Fantasy Series that Ruined My Life, Vol. 2

12/5/2025

"You think I could share your book?" I ask a neighbor, craning toward their desk like an affable Gumby. "Couldn't fit mine in my backpack." You-know-how-it-is nod to the overstuffed bag on my desk. Closed enough to hide whichever Gurm, Lynch, Rothfuss, or Ericksons are crammed inside.

A Song of Ice and Fire; Gentleman Bastard; The Kingkiller Chronicles
And an inevitable English degree

My first year of junior college took place in the dark. I walked by streetlight to my classes at night, then walked home to sit in the blue glow of my computer until dawn. I was 18, no car, no job, vague direction. I spent the long nights reading The Dark Tower, playing video games, and trying to maneuver my way into girls’ top 8s. And writing. Naturally, my steady diet of fantasy series had turned me into an English major with notions of wanting to write for a living. I took all the literature classes and fiction workshops my school offered. In my warlock’s hours I built fantasy worlds of my own, crafting outlines, drawing maps, spinning lore, breathing a miasma of dragon’s blood incense while my hair grew long and my skin grew pale. Hey ladies.

I was doing my best to behave academically, but the more I saw of academia, the less I liked it. It seemed like English careers comprised the same kind of tedium that made my brain fall out in high school. I learned more from the personal lives of the faculty at school than I did from the material — they were middle aged, out of energy, spending their careers stirring the ashes of literature for the handful of undergrads that did the reading. The great excitements in their professional lives were literary conferences, where academics convened and debated the minutiae of grammar over long weekends. Then they came back and described these thrills to us in class. And this was the likely fate of an English major. The idea terrified me, but I hadn’t exactly given myself many alternatives. I’d managed to find a path, but the way was dark and desolate, and I had no social reinforcers, which, with hindsight, are absolutely key to success. I don’t think I made a single friend in my department. Even in the writing workshops, most of the other kids in class were just doing the minimum to get their GE credits. It was high school with less structure and more cigarettes.

So I walked home, read books, and vicariously followed the journey I did want to be on. The fantasy scene was having its blogosphere renaissance. A Feast for Crows was hitting shelves, the Ice and Fire HBO show was on the way, and Gurm was in the mainsteam. I read Ice and Fire religiously, of course, but it wasn’t something I sought to emulate. Like Tolkien, Gurm was in a league of his own, untouchable. Somewhere, though, the Gurm mentioned in retrospect that the most inspiring book is the one you feel you could have written better. Surely if that author can get published, he reasoned, you could too. And while I didn’t find many of those, I did follow the various prodigies that were rising to fill the space between ASOIAF releases, and kept up with their blogs and big-hype debut novels.

In 2006, the Lies of Locke Lamora was the heir to the throne. It kicked off the Gentleman Bastards Sequence and launched the career of Scott Lynch, who was famously advanced 7 figures for the 7-book series. Lynch was in his 20’s, so obviously I was jelly, but that also made him relatable — he was human, mortal, alive and blogging. If I could just figure out what he was doing, maybe I could do it too. To me, Lies was a whole masterclass in style. Lynch had crafted a sharp cinematic narrative that staked its claim well outside the shadow of Ice and Fire. Like Gurm, though, Lynch suffered from series malaise. Two books in and it seemed like the rest would never come. Lynch addressed the delays online, speaking openly about his struggles with mental health. This personal perspective was also revelatory. I read these long series in the lonely low points of life; maybe they were written in lonely low points as well.

As though to confirm this, Patrick Rothfuss’ celebrated debut The Name of the Wind was also followed by delays and candid bouts of gloom. The books may not have been booking, but Rothfuss stayed active with personal check-ins and behind-the-scenes industry posts, opening a window to the world I really sought. I was learning how the stew was made, and I was learning what life was like for the 0.1% of authors who found a modicum of financial success. It was kinda bleak, tbh. Even the top authors in the scene were hitting walls and enduring public failure. They were imprisoned in their writing rooms for 14 hours a day, pounding their heads against their desks until words fell out. It seemed like the best a writer could hope for was a cult following that might support a modest lifestyle and inspire some yaoi fanfiction. And maybe attending the equivalent of literary conferences, in costume. Which sounds absolutely dope to me now, let me tell you, but back then the whole business sounded like yet another Sisyphean doom of isolation and tedium. It seemed like my road was leading me into a wasteland.

