable, that simply isn't true. While I do recognize myself in it, it came from a chapter of my life that is long past.

So, will I ever write another Saint Sadist? The short answer is 'no, but I can assure you, dear friends, that I will always strive to write with the same level of honesty and attention to detail that made it so resonant.' I'm just in a different chapter (or 'era,' as the cool kids say).

What chapter am I in? Well, that's a topic for another essay.

I came across an interesting sentiment here on substack this morning. I already made a response, but I’d like to unpack it further.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of . I don’t know him! But I’m sure he’s a perfectly fine person and editor. And there are numerous reasons why he may have said what he said the way he said it when he said it, but I do think it exemplifies a very specific kind of approach to literature, or at least how we speak about literature online.

So I’m going to somewhat tediously go through this post, not to criticize John, but to speak more broadly about the editorial process.

the obligatory referencing of my credentials

I have been a published author since I was twenty. I’ve had a few novels come out through small independent presses. I’ve selfpublished a decent amount. I’ve also had a novel out through a mid-size traditional publisher in the UK. In all cases, I’ve had to deal with editors, including ones whose professions are Editor.

I’ve also had dozens of short stories and essays published over the last almost-twenty years. At two separate occasions, I had a weekly column at magazines (neither exist anymore, sadly) where I was edited weekly. I’ve had stories in major magazines and anthologies, with my stories coming out in venues or even in the same issue as big name professional authors. I’ve even had a short story of mine singled out by Tor.com as one of the best stories to come out in a given month. I’ve also been published for free at places where the editing was done by a volunteer. Places that have come and gone, disappeared from the internet.

So I’ve been edited a lot and by a lot of different people and by people with various skill levels, credentials, successes, and at varying timelines.

I was also a freelance editor for a few years. In that time, I edited dozens of novels and nonfiction books.

In every single situation where I’ve been edited, I have personally felt a lot of social and professional pressure to agree with edits. This pressure wasn’t necessarily pushed upon me by anyone else. But when you’re twenty and a real life adult with decades of experience gives you feedback, it felt to me like I had to agree to edits. And so too often I swallowed my own feelings about a piece and went along with edits, even when I disagreed.

However, as you get more experience being edited (and editing), you gain the confidence to push back.

outlining the credentials of would-be editors

I’ve spoken about this in other places, but the only thing that qualifies many people as a publisher or editor is that they bought a webpage domain and set up an email where people can send them stories or essays.

Literally, that’s it!

Theres a wide range of who and what an editor is, but many editors are simply people who have decided to be involved in the publishing process. If they work for a major press or magazine, they had to prove that they can do the job and go through some kind of hiring process. But if they’re in the independent world, their credentials may just be that they own a website with Magazine or Press in the title.

This is partly what makes publishing a numbers game. In every case, whether you’re dealing with one of the Big Five or a one-person operation, you’re being judged by a single person’s specific tastes and biases. A rejection from this person may feel devastating, but the next person you send it to may love your story or essay.

This is a reminder not to take your wins or losses in publications too seriously. Why you appeal to one person and not another has nothing to do with a meritocracy and may have nothing to do with your skill as a writer. Ultimately, it’s just about that one person’s taste.

That’s not to denigrate editors, but to contextualize who they are and what they do. They are the arbiters of what gets published, but they’re far from an objective judgment of quality.

I could point to dozens of infamous stories of books that were rejected a hundred times before going on to win major awards or becoming generational bestsellers.

the editing process

You should expect for there to be some amount of back and forth during the editing process. This is normal. More than that, this is a healthy and productive way for the process to go.

That doesn’t mean it’s without contention. As the editor or writer, you may feel personally attacked during this process. You may get angry or feel misunderstood. You may yell or even write in all caps to try to get your point across. You may, against your better judgment and despite your attempts at professionalism, insult one another or imply that the other is a fucking idiot who can’t read.

This all feels wretched in the moment and it may not be worth it, but it can lead to the improvement of the text.

And that’s what this is really for.

Any editor who balks at edits being rejected or argued over is either too inexperienced or too egotistical to do their job properly.

Many people will swallow their pride or even their potential better judgment just to get along or to move the process forward. There’s professional pressure here to seem like a team player. To be easy to work with. After all, you don’t want editors and writers to begin whispering about how difficult you are or how much they dislike working with you, yeah? That has the very real potential to severely limit your professional opportunities.

Maybe it shouldn’t! But writing is a very particular industry and who you know and how you feel about them, how they feel about you, are often more important than your talent or skill.

I’ll say it again because it bears repeating: any editor who reacts poorly to pushback on their feedback is too inexperienced to do the job properly.

Because pushback is normal. Not only normal, but mundane. If what you’re talking about is simply grammatical, it’s normal to expect much less pushback (assuming you’re correct! always a perilous assumption in English). But sometimes a writer’s style pushes on grammar or is even actively anti-grammatical in certain cases.

Sometimes there are good reasons for breaking grammar rules and sometimes their are bad ones, but don’t expect deleting a comma to go without notice!

When I worked with the mid-size traditional publisher, we were working on a syntactically experimental work. I was grateful that my editor understood what I was doing! But one of the stylistic quirks of this book had to do with how I was using the comma. Which is to say I was using it idiosyncratically or in anti-grammatical ways.

There was pushback and debate over some of these choices. Sometimes my editor was able to convince me that he was correct and sometimes he wasn’t. But in every case where I agreed with him, I saw how his edit was making my style more itself.

Now, every editor would like to believe themselves Gordon Lish, rewriting Raymond Carver and turning good stories into best-of-the-century stories. But most editors are not that.

And honestly, if Gordon Lish was my editor, I probably would have had a big problem with how invasive his edits were.

who does a story belong to?

Well, the writer.

Always and forever, it’s the writer’s name on the byline.

This means that the writer is the one with the last say on what happens to their story.

Whether the editor likes it or not, the author is the one with the final say.

Of course, it’s your right as an editor to reject a story after acceptance if you and the author can’t find a way to get through the editorial process together.

This is why, knowing myself, I would have really struggled with an editor like Lish. What Lish did with many writers, and most famously with Carver, is change the story so entirely from what the writer had done that it really stopped being Carver’s story. Sure, his name appears there next to What we talk about when we talk about love, but is that story really his anymore?

Given what we know about how Lish essentially rewrote that story, I’d argue that it’s not. Not really. It would make more sense, if we’re being honest, to make Lish a cowriter on the story.

As I said above, I’ve been edited a lot by a lot of different people. Some are those people who just started a website and began accepting submissions and others were people whose profession was editing. They got a paycheck every two weeks from a company where they had a desk and their only responsibility was to edit the stories and novels of people like me.

Some of my worst experiences have been with professionals and some of my best have been with those people without credentials. One of the best editors I ever had was a volunteer. I still remember it so I’m going to mention the process here in a bit more detail.

The story was only 1,300 words. He didn’t give me a single line edit in his first email. Instead, he said, “Make this 900 words.”

I cannot fully express to you how much better this single editorial suggestion improved me as a writer. I don’t just mean that it improved this single story. I mean it fundamentally made me a far better writer.

Because he didn’t tell me what to cut or how to shorten it, I spent an entire day going through that story sentence by sentence. If I could save a sentence by cutting just a single word, I did it. If I could save a paragraph by preserving only one out of five sentences, I did it.

It caused me to focus on syntax and word choice and word order in a way I never had before. In many ways, it taught me how to actually write.

After I got the story down to 900 words, we had a few more edits here and there, but mostly just tightening up grammar.

And seventeen years later, I still think about that experience.

That editor, Richard Thomas, has gone on to have more success as an author and editor. But back then, he was just some guy who volunteered to edit a monthly magazine.

Just last year, I had a story come out in an anthology where the editing process began feeling absolutely bizarre to me. It got to the point where I nearly withdrew my story.

In my view, the editors didn’t even seem to understand the story. Their edits made no sense to me, or seemed in direct opposition to the goals of the narrative.

Over the weeks of back and forth, I agreed to some edits, especially ones about grammar or word order choice, but defended the choices that I believed were most crucial to the story. I wrote paragraphs defending my choices. Defending my story. I tried to be as professional as possible even though every email made me angrier and more baffled by the editorial decisions.

In the end, I got what I wanted. My story remained itself.

And I say this because the story is mine. It doesn’t belong to the editor. It’s not their name in the byline.

It’s mine.

Because of that, I fought to keep it mine.

And, yes, the stakes couldn’t be lower. After all, it’s just a story that probably fewer than a hundred people even read. I got paid a nice amount for it, but I have no illusions about its reach.

But I was also comfortable refusing the money and withdrawing my story from the anthology. I would rather not be published than have my story become something I’m no longer proud of.

In a recent episode of my short story podcast, I discussed how I would have taken this story I thought was very unsuccessful and turned it into a much better story. This kind of exercise is slightly useless but it’s also exactly what I’m talking about with editing. Had I been the editor of this story, I would have recommended a pretty drastic rewrite.

Which would my right to do as an editor. But it would be completely reasonable for the author to simply say, “Had I wanted to tell the story that way, I would have.”

From there, we’d either work it out one way or another. But my goal as the editor of this story would have been to make it more itself. To enhance what’s already there in hopes of making it hit harder, hit in a more profound way, while remaining true to the author’s vision.

Because no matter what you might think as the editor, the story will forever belong to the writer.

As an editor, I may feel that the author is being “insecure and arrogant” for not receiving my edits with grace and gratitude. But as the author, I’d view this editor as someone who is possibly unwilling to see from my perspective. I mean, I could say the exact same thing! I would potentially view this editor as insecure and arrogant, believing that they know better than me about what’s right for my story.

what’s to be done then?

