Hey Kate, tell us about the weirdest trilogy you've found since Brian Catling's Vorrh series, why don't you. Pretty please? Is it Jeffrey Ford's Well Built City trilogy? What about Tade Thompson's Wormwood books? Or Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy (wrong, I haven't read that yet. But stay tuned!)? Well, close, but no: it's Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft, and yes, Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack (also the names of the cities in the series title) are weird as hell.

And yeah, just like happened with Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog/Ludluda diptych, I didn't post on here when I read the first two books last year, in glorious audio book form as narrated by the idiosyncratically excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith*, but again, not because I didn't love them. I just don't post about everything I read anymore because I don't have the stamina I used to and typing still really hurts. Anyway, once again, I saw the final book on Netgalley and didn't want to wait, so now I'm honor-bound once again to share my thoughts about it. Which I have to talk a little about the earlier books to do at all well. So.


A warning to start: Alex Pheby is not here to meet your expectations. He's not writing any kind of fantasy that your average Big Publishing House marketing team would have any idea what to do with (so let's hear it for the brave and tasteful souls at Galley Beggar Press!). He's not giving a master class on world building, not here to give fan service to people who have come to care a lot for the kid who seemed to be the series protagonist in the first book, Mordew, nor to lovers of his urchin pals who take over most of the action in the second, Malarkoi, nor even for the incredible magical dogs who steal the show in both of those books.

We start Waterblack full of questions about what's next for Nathan Treeves, Prissy, Gam, Anaximander and Sirius (well, we kind of feel like we know what happened to the Goddog but Pheby has taught us to maybe not take certain endings very seriously). Nathan's mother, Clarissa, seems to have achieved her ultimate end already and has nowhere to go but down; is that what we're going to watch here? Nathan's enemy, Sebastian, the Master of Mordew, is still kind of kicking around though he was pretty disappointed at the end of Malarkoi, what about him? What about Portia, the Mistress of Malarkoi, "goddess of gods," who gave little Prissy quite a gift last novel?

Cue pitiless laughter from our author, who doesn't give a fig for our expectations, but who knows that he's got us hooked anyway because the kind of people who enjoyed the first two volumes of his Cities of the Weft trilogy want to know where the hell he's going with all of this weirdness way more than we're invested in any particular character. Although, them, too, somewhat. I mean, there's still an untold number of "Nathan flukes" loose and wreaking havoc in the topologically distorted ruins of Mordew, after all, and Clarissa, who's been powering all of her mighty spells in the single most ruthless manner I've ever seen a not-quite villain employ in a novel of any kind, ever, still has... something going on and hey, does she care about her son, like, at all? And speaking of offspring, there's still a puppy of the Goddog's running around somewhere.

There are some very weird and intriguing and mind-blowing plot threads that have yet to be properly woven into this here narrative textile, is what I'm saying.

However...

Waterblack starts off by posing an extended philosophical argument as to how a whole bunch of stuff we've just been taking for granted as "true" within the universe of the Cities of the Weft... is ontologically impossible. This undermines almost everything we've come to understand about the hundreds of pages and dozens of hours we've devoted to exploring his creation.

And then he launches into a deep exploration of the background of a minor antagonist who had maybe two scenes in Malarkoi and wasn't even mentioned in Mordew.

But, because Pheby is a hell of a gifted storyteller, we're immediately interested in this girl, Sharli and her defective firebird companion, Tinnimam, anyway. Even before it's hinted that her back story may allow us to learn, at long last, what the hell the Women's Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade is all about. I mean, this isn't Philip Pullman, here; as the jacket copy on Mordew discloses before we've even read a page of this series, God has already been dead a long time, here. But there are definite echoes of Pullman's work in the Cities of the Weft; there's even a Subtle Knife, though the person who gets it puts it to very different use than sweet young Will does in the book named for it

But wait, Pheby isn't done trying to talk you out of loving his trilogy. He still has many logical arguments to make as to why everything he's shared with us through hours of narration/hundreds of pages is really kind of bullshit, and he makes these arguments in exhausting detail (there's more than one reason why people refer to these books as the most Platonist since Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). And, as he starts warning us about halfway through the book, a lot of our pressing narrative questions will not be answered in the text of Waterblack proper; we'll have to wait for the appendices, which, Lord of the Rings-like, take up a good chunk of this last novel.

But that's really the only thing these books have in common with Tolkien, I assure you.

What this ultimately comes to is the most fascinating yet frustrating read I've encountered in a long, long time. Waterblack does my favorite thing a series' final volume can do, which is make me want to go back and re-read the whole trilogy because it has fundamentally changed what the earlier books even mean. This is a particular achievement in this case, since I just re-read Mordew and Malarkoi last month in preparation for this!

But so, despite Pheby's best and most perverse efforts to the contrary, I still love this series. I still love its characters, especially the magical dogs (and especially especially the new magical puppy introduced in Waterblack. I absolutely want a sequel devoted to the further adventures of Anaximines. I am also absolutely sure I'm never going to get one. But that's ok, I have this.); I still love its strange cities and its stranger creatures (especially the very cerebral and civilized Person-Headed Snakes). And I love most of all how it made me question pretty much everything I'd read before, both in and out of the fantasy genre. You might, too. Give the first book a try!