Nonetheless, I was carried by inertia to the English department at Cal State Northridge, where for the first time I was out on my own, living independently, working to pay my way, and rolling the boulder up the hill.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen
And the sophomore death spiral redux

The ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen is the Ph.D. of fantasy series, an ultra-developed DnD campaign taking place across multiple continents and thousands of years, with pantheons of tormented gods, derelict military legions, arcane systems of magic, and hundreds of characters, mostly having a bad time, animated by professorial anthropology and philosophy and the least forgiving narrative style I’ve ever read. It’s a brutal, challenging, addictive slog, and it fit the mood of my first year of college.

I lived in a dorm with three chronically absent roommates. My friends were on the other side of the misty mountains. I was treading water in English while looking in the window of the impacted Film & Television program. At that point, the film industry seemed more exciting than English, with less dusty academia and more avenues for employment. I’d decided that I wanted to live life instead of just reading about it. Hunter S. Thompson’s Rum Diaries had something to do with that. In fact, I took a lot of inspiration from Thompson around this time. Probably too much. Despite living on campus, I kept my part-time pizza job and commuted back to my hometown four times a week. I worked nights and weekends, went to strange parties on the moons of LA, explored the universe, crashed in my dorm for naps, and sat in class a zombie, reading Malazan and trying to scratch together the coursework that would get me into the film program.

But frustration and FOMO weren’t my only demons. At the same time, my brother took a serious health turn. He’d had chronic seizures much of his life, and a scan had recently found a brain tumor. Soon the time came when it would have to be removed, and the procedure wasn’t without risk. And so the creeping dread that follows family peril joined the party, and my neglected coursework was just another swirling vapor of subconscious guilt. It seems like I spent most of that semester on the freeway between home, work, and school, speeding from my responsibilities at every end.

By the end of the year, I found myself returned to the old waking nightmare — watching classmates hand in assignments I hadn’t done, taking tests I hadn’t studied for, realizing I’d been sleepwalking into another chasm. My GPA dropped so low that I was kicked out of school before I even put a film portfolio together.

A few months later, back home and wondering what was left, what opportunities I hadn’t squandered, I was fired from my pizza job and fell into the earth. But, in the maw of that long bleak dumb Odyssean year, those Malazan books really hit.

Review: George R. R. Martin, The Mystery Knight

In my heyday I read the Ice and Fire books at least three times each. They were the most engrossing thing I’d read since Harry Potter, as influential on the modern scene as Tolkien was on the classic scene. I lived in Westeros, knew all the lore, opined and debated details with friends on our long commutes to school. Alas, that was over a decade ago, before the (disappointing) HBO show and cultural craze twisted the story and famous actors replaced the characters in my head. “Will it be as good?” I wondered, dusting off the Warriors collection in which The Mystery Knight appears. “Oh, yes. This is good. This is very good.”

Even in novella form, Westeros is incomparably developed. Though the world and its stories are massive, and its plots and politics complex, it all unfolds and interlaces as naturally as the true history from which it’s drawn. Gurm’s prose is lyrical, and his fantasy argot actually works. The descriptions of food make the most disgusting meals sound like exquisite feasts. The depths of the folklore make you want to light a candle to the Seven. You want to live there, even though Westeros is probably the least appealing fantasy world ever written.

Like the other Ice & Fire novellas, The Mystery Knight is a self-contained prequel to the main series. Dunk and Egg are among the most traditionally “moral” characters in the series, just an awkward underdog hedge knight and his squire, exploring familiar locations and getting in over their heads amid a cast of historical Starks and Peakes and Blackfyres. It’s a fast yarn full of easter eggs and butterfly-wing beats that stir the main story 300 years on. It’s also got all the scheming, action, and intrigue that made Ice & Fire a phenomenon, to the point that I think Dunk & Egg’s imminent MAX-ification has the potential to outclass the contorted Game of Thrones.

Gurm remains the modern GOAT. But you already knew that.

Review: Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

On my quest to revisit all these doorways in the sand, The Republic of Thieves was probably the book I was most excited about, and it did not disappoint. It picks up where book two left off, with Locke grievously injured by the events of that book and Jean desperate to save him. That desperation leads them to a diabolic debt and a new elaborate grift under deep cover among a city’s rival political cabals.