This is art we’re talking about. Which is to say: this is all subjective.

Because of this, it can be difficult to view ourselves as purely subjective. Especially when our job is Editor or Writer. Both titles come with a certain level of arrogance and self-importance.

No one would submit a story for publication without the arrogance and ego and self-importance to believe that their words matter so much that someone else should read them. No one would choose to edit a story without the arrogance and ego and self-importance to believe they know what is good and bad art.

This is also why the process can be so contentious. You put two egos in opposition to one another and see which one blinks first.

For the editorial process to work at all, you need that ego. But you also—both writer and editor—need enough humility and grace to see the other’s perspective.

And for all that I’ve said, if we talk about power imbalance, the editor is the one in the driver’s seat here. They get to choose if your story is published or not. Because writers are so used to failure and rejection, some will bend over backwards to agree with edits even if they don’t like the edits. Their insecurity gets the better of them and they assume that the editor’s authority is based on something substantial, rather than seeing the editor as just another subjective agent in this dance of artistry.

And I am fully aware of how annoying writers are. I know a lot of writers! I’m only friends with a few. The number of writers I like as people and the number of writers I know is a very wide margin! So trust me, I understand when editors want to complain about writers. I understand how frustrating and stupid and full of shit writers are.

But I’ve also worked with enough editors to know that they’re not that different. Often, they’re all coming from the same pool of people. After all, many editors are just writers wearing a different hat.

But if you want to make a go of being a successful writer or editor, you need humility. You need to be willing to compromise. As an editor, you also need to understand that the story doesn’t belong to you. As a writer, you need to understand that this person may be able to make your story better. But you also need to trust yourself enough to know when the editorial suggestions are wrong for your story.

And sadly for all you editors or would-be editors: the story belongs to the writer and they have to have the final say on what happens to their story.

The next episode just went up.

This is, in part, why I want to talk about a genre I’m describing as Masculine Fiction. I suppose you could consider it the inverse of what most people commonly knew as ChickLit.

I don’t think we use that term anymore and I wouldn’t want to use the term BroLit or something like that.

So what is Masculine Fiction? Well, to put it in its most simple terms, it’s a fiction about men and primarily written for a male audience. That’s not to say women aren’t in it or that women won’t read it. But the primary audience seems clear to me, or at least as clear as the intended audience for something like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

I bring all this up because Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series is undoubtedly Masculine Fiction. Just in the first novel, we’re introduced to dozens of characters across a continent but only two of them are women, and only one of them has a POV chapter. And to be honest, for all that Farro is certainly a woman, she is written with primarily masculine traits.

This is a problem I find with the portrayal of women across media. When you need a badass female character, people tend to write them exactly like they would write a man but with different pronouns. I’ve found this just as common in Romantasy as I have in Masculine Fiction, though most only seem to comment on it when the writer is a fella. But that’s not really what we’re here to talk about.

Last year, I read Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories. Thirteen novels set in around the year 900 in England. Thirteen novels about badass dudes doing badass shit. Lots of violence and scheming and so on. Across the whole series, at least a million words, very little time is spent with women. Rather, almost every minute is about men. Men being men. Men together. Men against one another. Words of honor. Words of betrayal. Promises, oaths, friendship, fatherhood, apprenticeship. The rituals of masculinity, of becoming a man, of being a man, of raising men.

The series covers an entire life, from first memory to old age. And it captures that life fully, warts and all. And Uhtred, for all that his narrative voice intoxicates, is a real piece of shit. But he’s our piece of shit. He’s a piece of shit worth rooting for, worth following. He’s proud and vain and a terrible father, a terrible husband and lover, but he is a great warrior, a great leader of men.

And though none of us are killers or warriors, I think there’s a strange kind of camaraderie that we find in Uhtred and characters like him. We don’t want to be him, no. Or at least I hope not. But we find pieces of him to admire. Pieces of him that reflect ourselves, that show us how to be a man. Because I do think Masculine Fiction is a type of story intensely focused on this identity.

What is a man?

This same question arises when we consider a work like Berserk. Guts is, in many ways, a holy terror. We do not want to be him. We do not want to be like him.

And yet.

Sometimes we do.

Heathenish Ramblings

Guts: The Modern Man

Brand of Sacrifice, or: the Burden of the Protector…

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a year ago · 11 likes · Kelby Losack

While Uhtred and Guts and even Logen Ninefingers are not men to admire, there are aspects of them that shine so brightly that they inspire us. They inspire us to be better. To be great. To do what it takes to be a man, to become a man, to be a father, a son.

But what is a man?

Who can say? There are so many different answers. So many different kinds of answers. Yet we do live in a moment in time where masculinity is, I think, in true crisis. There are many factors here and this is a topic I’ll be exploring in various ways in future essays, but we’re also living in a moment where Masculine Fiction has been largely sidelined from the mainstream. Again, there are many reasons for that, but that topic is for a future essay as well.

And so where do young men go to find models for masculinity?

Well, sometimes to quite dark places.

Fortunately, Masculine Fiction is nothing new! In fact, it could be said that most fiction of the last few centuries falls under Masculine Fiction. And so we can find our models for manhood in the Three Muskateers or even stories like Robinhood and King Arthur. We can find them even in Bukowski’s degeneracy and Palahniuk’s or Bret Easton Ellis’ satire. It exists in so many places and from so many different times, that all you need to do is open up your eyes and look backwards.

But there is another place we see it burbling up, which is the selfpublished space.

I’ve been burning through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which I’d very much classify as Masculine Fiction. One interesting aspect to this story about an apocalyptic gladiator style game is how it presents Carl and his masculinity.

Carl is a hard man. He’s had a hard life. Despite that, and despite the brutal circumstances he finds himself in, he doesn’t give into despair or various behaviors that some have come to describe as toxic masculinity, but instead finds strength in building coalitions, in relying on friends, in sacrificing for those friends, for the people who rely upon him, who need him. And especially in his relationship with his cat, Princess Donut.

Consider this the beginning of an investigation into masculinity, but first join me and my good friend Joe Owens as we discuss Joe Abercrombie’s First Law series book by book.

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• Tales of Terror

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My good friend Rios de la Luz is hosting an online workshop March 8th.

Want to write with other creatives? Want inspiration for poetry, prose, or fiction?

WRITING THE WILD will focus on exploring the wilderness in our imaginations, non-linear paths into a story, mixing nature into writing to paint vivid imagery, exploring ways to add magical realism into our work to give stories more depth.

This workshop is generative, meaning, we write together within time limits of 10 to 20 minutes per prompt and create on the spot.

All writers will receive a packet with prompts and guides for longer exercises which focus on magical realism.

Classes are recorded and recordings will be available for 30 days.

WHEN: March 8th, 2025
WHERE: Online
TIME: 9:00AM PST to 1:00 PM PST
COST: $40 to $60
(Sliding scale)

If you are a writer with any interest in developing your craft in a generative group setting, don’t miss this. More info/sign up HERE.

I’m joining a podcast to discuss epic fantasy series! The first episode is releasing on March 10th. In it, we’re covering the first ten chapters of Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself. You can follow along here or wait until the pages go live on spotify and apple and so on. But if you want to read one of the most important grimdark series along with me, hop on for the ride!

More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

• It

• 11/23/63

After five King books, I begin to think I know who he is as a writer. His books are big sprawling affairs far more interested in the people than they are in the horror held within. Even if that horror is why we’re all here flipping through pages, King knows that the horror only matters to the extent that we care about those witnessing this terrible no good very bad time.

I do think King has far more in common with 19th century writers than he does with most of the 20th century writers you might expect. Dickens is alive and well in King, which is really never what I expected to find when first I picked up one of his books.

From a Buick 8 is a bit different, though. Not so much in terms of its focus, but it is structurally the most adventurous of King’s novels. While the other five I’ve read are very typical in what you’d expect, From a Buick 8 is an old fashioned frame narrative but also a bottle episode.

For an explanation of a bottle episode, take a look at this clip from Community.

Almost the entire novel takes place in a Police barracks in the early 2000s while members of Troop D describe how a Buick 8 showed up and what’s happened since then. Largely, this comes from Sandy Dearborn, the sergeant, telling the story to Ned Wilcox, a high schooler who started unofficially working there as a dispatcher after his father, Curtis, was killed by a drunk driver.

Curtis was one of the cops of Troop D but also one who had one of the strongest fascinations with this Buick 8.

It showed up mysteriously and every investigation into it only leads to more mysteries and then it begins causing its own strange mysteries. And not just mysteries.

But it’s the structure here that’s interesting. The story sort of floats around the car. And I do mean around. Everything we hear is only to elaborate on the Buick 8 and the effect is one of swirling history interacting with the present, where they’re all sitting around telling Ned about this strange car that showed up from nowhere, left by some stranger in black.

Now, the stranger in black may be a red herring, especially since I’ve never read King’s Dark Tower series, but I know a man dressed in black is a central figure there.

Is this related to that?

No idea.

But it got my brain itching.

And much of this book really gets your old noodle tangled, makes that itch grow fiercer and fiercer. Because for quite a while, nothing seems especially dire or even especially important. We’re living the lives of these people, inhabiting their world. And while the car sets off some otherworldly lightquakes and causes the temperature to drop wildly, it’s not until were pretty deep into all this that something leaves the Buick.

I don’t often feel fear when reading King’s books—at least not so far—but this was pretty alarming! I won’t hop over to spoiler territory, but this moment cracks the world open. More than that, it pierces through the lives of Troop D, leading to disasters and horrors and obsessions. And obsessions, as most know, often lead to a certain flavor of disaster.