*Who commits pretty much every sin I hate most in an audio book narrator but makes it all work. Even his artificially high and breathy female character voices somehow work. But that doesn't mean I'll accept this from anybody else, you hear?

The Killing Gods as a Bait to Keep Reading Nonsense

“The… conclusion to Alex Pheby’s Cities of the Weft trilogy.” Pheby teaches at the University of Newcastle in Scotland. He has been winning prizes for his fiction since 2016, when he focused on schizophrenia. Then, he turned to fantasy with this series. He has been releasing one book in around two years. The schizophrenic theme seems to be picked up here, as an opening page includes a map with handwritten scratches, and inkblots meant to suggest the narrator’s psychosis. The lines crossing it hint at paranoia, though in this dark-fantasy, there are real fantastical threats, like “left bomb collapse zones”, and “mutations”, as these scribbles indicate. One title written here in bigger letters is “The Angelic Army of Waterblack”, while another is “Battle Map of the Relic Fields”. The map does not seem to be of any particular place on Earth.
“One thousand million infants are dead, and Nathan Treeves is back. He’s become the Master of Waterblack, the City of the Dead.” Readers coming to this book without having read previous books in this series should read the helpful “Events of the Previous Volume, in Summary” section. It clarifies that Nathan has “an unpredictable and uncontrollable power he has inherited from his father.” Though then it adds confusion by mentioning that Nathan created “a limb-baby” and sold it for fake money. It’s puzzling if this means he produced a child and then sold it into slavery… I tried searching for “limb” to figure out what this was referring to, but did not find anything relevant. The most dramatic mention is: “Bill cut at its limb, at its nerves, it filled Bill with pain, a pain unbearable for a body.” This description goes on to mention “stamping with a broken knee” and “cut away… limbs” (164-5). There is a lot of blood and gore, but little magic. It’s unclear if it’s just about a sadist, or if this sadist is also doing something magical.
“And Sharli, once a sacrifice, then an assassin, is now a trained God-Killer.” The latter point is somewhat clarified in a section that seems to be non-rhyming and semi-rhyming, but non-metered verse, which mentions that “In the pages of this book”, the reader will find “unusual things, including… a god killer… gods caged in cubes… gods fighting each other…” This is a preamble seemingly designed to keep away those who are overly religious. The broken lines in this ad are designed to make them seem to be modern-art, or something abstract and deep. But it also serves to scare the reader by confusing them with abstractions. Returning to Sharli, the god-killer, the section that discusses this just describes her violently killing unnamed people. I have nothing against violence. But who is she killing, and why? What’s the point of these murders? There is a note that she loathes the body of a guy she just killed. And then the story moves on, as she sees a guard and is turned over to a supervisor (apparently murder isn’t something to run away over?) (119). I also searched for “god”, hoping to find god-like or god characters. Instead, I found general references to the abstract “crying out to God”. But later in the book there is a section on “The Propaganda of the Immaterial Soul and the Myth of ‘Heaven’”, which discusses “pseudo demigods” in detail, “such as the ‘Mistress of Malarkoi’” (143). This seems to be an abstract digression that is not directly related to the main narrative.
“She has killed many—but failed in killing Nathan Treeves years ago.” Apparently, she tried to kill him when he was “a baby” in the “slums”, before later becoming the Master of Waterblack, who together with his Mistress was “aiming at the seizing of power from God, whom they had arranged by their occult powers to kill” (204). Ah, here is the promised direct discussion of god-killing. But as the narrator acknowledges this description is “notoriously vague”. Searching for the next references to “God” does not help to clarify this, as they are again vague.
“Soon she, and the Women’s Vanguard, will have another chance, even as The Master, The Mistress and the Atheistic Crusade hurtle toward their final confrontation.” This is apparently to kill God, but the whole story is extremely chaotic, as no concrete battle or narrative structure appear to help lead the reader. This is not a readable book. I can’t recommend for anybody to try and dig into this. Maybe if somebody wants to try hallucinogenic drugs, and is lucid enough to read on them; they would enjoy just kind of tripping on these ideas hopping around. But on a sober head, it’s just impossible to grab onto what this story is about.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024

Pheby continues with the tongue in cheek humorous style that made the first two books great. We finally see the inner workings of the Atheistic Crusade and get answers about the crazy metaphysics of his world. The strength here is the world building and the relationships between God and man, life and death, the real and unreal. Creepy cats, philosophical dogs, this book has everything I wanted from a conclusion to the cities of the Weft. I can't wait to see what Pheby writes next.

I absolutely loved this series. The first book, Mordew, pulled me in and I read the second one right after. I had to wait a bit to get to read this one, but it was well worth the wait.
If you are sick and tired of the same old tropes in fantasy, this is for you. So different and interesting. I would love to get inside this authors mind.

this was a strong third entry in the Cities of the Weft series, it had that feel that I enjoyed the overall feel and it worked in this universe. It had that plot that I was looking for and was glad everything that I wanted. The characters were everything that I expected and was engaged with what was happening to this world. I enjoyed how good Alex Pheby wrote this and am excited for more.