Not quite two years ago, I reviewed Jedediah Berry’s The Naming Song in these pages. That novel, like its predecessor The Manual of Detection, was a thematically ambitious work of fantasy in which big ideas seemed to leap from the page. Some SFF writers embrace tropes and lean into easy classification. Berry does not, and it left me curious to see how he’d follow up The Naming Song.
Was I expecting an irreverently-titled short novel about the adventures of an eyepatch-wearing barbarian warrior in a city of tetchy wizards, delirious gods, and complicated social hierarchies? I was not. Still, that’s a reasonable thumbnail sketch of what to expect from Kill All Wizards, which is the first in a planned series of books (the followup is announced at the end of this volume) about a barbarian named Gotchimus.
The novel opens with the line “There was a great tameness upon the land.” Readers may presume from that that they are about to meet a character at odds with the description of cozy prosperity that follows it. Sure enough, that’s Gotchimus, described as “beautiful in the way that certain rare and deadly beasts are beautiful,” possessing a keen intelligence and an undeniable sense of style.
Kill All Wizards begins with a meeting between Gotchimus and his friend Hecksley, a thief fitted with a clockwork hand, at the Unnameable, a members-only club built from a massive three-eyed skull. Each wishes to learn something about the other: Gotchimus is curious about the origins of Hecksley’s artificial hand, while Hecksley seeks to uncover why Gotchimus wears an eyepatch. And so the stories begin—with the story of how Gotchimus ran afoul of a group of wizards taking up much of the book that follows.
There is another matter also undergirding the two friends’ conversation: the killing of a number of the city’s wizards, for which Gotchimus is under suspicion. Kill All Wizards is narrated by a collective voice, an elegant way to personify the general mores of this world: “Some of those wizards we had loved, if not as friends, then as friends of friends whose gardens we had hoped to tour someday. With their deaths, the tameness was ruffled.”
Reading Kill All Wizards, I began to wonder if this book was Berry’s riff on the SFF of a bygone age—more specifically, Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories. You don’t read a lot about Lieber as an influence these days, though this series has led to some relatively recent fictional descendants, including Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. (Also, note this 1988 collection, where the cover artwork by Thomas Canty uncannily anticipates what Mikkelsen as Fafhrd might look like.)
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Kill All Wizards
The combination of a barbarian warrior and a thief in Kill All Wizards echoes the backgrounds of Lieber’s two title characters, for one thing. And for all that this book looks like it might be over the top—it is, after all, a novel called Kill All Wizards with a barbarian warrior as its lead character—there’s an unexpected element of psychological realism to it, not the least of which is the fact that the aforementioned warrior has a substantial amount of PTSD.
Right about here, I’ll shamefully admit that Lieber is a writer whose work I’ve meant to read more of than I actually have. I picked up a copy of The Big Time a few years ago and enjoyed its take on time travel; I can remember reading one of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser collections decades ago and both enjoying it and being surprised by the relatively bleak places the stories went along the way. To put it another way: I am familiar enough with Lieber’s adventure stories to suspect Berry is paying homage to them here; I am not familiar enough with them, however, to know if the connection goes deeper than that.
All of that may be irrelevant, though, as Berry also demonstrates that his fondness for big ideas has not vanished; reading it, I found myself taken aback by a description of a scene or background character that tapped into a surreal pulp energy. Here’s one description of Gotchimus making his arrival for a night at the theater:
A stranger dressed like something from the tales of the dreamthroes, the beasts on his waistcoat poised as though to pounce, his boutonnière a blazing beacon. He appeared out of place amidst the severe dark suits of the crowd, but his stride was so confident, so commanding, that every other gentleman in the room suddenly felt oldfangled.
And here’s the scene outside of Gotchimus and Hecksley’s meeting at the club that opens the book:
From here, the beauty of morning in the capital could be appreciated fully. The knife grinders of Charnel Square were out in force, their calls like the dirge of some spectral choir. Meanwhile the majestic ghost tortoise of Bloodletters Pond traced her slow route along the paths beneath the oaks.
The setting is not the only way in which Berry explores surreal and memorable ideas. The role of magic in this world is also striking, including playing cards that can transform into weapons and mirrors with mysterious properties. It’s all very conceptually rich, with some of the heady ideas that have been present in Berry’s other work echoed here. This is most apparent in the story’s use of gods, who “must always perform those functions upon which [their] existence depend,” as one character puts it.
Kill All Wizards is a departure from Berry’s previous work in many ways, but it is also recognizable as the work of the same author. Sometimes, a writer wants to explore the nature of reality; at others, that same writer might want to chronicle the adventures of an irreverent warrior making his way through posh society. Turns out Jedediah Berry in sword and sorcery mode is still Jedidiah Berry, and Kill All Wizards shows that visceral action and grand ideas can comfortably coexist.
Kill All Wizards is published by Tordotcom Publishing.
I’m reading it now. Except that I am a huge fan of Sword-and-Sorcery, this book is a big departure from what I normally read and I’m having a blast.
However I know already I’ll be soon disappointed because this book -133 pages- will end too soon for me and the wait for the next one -which I know I will buy-is going to seem way too long.