Much of the tension here seems like it would dissolve because of the frame narrative. After all, we know who’s alive and who’s not, yeah? But King does something here that far too few framers do, which is to use the present day as a narrative tool rather than simply somewhere to hang a narrative.

What I mean by that is that many writers have a character looking back into the past and that’s the whole story. It’s a story gone and done and the narrator simply goes on living once they’re done telling their tale.

King, though, makes a strong interaction between the present and past, between who someone was and who they became, who they are now.

Most importantly, the climax of the novel doesn’t simply happen in the past but relies upon the past and present smashing together in a harrowing moment.

At the heart of the novel, though, is this obsession with an object. How the object becomes a symbol, becomes a totem. Even when it seems out of their control, Troop D never asks for help. Never enlists scientists to come investigate, to have the government step in and sort this out.

Why?

Well, because it’s theirs.

And as silly as that answer is, especially given all that they go through, I find it one of the most human explanations I’ve seen. And this humanity it really what makes this book shine. Sure, you show up for the horrors, the otherworldly dread, but you stay because of these people, because of their humanity.

From a Buick 8 isn’t my favorite King novel, but it’s the most adventurous I’ve seen him. For all that this is a tiny story, a bottle episode, it feels nearly as ambitious as It. Sure, it’s not trying to capture the entire world in a novel, but it is taking the minute and exploding it into the whole universe.

This stupid inert truck in a shack.

The whole world.

The very universe.

I’ve described what I see as the heavy thumbprint of James Joyce upon King, but here is another thumbprint where I least expected it. And I know no one wants to talk about King in the same sentence as someone like James Joyce, but is this not exactly what Joyce aimed for?

To turn a single day into all existence. To turn a single city into all the world.

Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII

    ---

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• Tales of Terror

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• Dark Fantasy

• Dangerous Women

It was not exactly my favorite experience. Gibson is a very specific writer and not one I particularly care for, as it turns out. But I began the project and pushed through even though I often felt like quitting.

But that was the past. When I thought of ways to continue the podcast, I considered picking a new author and doing something similar. Ultimately, I decided against this and have instead turned the project in a very specific direction.

Every other week, my good friend Kyle Muntz and I choose a short story and discuss it. As regular readers here may already be aware, I’m a big fan of doing close, intense, and focused examinations of single pieces of art. Here, I’ve discussed Michael Jackson’s voice, Kanye West’s Runaway, Bon Iver’s 715 - CR∑∑KS, blink 182’s ONE MORE TIME, Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name, Tom Waits’ Make it Rain, Iron & Wine’s The Trapeze Swinger, and various other films and movies and TV shows. But the ones linked here are the ones most similar to what I envisioned doing with the podcast.

A very tight look at the short story, discussing from, narrative, style. Going, at times, down to the syntax of a line, the sonic texture of it. But also peeling back and discussing a work in its context. And while we’ve only released three episodes like this, I think it’s been one of the most interesting projects I’ve been a part of.

I believe I can say with a relative amount of truth that I’m better read than most people, including most self-described readers and writers. And it’s not just that I’ve read many books, but that I have read widely across genres. I’m as comfortable discussing James Joyce and Cormac McCarthy as I am discussing JK Rowling and Gawain and the Green Knight. I’ve read everything from micropress experimental prosepoem to bestselling commercial fiction and almost everything in between. I read selfpublished authors, authors in translation, authors from a century or ten ago, and I try to hit just about everything in between.

And Kyle is one of the few people I’ve met who has a similar breadth of reading. The podcast is tremendously enriched by the fact that he’s been a professor of literature and writing for nearly a decade as well.

And so I think we’re uniquely poised to present something quite different than most podcasts. We have both found that most content on literature is quite shallow or with too narrow or broad a focus.

The short story provides a very interesting avenue for discussion. For one thing, the commitment from the potential listener is much lower. You may not have the time to read a 300 page novel but you can probably pick up a 10 page story and be part of the discussion we’re having.

More than that, though, is that by focusing on single stories, one at a time, we can reach far and wide while also diving deep into one work at a time.

Our choices are of course informed by our own interests, so while our backgrounds are quite literary, our current tastes lean more towards genre fiction, in its various guises.

Our first episode was on Susanna Clarke’s The Wood at Midwinter and I think it gives you a strong sense of the project. We dig in and really chew on this brief story.

For our second episode, we did something similar with Stephen Graham Jones’ Father, Son, Holy Rabbit, but we were fortunate enough to have Stephen on to discuss the story with us.

Our most recent episode, released yesterday, had Brian Evenson on to discuss his short story The Sequence. Again, we dug in and chewed it up and Brian was generous enough to share his own thoughts on his story and his writing more broadly.

If you’re an aspiring writer, I think these episodes are really invaluable, especially the ones with Stephen and Brian on. If you’re a reader just wanting to have the kind of focused discussion on a story that you probably haven’t had since high school or college, I think this may be the best place to find it.

I hope you listen as we continue onward. We plan on having many more writers on as guests to discuss their stories, but we’ll also have some without the author. I think there’s a lot of value in both approaches.

But what I really hope—what I always hope—is that this audience that has piled up around me can learn something. If nothing else, I hope it’s a way for you to train yourself to once again look at art and approach it as a serious topic, as something to debate and discuss rather than simply as content to consume.

The algorithms are here to guide our consumption but it is possible to step aside. Take your interests in hand and give them the focus you once did, before you had a smartphone in your pocket, before you had dozens of notifications buzzing at the periphery of your attention.

So come join us. And we’d love to get recommendations from you wonderful listeners as we continue forward.

Listen on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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• Monsters and Mayhem

• Awesome but Humble

• Warm Coffee, Free Copy

• The Occult and Supernatural

The Broken River Writers' Collective

LITURGY

art by Haoning Wu…

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a year ago · David Simmons

David is truly one of the best. Has such a unique and off-kilter perspective. One of the most unique voices out there.

Also, check out Ghosts of East Baltimore and its sequel Ghosts of West Baltimore, some of the wildest books I’ve read.

Long ago, the land of Terre d’Ange was blessed by Elua and his companions.

Elua ben Yeshua was conceived by Yeshua and the tears of Magdalene. Being the illegitimate son of the son of God, he was rejected by many in his travels around the world. He was accompanied by a host of angels and with them he spread the gift of love to mortal men and women. The children of Elua and the angels became the D’Angeline of Terre d’Ange.

This is the backdrop to Kushiel’s Legacy, a trilogy by Jacqueline Carey published from 2001 to 2003. It’s set in a reimagined France (Terre d’Ange) and has many cultures familiar to us, though the history is all quite different, which makes their names different as well. But it makes for a fun little puzzle to assemble, as you come to realize the Tiberian Empire was the Roman Empire or that the lands of Alba are England and so on.

This is some of the cleverest kinds of worldbuilding. Rather than try to invent the world from whole cloth, you take a few details from our world and give them a twist. Then follow the implications of those twists. Carey plants a garden here and allows us to look upon her world in the same way we viewed the opulence of King Louis’ court at Versailles and then she waters it with her imagination and we all witness the bounty springing forth.

We begin with Phèdre, a child of no name and no family who is sold to one of the houses where she will learn to be a courtesan. This is not so bad a thing in Terre d’Ange, given that their entire nation and people descend from the son of the son of God and God’s angels who willingly copulated with anyone and everyone who desired this.

To the people of Terre d’Ange, sex is not only quite liberal but it is, in a way, sacred. On our Earth, Catholics have their Communion wafers but in Terre d’Ange, the people have a different kind of sacred communion.

One thing that separates Phèdre from almost everyone else is a scarlet mote in her eye. This is, at first and by many, seen as a great flaw. It may be why her mother abandoned her. But she is discovered by Anafiel Delaunay who takes her in and gives her his name.

From there she’s pulled into intrigue and mystery and continent spanning adventures that are often not of her choosing. Delaunay trains her both as a courtesan and spy, but he also recognizes this scarlet mote as Kushiel’s Dart. For Phèdre is blessed by Elua’s companion, Kushiel. And this is not a kindness, this blessing.

For Kushiel was God’s punisher who understood the pain and chastisement he gave were acts of love. And so those who follow Kushiel or who are devoted to Kushiel also see pain as an act of love.

Some of you see where this goes for little Phèdre.

Blessed by Kushiel to find pleasure in pain.

I’ll say no more about the goings ons of the trilogy because I really do think you should read it. It’s as brutal and full of intrigue as George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire with the same kind of intricate and robust worldbuilding, full of deep mysteries, long histories, and strange and wild magic.

It’s also a bit more inviting in that I think the first novel works quite well as a standalone.

You don’t often hear about these books, which is a shame. I feel that Carey published them about twenty years too early because if they came out now the tiktok algorithm would spread it like wildfire.

This age of Romantasy, where the bestselling and fastest selling books are all erotically charged and sexually explicit novels set in fantastical worlds, was made for Jacqueline Carey’s series. But, sadly, the books are decades old by now.

And so I’d like to give them a bit of a shot in the arm. If you’re a romantasy reader, I think you should turn back and pick these up. If you’ve never read a romance, let alone romantasy, I think this is a great place to start.

They’re lush and evocative. They’re erotic and explicit. The language is beautiful and often haunting.

While I have heard many critiques of romantasy writing—that it’s full of cliches or that the writing is sloppy or unskilled, that it’s YA+fucking—Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy is a truly masterful work. From worldbuilding to plotting to language, it really is an accomplishment.

This is entirely a series written for adults and while it has all the brutality and intrigue of A Song of Ice and Fire, it is a very feminine work to stand beside that overwhelmingly masculine one.

I find that many novels and movies and shows demonstrate a female character’s strength by giving her stereotypically masculine characteristics. They’re often badass fighters who have no respect for authority, who aren’t afraid to go it alone, who like drinking and fucking with no attachments.