The parallel story follows young Locke in his early days as a recruit in the Gentleman Bastards, where he learned to lie, cheat, and steal from the aristocracy, evade the gallows, and avoid ass beatings from his fellow thieves.

His primary preoccupation, though, is impressing Sabbetha, the gang’s MVP bad girl thief, while their group maintains a con as an itinerant theatre troupe. The action, intrigue, and humor are still strong, but the teenage angst and digs at politics and theatre life are the real fun. The stories and tensions intertwine and weave a deft Netflix-ready narrative. Where is this adaptation?

Review: Patrick Rothfuss, The Narrow Road Between Desires

The Narrow Road is a sleek fairy tale snuck between the pages of the Kingkiller Chronicle’s main narrative, a slim story between novels. It’s not the long-awaited final book, but we take what we can get. I read The Name of the Wind at its height in 2007ish, which, thinking about it, was almost half my life ago. Oh no.

At a time when grimdark Gurm clones were rampant and every new title fit the “A [thing] of [things]” mold, Pat Rothfuss debuted his life’s work: a well-crafted, slow-paced cottage-core fantasy that eschewed Machiavellian conflict for wizarding school vibes and earthy lore.

The Name of the Wind had the prosaic sincerity and unhurried ramble we didn’t know we needed. All that is here in The Narrow Road, which follows Bast on a faerie’s day of bargaining, liaising, and fae magic. Rothfuss’ unique fairy tale prose textures a story that’s surprisingly heavy, conscientiously examining themes like sexuality and child abuse.

In the course of Bast’s busy day Rothfuss proves he can spin a tight, polished narrative that’s just as absorbing as his meandering doorstoppers. I choose to believe he's currently applying that craft to the imminent final book; I only have so many lifetime halves remaining. Kingkiller is the third piece of the Triforce of Anticipation, bound forever to Ice & Fire and Bastards in the fraternity of A-list fantasy series whose final books are lost to the whims of the muses. It’s not the final book, but Narrow Road is a great little check-in for those of us who have been sitting around the innkeeper’s hearth these many years.

Review: Steven Erikson, Dust of Dreams + The Crippled God

I caught up with a dozen series this year, but in Malazan I reached the glorious conclusion. The last two books are a two-parter — a 2,000-hardback-page Homeric epic that draws thousands of characters and dozens of storylines together. Most of the narrative follows different factions trudging along different brutal slogs to different showdowns, chapter by chapter struggling against thirst and famine and death, most resigned to the futility of their march, all dwindling hope that their sacrifices will amount to something worthwhile. Hey, if you’ve read the series this far, you’re a bleakcore junkie.

Each line connects at least superficially to the central convergence in the wasteland. Why are they converging there? I’m not even sure. Many of the big revelations in this series are delivered by inference and innuendo.

pb reading copy required

Fans know to read each chapter’s concluding page twice to catch subtle portents and implications. There’s work involved, yielding rewards for the scrupulous reader. But I’d been out so long that I had to keep the wiki open and do a review after every chapter, and I know there are plenty of details that went over my head.

But I got what I came for. The labyrinthian complexity. The immensity of scale. The familiar rhythm of build and convergence. Deep in the 600s, it really starts to pick up. Faces from the early books return, and you remember the magic, the characters. and the conflicts that made those books so good. Then the resolution, an epic convergence the size of a regular novel. The vibrant, explosive ending, like the most vivid anime. Reality-shaking battles. Pillars of jade fire, cosmic conflagrations, the clashing of gods and men and beings beyond imagining.

Is Malazan worth the commitment? It was for me, but it’s not for everyone. The world and story are delineations of the author’s D&D campaigns, and if it seems like some of the story events were the result of dice throws, they probably were. You also get side characters that come off like Elder Scrolls NPCs, who rhapsodize world-weary philosophy at every opportunity. People criticize The Wheel of Time for its pedantic descriptions, but at least the Wheel is comfortable. In Malazan, there is no relaxing, no homeliness, little humor, nothing Tolkienesque or wonderful. All on purpose, of course. This is work, baby, we’re not here to lay around Rivendell and eat elf bread. We’ve got a thousand characters, dozens of races and factions, numerous systems of magic, and interweaving timelines to keep track of. It can feel like you’re fumbling with a mess of tangled wires of different sizes and colors, trying to put them together in a way that makes something happen, and Gods help you if you think Erikson leaves any instructions. But that’s the fun, if you’re up for it.

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