Phèdre is a very strong character but she also shows the kind of strength more typically associated with women. She’s a courtesan, trained in love, so she’s not going to out-fight or overpower someone.

That’s not who she is. And even were she to try, it would not go well for her.

And so rather than take a path of violence, she finds power in subservience, in compliance. It makes for a daring, dangerous game she often plays where her very life depends on the passions and desires of violent men. But we see how she finds a way forward through and with such people.

In different hands, Phèdre would be a master manipulator. She’d use her feminine wiles to turn armies and nations, but she actually does something far more interesting.

Everywhere Phèdre goes, she builds coalitions.

Even when she’s enslaved and powerless, she finds friendship. She is always plotting to achieve her goals, but we see the very human conditions she must deal with. And for all that she was trained as a courtesan and spy, she cannot shut her humanity away. She is, perhaps, overfull of compassion. And so she makes genuine relationships everywhere she goes. Even when she’s despised, she seeks friendship and takes what scraps she can and slowly builds those into companionship, into friendship, and finally into the kinds of bonds that tether lives together through hardships and tragedies. Often forged by trauma and terror, she builds community over and over again in this series.

She does it through kindness. Through compassion. Through curiosity, through genuine interest.

It’s this, more than anything else, that makes the novels a marvel. Makes her a heroine to remember for decades.

She will never beat you in a fight, but she doesn’t have to. While you were enjoying your status, she was building connections with the servants and slaves, with the women domineered over by powerful, violent men. Mothers and wives and children become her friends and allies. And so when you turn your sword in her direction, you find that all the thousands of invisible people who make your life possible are now clenching their kitchen knives, their gardening shears. In that moment, you may understand, for the first time, the foundation beneath your feet has been weakened, has been turned to sand. And all those little people who you never noticed outnumber you and look upon you with seething hatred.

It’s not a perfect trilogy. I think the first book is the best one. The second and third follow a mini-formula formed by the first. But there is a lot of beauty and wonder and magnificence here. The language is lush, the world is evocative, the characters are memorable and worth rooting for.

And at the center of everything is a doomed, tragic, but inescapable romance.

But I’ll leave that for you to discover.

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• Strong Female Characters

• The Hero’s Dilemma

• Book O’Clock

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• My Bloody Valentine

• February Crime

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• Free Fantasy

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• Awesome but Humble

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More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

• It

There’s an interesting novel inside Stephen King’s massive 11/23/63 but it’s not really one for me, I’m afraid. Perhaps if I cared more about the JFK assassination this would have held more sway for me, but, honestly, I just don’t have many thoughts about it.

Structurally, this is a fascinating novel, though, and I think it plays to King’s strengths and obsessions. What’s most immediately apparent in this novel is that King struggles to capture the way people talk now (well, now being 2011 when this was published). This is a difficulty for him, I think, since he writes contemporary novels and has traditionally had a bit of an ear for how people talk. This is a great skill to have but, as we get older, we lose that touch for the simple reason that slang and colloquialisms of 20 year olds don’t fit well in the mouths of 70 year olds.

That’s life, baby.

But I think this is why King pulls us back to his childhood in the 1950s. So despite being technically set in 2011ish, the vast majority of the novel takes place in the late 50s and early 60s.

He’s definitely more comfortable back here in 1959 and 1962 than he is in 2011. He’s able to really fall into the world and build it meticulously, able to render the speech authentically as well as the motivations and cultural and political concerns of his characters. Also, not for nothing, he gets a little chance to bring us back to the kids from It.

And while I liked that Easter Egg, I also think it demonstrates something peculiar about King.

He’s very famous. He’s been very famous for a long time. Decades! And so he’s able to put in these extended sequences that kind of have nothing to do with anything but which serve as a reward for people who have been longtime readers.

That’s not a bad thing, mind, but it felt kind of odd to me. Like the whole sequence was put in there as a little wink at me.

I don’t especially like being winked at by authors. It’s a bit of a quirk, I suppose. And so though I enjoyed returning to Derry, Maine, it also sort of itched at me uncomfortably. I cannot really explain why, especially since I typically like this sort of thing, where an artist’s oeuvre offers little rewards for those who really dig into it.

Anyway, the time travel technique here is just a little bit of genius. Rather than get into the weeds, he just presents it as something possible and then throws us forward. And though this man is going back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, what King is really doing is giving us an enormous slice of life novel about living in the early 60s but with foreknowledge of some things.

Because of the way time travel works, the narrator can’t just go back to a few days or weeks before Kennedy’s assassination but instead must begin five years before the assassination.

Five years.

This small choice is enormously important and adds much of the tension of the novel and the structure. Because it takes five years, you don’t just get to try again and again. No, each try means spending five years back in time. When you return to the present, nearly no time at all has passed, regardless of if it’s been 5 years or 5 minutes.

Stranger still, every time you go back in time, a big theoretical and temporal reset button is hit. So if you go back in time and stop the assassination, going back in time again will undo that work.

I love this kind of thing. It’s such a simple but ingenious trap to create.

King doesn’t get bogged down in the how but does fixate on the why. The how is just taken as the weather because how else should it be taken? How does it work? Doesn’t matter. How does time reset? It just does, nerd.

This allows us to get on with it.

And unfortunately, this novel lives and dies by your interest in this man’s life in the past. If the novel were 250 pages, the conceptual stuff would likely carry you through, but because it’s nearly 1,000, the novel rides on the narrator’s shoulder.

And he’s just not that interesting, I’m afraid. His quixotic journey into the past also just becomes rather dull for long stretches, which made me understand the critique of how wordy King can be. Now, I don’t think this needed to be a short novel, but I think it needed to be shorter than it is. Maybe 500 pages or 700 pages or 300 pages was the right length—I don’t know. Don’t even care.

But this is an exhaustive and exhausting novel for better or worse. And I can see some who would be fully into this, who would wish there were a few more hundred pages.

I am not that reader.

What really makes this novel worthwhile is its vision of the past. The lengths King went to rebuild America and envelope us in these long gone years that most of us weren’t alive to experience. In this way, it reminds me of It in very direct ways, so it’s oddly fitting that It echoes through parts of this novel. Both novels are about today while really being about yesterday, and though we always long for those halcyon days of our youth, we must also reckon with the terrors of youth, of life, the trauma of being alive at all in a world where brutality occurs sometimes right in front of our faces.

There’s a dangerous, seething kind of nostalgia to King’s work.

This is what I find fascinating about him, I’m discovering.

But this one just wasn’t really for me. There’s a lot to like about it and it’s an achievement in its own right, but I felt overburdened by its length and by the dull narrator.

There’s a lot I’d like to get into here, especially the reveals near the end, but that spoils much of the journey. I actually think these elevate the novel tremendously and make it a far more interesting work than it appears at first glance, or even than it appears when you’re 700 pages into it. The way it twists away and out of your hands will stick with me for a long time for reasons that I cannot really get into.

But King does one of my absolutely favorite things here. Something I find daring and provocative and wild.

Would I recommend it for that payoff?

That’s less clear. I’m glad this wasn’t the first King novel I picked up is how I’ll answer that.

While it’s shorter than It, 11/23/63 feels a whole lot longer.

Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII

    ---

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In 2024, I spent the year reading William Gibson and rather than write about it, I decided to invite people onto a podcast to discuss the novels. You can check out the whole catalogue of episodes here.

My history with William Gibson had been a troubled one. I even put Neuromancer on a list of books I hated.

But I muscled through and spent a year discussing his books. I probably would have had more success and fun had a picked any other author, but whims and weariness guide me. Despite many of my issues with Gibson as a writer, I do think he’s one of the best at conceptual writing and he’s a great stylist.

Anyrate, I did the work so you don’t have to and now I’ll tell you what to read and what to skip.

Gibson’s career is somewhat unusual in that it’s broken down into distinct trilogies. Because of this, I can’t just tell you to begin with the middle book in a trilogy. Or, I suppose I could, since the novels are mostly standalone, despite being trilogies. But it feels weird to me to recommend that you read that way.

Where to Start

This is for the All-Inners, the gobble-em-down fienders who cannot be turned away nor told to try some other squaller for a place to scrump on some delectables.

So if you must read all of William Gibson, despite my best protestations, here’s how you do it.

Neuromancer (1984)

I genuinely do not like this book. After speaking with my good friend , I found an appreciation for it. But it’s not a particularly successful novel, though its influence is unmistakable and unavoidable. He revolutionized science fiction in this single novel printed on disposable paper that ended up being a megabestseller.

The narrative voice is addictive and the novel begins with one of the best first chapters you’re likely to come across. This carries you through for quite some time, but the novel begins to quagmire in technobabble and perplexing motivations and muddied political machinations. The propulsiveness of the narrative is meant to hold you through to the end as we dash across continents and into space and back down to earth and through cyberspace, but I found this mostly confusing and not entirely that interesting.

Even so, if you must read Gibson, this is the real place to start. From there, do as I did and read through the man’s career in publication order.

Listen to our episode here:

If you only read one

For most authors, this is the way to approach them. Dip in a toe and get a feel for the water. I am perhaps somewhat unusual in that I find a lot of interest and joy in reading ten books by the same person in a condensed time period. This is very useful for some writers, especially if they have a varied body of work, but less successful with an author like Gibson who largely writes variations on the same theme.

It’s a good theme so he’s gotten a lot of mileage out of it, though.

The Difference Engine (1990)

This is a bit of an odd one for True Gibsonians since it was a collaborative novel with Bruce Sterling, but I really think it might be his best. At the very least, it demonstrates much of what Gibson is great at and what he’s capable of.

Big concepts, intense interest in underclasses and social structures, and subversion of expectations. I think the social structure of this novel is Gibson at his best and, sadly, something that he never really achieves again.

I think this is my favorite of his novels, though it does suffer from some of the quagmirely writing that so often plagued him throughout his career.

Listen to our episode here:

Pattern Recognition (2003)

I think this is Gibson’s best novel and I don’t think it’s really that close, though this is not his best trilogy. Even so, if you only read one novel by Gibson, this is a pretty good one to pick.

You get all of his fixations and, perhaps, the best description of the internet and our intersections and interactions with it possible. Also, strangely, it’s a contemporary novel. The first that Gibson would publish and, in my view, the best. While all writers are always writing about the moment they’re alive, this is really one of the best contemporary literary thrillers I’ve encountered.

Great protagonist with a clear narrative, which is something Gibson very much is not known for.

Listen to our episode here:

The Best Trilogy

Since his career is broken up into discrete trilogies, I really do think this is worth commenting on at length. Best here is meant more as favorite. His best trilogy is the Blue Ant Trilogy. It’s him at his most competent and masterful, but I like the rough edges of my pick. I like the sloppy imperfections that actually make it shine all the brighter when it manages to catch the light.

The Bridge Trilogy

Virtual Light (1993) is a near future science fiction novel structured around coincidence and happenstance. It manages to feel both like Pulp Fiction and Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren. There’s a lot of humor and wackiness but also Gibson at his most evocative. The Bridge is a fascinating setting, and while we don’t really get clear descriptions of it, we feel it. We come to know it on our bones.

A truly fascinating novel and sort of a better version of Count Zero, which was my favorite novel from The Sprawl Trilogy.

Listen to our episode here:

Idoru (1996) might be one of the best William Gibson novels. It captures something so very true to life as we live it now in the 2020s despite being written in the 90s. In many ways, this is simply a good version of Mona Lisa Overdrive, which I think is one of Gibson’s worst novel—possibly the worst.

Where my problem with Mona Lisa Overdrive was that every protagonist felt like they were locked into a train heading for a destination without agency, Idoru puts people in the driver’s seat and demands that we go go go.

Plus, conceptually, it’s just Gibson at his very best. I imagine this was unnerving to the point of delirium and incomprehensibility in the mid-90s, but in 2024 it felt almost common place to encounter these ideas

Which is startlingly terrifying in its own way.

Listen to our episode here:

All Tomorrow’s Parties was shaking up to be my favorite Gibson novel until we ran into the second half where many of Gibson’s worst habits began to crowd out what was good and beautiful and holy.

Listen to our episode here:

The Ones to Skip

I won’t belabor this here. There are many novels he wrote that I think are just not that good. Many of his novels feel like rewrites of other novels, in a narrative and structural sense, which makes his whole bibliography full of redundancies or, perhaps, more generously: echoes.

But there are also just novels that I think are flat out bad. Especially his two most recent novels, but especially his most recent novel Agency.

Absolutely skip Agency. It may be one of the worst novels I’ve read in years. Or, I would say that but I read a novel shortly after it that was unbelievably worse. Which is really saying something!

The other novels I would skip, even if you really did want to give Gibson the old college try:

Mona Lisa Overdrive:

Burning Chrome:

I must admit, though I didn’t recommend it above, that I have a real soft spot for Count Zero. The more I think about it, the more it might be my favorite Gibson novel. Not his best, mind. It has many weaknesses and would be rewritten, in a sense, a few times throughout his career with each one better than the last. But there’s something special about Count Zero.

Anyway, this sort of thing is likely destined to be controversial, but I can only speak my mind. And, trust me, this could have been quite a bit snider! I didn’t particularly enjoy my year with Gibson, but I do think it was an interesting endeavor. Also, speaking with people for an hour about a book did increase me appreciation for aspects of Gibson that I likely would not have enjoyed or admired.

For all the negative things I may say about Gibson, he is a truly singular writer. So if you find your interest piqued, I hope my guide here will help you along your journey.

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People online began discussing The Odyssey and while, apparently, many people have never heard of it1, many more began discussing the merits of various translations.

The villain emerged and it was Emily Wilson. Since I’ve an interest in ancient poetry and various translations of them2, I thought I may as well comment on this here, especially since I read Wilson’s translation a few years ago.

One way—and a pretty useful way—is to compare like with like, and some enterprising net denizens did just that with the opening of The Odyssey:

Now, you’re allowed to feel however you like about these four translations and if me writing about The Odyssey finally causes you to pick it up, the world will be a better place for it. And I encourage you to pick up whichever of these four that feels most enticing.

Controversially, I think Emily Wilson’s translation is a good place to start. Of course, this is assuming you’re the type who would read multiple translations of the same piece of work for fun. I mean, who would do such a thing?3 But, you know, even if you don’t plan on reading another translation, I will still recommend Wilson for a simple reason:

It’s the simplest to read and follow.

It really is like that. I think there’s value in reading the poem simply for the sake of understanding what Odysseus did, where he went, why, and on and on. If you’re more interested in the tale than the telling, the Wilson translation is the perfect place to look.

Some lit majors or classics scholars may be gearing up to yell at me but if you’re the casual reader of literature who has, perhaps for the first time, shown an interest in ancient poetry, this is as good a place to start as any.

A big benefit of the Wilson translation is her Translator’s Notes, which, if memory serves, stretches over nearly 100 pages.

If you’re a casual reader, you’ll probably skip right past this and realize you’re already a quarter of the way through the book, which feels nice. But if you read the book and double back to this, there is a lot to feast upon.

This really is the best part of the book, and I’m not being snide or glib when I say that. Reading how a translator made the choices they made with this much detail is truly fascinating, especially if, like me, you’ve an interest in language and translation and so on.

Just from looking at the comparison above, something should be immediately clear about her translation: it’s briefer.

This is because she aims, on purpose, for simplicity and plainness. According to her, the High Register we associate with ancient poetry does not exist in the Greek. I have no way of judging this so I take her word for it, but because of this she also chose to transpose the poem from its original meter to iambic pentameter, since this mimics closely spoken English and is the kind of poetic meter English speakers are most familiar with.

There are few, if any, translations that mimic the original Homeric meter, so this is not exactly that notable. Each translator picks his (Wilson is notable for being the first woman translator of the epic) preferred meter or at least the meter he believes best serves the poem, and many translations forego meter entirely. However, we do see how different it is from the other translations.

What Wilson is aiming for here is a bit of reclamation of the original intent. These poems were sung over the course of communal evenings. They were a performance. And in being a performance, the communication was important. And so the language was relatively unadorned and clear and straight forward.

Allegedly. I don’t and cannot know because I don’t read Greek, ancient or otherwise.

I do think Wilson achieves this and her Odyssey is clear and straightforward and simple to follow. It’s also quite often clumsy and artless.

For all Wilson’s scholarship, she is most certainly not a poet herself. Or perhaps she is, but she’s a very poor one.

And so I understand the critiques and dismissal of Wilson’s translation.

It’s often quite artless!

Is it bad? I don’t know. But the poetry of Homer as mediated through Wilson is quite bad. It would not have survived the ages, I think, if Homer was so clumsy in his telling, in his metaphors, in his lyric.

Even from the first line, this is apparent.

Tell me about a complicated man.

I cringe. I wince. I nearly double over, clapping my hands over my ears. Rarely do I encounter poetry that breaks my poor brain apart like this. But, out of curiosity, I went on and on and made my way through.

But if you’re looking for a more artful telling of this poem, you should pick just about any other translation, though I’d still recommend picking up Wilson’s just to read the Translator’s Note. It really is that good.

Taste being what it is, I cannot tell you which translation to read. I’ve read a few and it seems like the award winning Fagles version has become the preferred one though Fitzgerald’s was the standard for quite a long time.

If there’s anything good about these literary squabbles, I hope it’s that more people begin diving into the ancient past for their poetry.

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Last year, I reviewed each of the Harry Potter books1. I’m very lazily turning these into a book by adding reviews to the movies. I may also add the Fantastic Beasts movies because why not. Let it become a book about all the Wizarding World.

These reviews caused a lot of people to unsubscribe and at least a few to say not very nice things to me or about me.

There are various ways to respond to people who angrily email you but the way I have largely dealt with it is by ignoring them because, ultimately, who cares.

Before writing about Rowling and Harry Potter, I pre-emptively wrote about my feelings with regard to bad people who make art you might like.

I’ve gone on to toe around with canceling people as a concept, with one piece that addresses the alleged cancelation of JK Rowling2. And so I return to the concept and to Rowling because of some recent news.

“We are proud to once again tell the story of Harry Potter — the heartwarming books that speak to power of friendship, resolve and acceptance,” the statement continued. “J.K. Rowling has a right to express her personal views. We will remain focused on the development of the new series, which will only benefit from her involvement.”

from Can Harry Potter HBO Series Overcome JK Rowling’s Transphobia?

For more on JK Rowling’s commentary on trans people, you can check out Contrapoints’ discussion.

a canceling that never took

Now, there are several very obvious reasons why HBO would keep Rowling involved in the Wizarding World adaptations and projects. For one, I imagine her contract has some binding language in there that they can’t just decouple her work from her. This isn’t typical in media contracts, but most authors are also not billionaires who live in castles.

While I’m sure fandom sites and pundits will claim this is another sign of how terrible the world will become now that Trump became president, I think it’s clear that she was involved long before November 6th. They cite the 20+ year relationship between Warner and Rowling and that she’s been involved in selecting the writers and directors who will adapt her work, so let’s set all that aside.

There are a few very obvious reasons, I think, as to why they would want Rowling involved. And if you’re someone addicted to twitter, this may surprise you.

For one, JK Rowling is still immensely popular. If you go to a Barnes and Noble—which is effectively the bookstore for most Americans—you will find a decent chunk of the store devoted to Harry Potter. You can buy the books in a dozen different versions and styles, from the pocketsized to the deluxified. There are shelves of Lego sets and puzzles and various other kinds of merchandise related to Harry Potter. You can buy a dang wand or a Gryffindor scarf or Hufflepuff sweater or whatever else. And Barnes and Noble keeps this much floor and shelf space for Harry Potter because of how well they sell.

So if all you’ve heard about Rowling for several years is her transphobia, you might be surprised to find out how few people would even know what you’re talking about. My wife, for example, told me that I was the only person she’d ever heard about this controversy from.

The videogame from last year that many videogame news sites refused to cover sold over 30 million copies.

There’s a new Harry Potter theme park at Universal Studios that is drawing in massive crowds and has kicked off at least one tiktok trend about how hot the Deatheaters there are.

This by itself means one of two things:

• People don’t care about the controversy

• People are completely unaware of it

And I imagine the answer is really a mixture of both. Many who have heard about Rowling’s anti-trans activism don’t care and many people have simply never heard anything about it because they don’t spend their lives staring at their phones.

Of course, one potential big reason for the lack of broad backlash against Rowling has to do with the fact that many people simply agree with her. You may not like it, but polling shows that most people are fine with certain behaviors of the trans community and very against other behaviors. And if you look at that polling, a lot of it lines up with what JK Rowling has said about trans people.

Now, I do think money is the biggest factor here. Warner Discovery is looking for a cash cow and Harry Potter is the fattest cow on the lot by quite a wide margin. The rights are also a lot clearer than, say, The Lord of the Rings.

But we do see a distinct divide, I think, between your average person who might read or watch Harry Potter and the class of people who write about media, which is why the internet feels almost monolithic in its condemnation of Rowling while Rowling’s wealth and popularity seem to be growing.

I do think there has been fallout from Rowling’s stance here. I think The Fantastic Beasts series would have a fourth movie out and maybe fifth movie in the works had she remained quiet about all this. Many people point to the diminishing returns at the box office, but I think the big drop has more to do with bad scripts and the inclusion and subsequent firing of Johnny Depp than it does with Rowling. Even so, the three movies have made nearly 2 billion dollars. And while critics hated the second and third movies (which, again, I think had more to do with Depp than anything else), audiences viewed them pretty positively.

Not exactly failures.

And had the third movie made $800million instead of $400million, this wouldn’t even be something we’d have to speculate about. More movies would be in the works.

Now, it’s possible that she has lost out on other opportunities here and there due to her statements, but opportunity lost is not the same thing as losing wealth. Because I remember many articles from the last two years stating that Rowling’s wealth was bleeding due to her anti-trans activism.

I’ll remind you: 30 million videogames sold, enormous theme park, hundreds of millions of books sold.

But we also must discuss cancelation a bit as a social and political concept.

speech and who it’s for

The Double Axe and Other Poems is the fourteenth book of verse by Robinson Jeffers published under the Random House imprint. During an association of fifteen years, marked by mutual confidence and accord, the issuance of each new volume has added strength to the close relationship of author and publisher. In all fairness to that constantly interdependent relationship and in complete candor, Random House feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume. Acutely aware of the writer’s freedom to express his convictions boldly and forthrightly and of the publisher’s function to obtain for him the widest possible hearing, whether there is agreement in principle and detail or not, it is of the utmost important that difference of views should be wide open on both sides. Time alone is the court of last resort in the case of ideas on trial.

—Publisher’s Note to The Double Axe and Other Poems by Robinson Jeffers, 1948

Throughout WWII, Robinson Jeffers remained adamantly against the war.

You can imagine how unpopular this was. It’s the kind of thing disallowed in polite society. I just read biographies of Oppenheimer and Einstein and you’d be surprised by how restrictive political pressures could be on a life at that time. Which is why Random House felt the need to essentially say that they disagree strongly with Jeffers but stand by his right to say them.

While Jeffers was popular enough during his lifetime, he was nowhere near someone like Rowling, which is why I think his publisher made such a stance public. They felt the need to protect an artist who would not be able to protect himself against being silenced.

Rowling’s wealth makes her essentially immune to cancelation, as does the popularity of her books and movies and merchandise.

And so many have seen her stance as an act of bravery. Because she could have remained silent or even spoken for trans people, against her own internal morality. But because she was invulnerable to being canceled, to being silenced, she waded waist deep into a culture war.

Those who have read my many pieces about the culture war can probably imagine what I think about such a decision, but this is the one she made and it’s one certain types of people applaud.

I’m not here to tell you how to feel about Rowling. You can make it up for yourself. I think I made myself quite clear over the course of my Harry Potter reviews, but to put it short: I find it a very impressive work that is deeply flawed and often deeply weird in unpleasant ways.

While most discussion of cancelation surrounds media figures, I think it’s worth understanding that the people who really pay the largest price are regular workers. People who try to start unions. Janitors at universities who commit microaggressions against students. Professors and students who speak out against US policies.

And for this reason, canceling people is deeply unpopular and looked upon with great skepticism. The chattering class would like you to believe that this is because of the misogyny or transphobia or racism of the average person, but I think it has much more to do with the fact that they’ve seen who actually gets canceled.

They’ve also seen how DEI initiatives are often meant to protect the companies that employ them rather than pull down systemic barriers. If you’ve read Robin DiAngelo’s widely read and popular White Fragility, you may not have noticed how the goal is to individualize transgressions. This takes the responsibility off the company and puts it onto some random colleague.

It actively breaks worker solidarity, which makes life much more comfortable for the executive class. Hard to get people to form a union when they go to seminars designed for them to all point fingers at one another for perceived wrongdoing.

Ironically, we’re seeing this exact thing play out with the ACLU and the NLRB.

to cancel unto Death

The literary world was, as the kids say, shook by a long piece in Vanity Fair that describes the apparent relationship between Cormac McCarthy3 and Agusta Britt, a woman who he met when she was a 16 year old in foster care and he was 42, who he went on to have a sexual relationship with when she was seventeen.

You can read the whole thing here.

Many people have attacked the writer of this piece, saying that his terrible prose distracts from the very serious story. The writer, , is also apparently on substack and got access to Augusta Britt because she liked his review of The Passenger, so don’t let nobody tell you nothin about starting a newsletter for a small audience.

But what are we to make of this?

Should you still read Cormac McCarthy?

What should you think of a man who would do this with a young woman?

Well, this is where all this discourse gets tricky. Many are saying McCarthy groomed and raped her. Britt disputes such a thing.

And while we need to believe women, to believe victims, what do we do when the alleged victim denies her victimhood? I mean, she’s not young now and has had her whole long life to reflect on this relationship that both of them maintained for nearly fifty years.

What do we do with a main character who doesn’t behave correctly?

Well, we can still cancel ol Cormac and never read him again, throw his body of work into the ocean.

But my guess is that this will matter a whole lot to a very small amount of people and most will either never hear about it or they won’t care. The troubling aspects of this are fifty years old and ol Cormac is dead.

If Augusta Britt won’t mourn for the child she was, why should anyone else?

what now?

You must decide for yourself how to feel about any of this, all of this. You must decide what you’ll do.

If you stop reading Rowling or McCarthy because of who they are, that’s fine. You may do whatever you want. It’s your life.

But you also then must decide what it means that so many people continue to read Harry Potter and The Road, to watch Harry Potter and No Country for Old Men.

What the howling indifference of people means in the face of these things?

For what it’s worth, I wish Rowling had not said what she said and I wish McCarthy had not done what he did, but I also don’t feel any need to cut certain works of art from my life.

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RETVRN OF THE BLACK SWORDSMAN

This brings us back to where we left off in Chapter 8, with Guts wandering the world fighting demons. And we fall back into a looser structure in this Arc as well.

But there’s also a very similar structure in that this arc is essentially given in three parts. Rather than three parts over eight chapters, as in The Black Swordsman Arc, we have three parts spread over eighty chapters.

Enterprising mathematicians in the crowd will be able to calculate how this arc is a blown up reflection of that initial arc.

But I want to consider this overall structure for a moment.

The Black Swordsman Arc kicks off the story and last for eight chapters. We then get a flashback that is twelve times the length of the introduction to this world and story. From there, we return to the present, soaked in violence and fear and tragic loss, and we carry on for eighty more chapters in the present, meaning that we have still spent more time in the past than we have in the present by the time you finish this arc.

Onto the arc itself.

There’s less of the emotional devastation than we just witnessed in favor of some good old fashioned hack and slash action. Some gruesome monsters, some hideous violence, and an interesting development in the nature of Guts’ life.

Hanging over all of this is that we now know Guts. We know what he has done, what he’s been through. The weight of Griffith pressing down on his shoulders, the Casca sized hole in his chest stealing his every breath.

The death of all his friends, who had become a family to him. The loss of all he cared about. The collapse of his whole world.

And a brand carved into his neck. A curse unending, given to him by the man who meant the most to him, who saved him, who gave him a life.

The man who then took his love and raped her before his eyes while he was bound, helpless, by a legion of demons.

And we have the curious naming of this arc: Conviction.

I present to you now, before we amble on forward, that the meaning of this name is significant. The Golden Age is named as it is for seemingly obvious reasons.

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. But them times was golden all the same.

The Black Swordsman Arc is named in the same manner that a frat might name it’s homecoming weekend something like Blackout 40s or whatever.

And I suppose I’ll play a little game with the meaning of the name of the Conviction Arc, as I see it. You shall read what comes next and I will hope that you guess the reason before I state it at the very end.

such violent children

The opening of this arc presents a strange story of false elves abducting children and turning them into demons. They’re led by Rosine, who was once only a girl, dreaming of an end to pain.

Like so many, this leads her on a path free of pain, of glory, but ultimately of horror as she and the other false elves she creates consume the people of this small village near the Misty Valley.

As a child, she was beaten mercilessly and only found joy out in the wilds, in the forests and streams. The village was a place of violence and privation and fear.

And so we have a Peter Pan twisted death metal black here, where a child forsakes growing up by becoming a monster, Pied Pipering all the children along with her. She is giving them a new life. A beautiful existence with great power where they can live forever without the fear of death, the terror of marauding armies, or the casual brutality of cowardly men broken by war.

Because war is a backdrop here. In the years since the Eclipse, with the fall of the Band of the Hawk, Midland has been drowning in war, as mercenary bands cleave paths back and forth across the land. Worse than that, there’s an invading empire.

Guts and Puck encounter Rosine and her false elves mostly on accident. Guts being who he now is finds only one solution to just about every problem in his life: he swings his big sword.

And though the battle is difficult and hardfought, with Guts once more enduring pain and brutality at the hands of many demons, he defeats Rosine. But only by killing all the false elves, who were once children, who could perhaps have been saved.

Guts deals her a killing blow and she reverts, almost to a child again, and here is where the Holy Iron Chain Knights find Guts and this trail of devastation and destruction. Guts flees and so too does Rosine, though she succumbs to her wounds soon enough.

the seed of disbelief

What are we to make of the Holy See? It’s not accidental that the papacy of our own world is called the Holy See. Much of the iconography and political and theological structure of this sect are marinated in the Roman Catholic Church. They are also quite clearly set up as an antagonist in the same way that the nobility of Midland is presented as an antagonistic force.

This tells us much of Berserk as a story. For who among any of the competing forces has been presented as a force for good? We might say the Band of the Hawk, but only because Guts believes in Griffith. But was Griffith ever a positive influence on the land, on the people?

Charismatic and beautiful and bold and successful, he was, in a way, the promise of war ending. But his plan was to hand that power to the king of Midland until he could establish his own kingdom or take Midland for himself. And while we might want to give Griffith the benefit of the doubt since what he did to Guts and the land came only after a year of torture, but we should remember that even at the height of his power he was not above assassinating children.

We see in Berserk a distrust of all authority. Every power structure is looked at with suspicion and proves itself to be as brittle and nasty as any single individual capable of rape or great acts of violence.

Even our hero, Guts, is rarely heroic in the traditional sense.

Rather, his heroism is Schopenhauerian, Sisyphian, perhaps even Nietzschean, though I’ll have to defer to the philosophy readers when it comes to such things.

And so what in this world is presented in a positive light?

Well, the answer is simple: love.

Friendship.

We can but withstand life. The world is brutal and cold and godless and shrouded in darkness, but we can build a fire together. Your hand in mine and mine in yours. We can form a ring of fire, a brightness, a burning hot to combat the cold, the dark. Our callused hands and feet, our scarred bodies and faces can be turned towards gentleness.

And I’m reminded of another story, another moment drenched in the Catholicism of my youth:

There are no gods who will save us. No powers to come and protect us.

Only us. You and me. Our tiny hands. Our overbrimmed hearts.

And this is the beauty of Berserk, though you must traipse through blackened fields of shattered bones.

The Holy Iron Chain Knights capture Guts and plan on bringing him in. You see, they’ve been following the path of destruction he’s left. This legendary black swordsman who many in the Holy Iron Chain Knights barely believed existed. At least not as a single man. Another mercenary band, perhaps, ruthless and cruel.

The leader of these knights, Farnese, a noble woman and true believer in the faith, has been tortured by fear nearly her whole life.

Burning heretics forever cast in her eyes give her a sense of power, a marvelous burning in her underbelly, this frothing pleasure in violence, led her to become a blight upon the land, finding and destroying heresy wherever she encounters it.

Her faith in God fills her with righteousness.

But when Guts uses her to escape from the Holy Iron Chain Knights, her whole world is thrown out of order and we spend the rest of her narrative in this arc watching her battle all that she denied with all that she hoped.

Seeing the curse haunting Guts, witnessing the demons and ghosts that he must fight, changes her. For the first time in her life, she sees a limit to God’s light. She believed so strongly in God, in God’s power to crush the evil in the world. She was God’s tool eradicating heretics, snuffing out their power.

She believed so strongly in God that she disbelieved in the demons and monsters we’ve come to know so well over these 150 chapters. Guts’ entire world shaped by monsters, by demons, by men who may as well be demons, and these two perspectives crash into one another, upending Farnese’s worldview.

Farnese’s attendant and bodyguard, Serpico, finds her and Guts and he returns her to the knights, abandoning the capture of Guts.

Here, trying to recover from his many injuries, he’s visited by the demon child once more and sees a vision of Casca burning at the stake.

He rushes home.

what did you do when we needed you most; or, love asunder; or, I went searching for myself and lost you; or, never let me go, why did you let me go; or—

When I said that there was less emotional devastation in this arc, I did mean it, but I also lied by omission. For though it’s brief, this interlude between hack and slashery is acutely painful.

For Guts discovers that Casca is gone. He has been gone for two years, wandering the land in search of demons and monsters to fight, to gain some sort of vengeance. For this is the kind of man he is.

He does not know how to love. He was only just learning how before everything beautiful and bright was ripped to pieces by legions of demons.

And while I could write 10,000 words on this single moment alone, perhaps it’s best to leave you with Miura’s own words and imagery here.

Run to me.

Come to me, my love.

Do not look away, my love.

Be here with me, my love, always. Always with me. Hold me close. Don’t ever let me go. Don’t you ever fucking let me go, my love.

Guts did the only thing he knew how to do when faced with this ocean of sorrow: he sharpened his blade and went out to kill.

He did it before when he abandoned Griffith.

And damn it. I wish I didn’t, but I see myself here in Guts. And I shouldn’t. No one should. But I know myself. Have been forced to be myself for nearly forty years now. I cannot lie to myself to myself.

I close myself to people. Have done it for my whole life. It may not be a healthy response to sorrow and pain, but it’s the one I’ve continually leaned upon. I wrote about one such experience here.

But like all of you, like all of everyone, I have been hurt. Hurt in love, hurt by love, and sometimes this shattered me. But at times, I learned that the way to not shatter was to build a wall and turn away. And I found a strange capacity to shut myself off from people, even those who once meant the world to me, who were my everything.

I found I could forgive people and get past these hurts and sorrows, but rarely did it ever lead to true healing. For I could not forget. Could not turn my heart back onto them, could not open myself to be hurt that way again.

And so I understand Guts.

Understand why he left Casca behind.

Why he could not look at her. Not because she was raped or anything like that, but because she was the totem of his own failure, the sigil of his own inadequacy, a burning sensation reminding him of how he failed his love, how he could not protect his heart.

But that love never died.

And in a way, the vision of her burning and her disappearance allow a path to healing. For this is something he knows how to do.

If she’s in danger, he will go there and he will kill.

It is the only thing he knows.

In a way, it is all he is.

And that belief, that reflection he sees of himself, terrifies him.

His own failure shrieking back at him from Casca’s face.

The horrors they lived through. The love they shared.

Guts cannot face himself.

He cannot face her.

Cannot live with himself and so he threw his body into an endless war, leaving his heart to wilt and rot. And that heart became mute, unbound by memory, bound in an elf cave to keep the demons at bay.

the herald—hear her singing

The Skull Knight finds Guts once more and warns him that the Falcon is returning to the physical world, through some great terror similar to the Eclipse.

Here we meet the Holy See’s Inquisitor Mozgus who has come to the city of Albion to root out heretics. Farnese, after her failure, has lost command of her knights but she’s at Albion to assist in finding the heretics and killing them.

We find a swirling mass of chaos here and, interestingly, a heretical sex cult flourishing underneath the nose of the Church.

Casca, mute and seemingly helpless, is taken in by the prostitutes of Albion and inadvertently becomes an emblem of purity round which the sex cult goes bananas. This is, of course, the moment when the heretics are found.

Guts is also now here and he’s found a new hanger on—an orphan who, along with Puck, adds a bit of levity and humor to the whole dark affair.

Albion erupts into seven kinds of chaos. Farnese is having a dark night of the soul, doubting everything she’s built her life upon, and Serpico is there to stand beside her, no matter the direction, while Guts cleaves his way through everyone and everything to find and save Casca while prostitutes of Albion try to find a middle path through this chaos while Mozgus believes his connection to God will usher in a new shining day.

But his belief in God has allowed corruption into his heart, into his soul. And while he believes the power surging into him is God’s, it is, instead, the Godhand’s.

And Albion, like so many places Guts comes to, falls under the shadow of these great demons.

Humanity sheds from people and they rage and Mozgus becomes a great demon believing himself to be a magnificent angel and Guts, once more, like always, throws his body in the way and fights.

Clinging to his pain. Clinging to his humanity.

But most importantly, he has found Casca.

And he will protect her.

But does she know him?

And how this breaks him. Yet fight he must. There is no time to break and fall apart.

Albion and the Tower of Conviction at its center swirls with the dead, with demons, of ravaged and deranged souls seeking salvation. And the battle ensues and now Guts, for the first time since the Band of the Hawk, has companions fighting alongside him against great evil.

And Casca is with him.

And the tower falls.

And a light, in the distance.

Griffith returns.

And we close the book on this arc.

a name

And so, dear reader, I must ask what you make of the title: Conviction Arc.

This arc is obsessed with belief, with how we perceive ourselves and others, how we compile the world in our own hearts and heads. And what we find in every case, whether it’s Farnese or Rosine or Mozgus or even Guts, is that they are wrong.

Or, not wrong, but deluded.

Conviction: a firmly held belief.

And what do we believe in more than our own view of the world, of ourselves?

And so I find it fitting that this arc titled for conviction is really about delusion and the lies we believe about ourselves and others. It’s about all that we cannot see or all that we refuse to see.

Only through other people, through a balancing of perspectives, do we begin to see ourselves and the world with any clarity. Which fits the narrative structure here, since it is the arc that most often strays from Guts. We spend time with Farnese but also with characters that seem quite minor. Yet each of these minor characters tell us something important about Guts.

Though, of course, they are not themselves commenting on him. Rather, they are speaking about themselves. But what they see gives us a framework for understanding Guts.

The power to protect someone and the power to be with someone are different.

This sentence may hit like a truck if you’re unprepared.

For true strength comes from caring for others.

This grand epic drenched in black and painted grotesque is really one of love. And this is what continually impresses me, completely shocks me over and over. Because in all the hack and slash, I somehow, once again, forgot what lies at the heart of all this.

All that is beautiful, all that’s worth preserving, is our bounds to one another. Our relationships. Friendships. The love we share and the love shared with us. Kindness given and received.

While Miura got you in the door with sex and violence, we’re nearly 200 chapters into this because of what he delivered alongside that. If all we had was the violence, the demons and the fucking, we would have grown bored by chapter 50.

Instead, we race ever onward to see the path of love, the road to healing, the many storms we must endure to be human, to remain human, to find and give love, to earn and deserve, to share it even when we don’t.

More words that tell us so much given by a character who seems completely unimportant.

This is a narrative trick, mind. To feed us a thesis through the side door. Rather than putting these words in Guts’ or Casca’s mouth, they’re put elsewhere, given to us rather than those who truly need to hear it.

It is a different form of brutality.

But these contrast so completely with what Guts said at the end of the Black Swordsman Arc, where he castigates those for being weak, telling them to kill themselves if they’re not willing to fight the darkness, the evil of this life, this world.

But what strength there is in kindness, in love.

welcome the Falcon

Griffith has returned, not as the demon he became, that we saw, but as a man once more.

And what does this mean for Guts?

For all of them? For all of us?

While I do think this is weaker than The Golden Age, it is also a profound statement. This statement would mean nothing without the horrors of the Golden Age, without the love and heartbreak. And so it must build upon rather than forge its own way, like The Golden Age did.

But what I’m finding is that even a weak stretch of Berserk is better than many other stories at their best. More and more, I understand the devotion this series has, the reputation it basks in.

I’ll see you before the end of the year with the Millennium Falcon Arc, which is the longest arc and the final arc completed by Miura before his death.

Free books:

• Poetry and Literary Fiction

• Stories for the Fall

More of King Country:

• Salem’s Lot

• The Shining

• Cujo

• 11/23/63

My new daughter, born on Saturday, rests on my chest as I write this, which feels somewhat fitting for a novel like this. A novel so fixated on the horrors of youth but also the grisly nightmares that plague us all.

And I don’t really know what I expected from this novel. I remember seeing my friend John reading this gargantuan novel when we were in seventh grade and wondering what that could be. Wasn’t curious enough to look into getting the novel or anything like that. I was aware of Stephen King by then, I think, because everyone under the age of forty has probably been aware of his work for most of their lives.

But because I’ve always thought of people reading King as young adults, I really was not prepared for what’s inside this novel. And I’m not easy to shock! I don’t think anyone who’s read American Psycho or seen Gasper Noe’s Irreversible is easy to shock. And I’ve run across transgressive authors and novels famed for their grotesqueries and horrors and gruesomes and kind of shrugged it off because I’ve been desensitized by a life where I saw a man obliterated by a train on my friend’s computer when I was eleven.

If you’re around my age, you’ve probably witnessed horrifying things on the internet at way too young an age—not that there’s really any age where seeing a beheading isn’t going to knock you back—and so my squeamish bone dissolved decades ago, at least when it comes to this sort of thing.

But I think It is a genuinely transgressive novel. The places it goes and the horrors it resides inside are really unexpected. Even my blackheart was a bit shocked!

The novel begins simply enough: the death of a child in 1957 and the apparent murder of a young gay man in 1984. In both, there’s this strange inclusion of a clown. In the death of the child, Georgie, we witness the clown from his perspective and so of course we know that he was brutally killed by this ghastly clown. In the 1984 murder, both the murderers and the lover of the man murdered mention a clown.

A clown, of all things. I suppose fear of clowns has been around for a while but I have wondered if it begins here or if this novel played off an already common experience. I imagine it’s the latter, but, even so, it seems a silly thing here.

And then King takes it deathly serious.

But before we get to all that, there’s just a whole lot of happening. This novel is long. If you read it as a preteen or teenager like my friend John, it was probably the longest book you’d ever read. Might be it still is. By itself, it’s nearly the length of the entire Lord of the Rings. Interestingly, it’s not even King’s longest novel.

Which, I guess, does not entirely surprise me. By this point, four novels in, I can tell that King is not in a hurry to get anywhere. And while some may tell you that’s a weakness or the reason they can’t read King, I believe it’s one of his greatest strengths. And, sure, could this novel have been 1,000 pages instead of nearly 1,200? Could it have been 700?

Yes to both, honestly. Possibly, it would be stronger, at least to some. And, you know, maybe I’ll even agree, just for the sake of it. I’ll say that It would have been better if it was 700 pages long instead. Cut out those 450 pages and toss them away.

But have you ever been inside a cathedral? The light pouring in through windows the size of a house, the long shadows casting vast chasms of darkness, the domes opening wide above you like the eye of God, the sprawling structure branching off into chapel-sized alcoves, the palatial altar so gaudy and glorious and bright that you could chisel away at the marble to furnish suburban homes with new floors.

The immensity of the silence. The strange coldness of those monstrous buildings filling up city blocks. When the organ wails, it shivers your bones, pulverizes your chest, makes you gasp from the scale, from the untold human hands, the unimaginable cost, the weight of human suffering that went into its construction.

And yet, what a thing to behold. What beauty. What extravagance!

Perhaps It could have been the size of a church for those who care only for the meat but what a wonder to hold in your hands a novel that includes the skin and bones, the liver and spleen, the appendix and uterus, a novel that numbers the teeth and labels the layers of flesh as it cuts through each one, that measures the depth of your lungs while you suck in breath, the pace of your heart when you watch a child murdered, when you watch two adults fall in love after a fractured lifetime separating their childlike love from who they are now.

That’s not to say that It is without flaws.

Cathedral it may be, but this is a vast crumbling cathedral. Ancient, collapsing back into the hillside, shafts of light piercing through the cracking mortar.

You may not have the stomach for it, sure. But you also may not have the patience for it. Hell, you’re probably reading this on your phone. You probably can’t remember the last time you read a chapter of a book without looking at your phone. Not so long ago, you brought a book to the toilet every time you had to shit. Now? Well, your phone is all you need anywhere you go, yes?

But this story of love and loss, of horror and brightness, is really unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s sloppy and slapdash at times but then you’ll turn the page and feel your knees buckle even though you’re already sitting down, and a flashgrenade of a memory will crack open your skull to that moment when you were ten or twelve riding your bike as hard as you could, the wind in your hair, tears in your eyes, and you’ll take a breath because you’re no longer in your living room or bed but cast tumbling through time to moments you thought you’d forgotten, to times when life held such unutterable beauty but also marrowdeep fears trembling through your fingers even twenty five years later.

For It is many things and even as it sort of collapses inward like a dying star, there is an extravagant wonder to the way it dims and bleeds and cools rather than supernovas, taking you and all those memories with it.

And I think that’s fitting. I think that’s beautiful. Especially for a novel so tied to memory and brutality.

For, in many ways, this is a novel that you cannot take with you. It overwhelms you and it does it by design.

King doesn’t just write this to scare you—though you may get scared—but to invent a place. And not in the way that we all invent moments and times but the way Tolkien invented Middle Earth.

Down to the very dirt, King is invented and creating and bringing life to Derry, Maine. He wants you to smell the dang flowers, feel the high grass against your ankle, taste that hour before a rainstorm, hear the call of long ago friends, of memories buried alive yet bursting free, see the way the earth fissures and the waters rise.

It’s a brilliant success. It’s a staggering failure.

It’s a one of a kind novel, and I can taste James Joyce in It, can smell Mrs Dalloway’s tea in It. And maybe you’re ready to throw your phone across the room because what does any of this have to do about a bunch of kids trying to kill a luciferian clown? But I don’t think this book exists without James Joyce.

And maybe I’ll write something about all that someday, but, for now, I must go hold my daughter, my wife, my sons, and try to forget this unforgettable crumbling cathedral, knowing it will live inside me perhaps for the rest of my life.

Many people have recommended other King novels to me while I begin this journey. I’ll probably include most of them, unless I end up abandoning this whole project early due to disinterest or disgust, but the ones listed below are the only ones I’ll promise on writing about.

Here’s the order I’ll be tackling King’s novels. I’d like to give you a reason why this is the order and not some other order or why only these books and not a bunch of other ones, but I’m trusting to Jayson Young as my guide.

1. Salem’s Lot

2. The Shining

3. Cujo

4. It

5. 11/22/63

6. From a Buick 8

7. Revival

8. Firestarter

9. The Eyes of the Dragon

10. Misery

11. Pet Sematary

12. The Long Walk

13. The Stand

14. The Dark Tower I-VII