Malarkoi

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So it was that Portia Jane Dorcas Hall, who would become the Mistress of Malarkoi once that city was named, left her home country, never to return.

Mr Padge gives Nathan the medicine, but refuses to take his money, establishing a debt on Nathan’s part. As unusual and ambitious an epic fantasy as its predecessor…the situations are grotesque and unrelentingly grim, creating the sense of being trapped in a nightmare… Pheby is an undoubted original, turning the standard tropes of modern fantasy into something much weirder and more disturbing.”– Lisa Tuttle, The Guardian The weft is centre stage and an interesting concept. Time is meaningless here. It passes, as time must, but it is possible for those with the power to move around in time and space, although this comes at a cost. Edinburgh International Book Festival – 14 th August 2022 – Sequoia Nagamatsu, Courttia Newland & Alex Pheby: Resistance is Future

Professor Alex Pheby

He creates an army of flukes from the Living Mud, sets fires, drives the slum dwellers into the Merchant City, and then destroys the Glass Road. Mysterious Galaxy's "Virtual Event – Alex Pheby in conversation with Christopher Buehlman – 28 th September 2021 There is also a group of assassins, a talking book, naval POVs, ghosts, the very literal face of God, and a truly wonderful and intriguing set up for the final book in the trilogy, which is, without a doubt, my now most anticipated release. I know it's a way off, but my lord I am hooked. While Pheby is writing fantasy, it’s clear that his interests are political. A British professor of creative writing, he moved into genre fiction after publishing three other novels, all of which have to do with schizophrenia. These are books about the social dimension of madness, and they feel mad, too, with feverish descriptions of physical injury and terror. “If it was up to him,” one sadistic dentist thinks in 2018’s Lucia, a fictionalized telling of the life of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, “he’d anesthetize the lot of them and do what needed to be done.” Cities of the Weft, which has been received enthusiastically by U.K. reviewers, shares that grim interest in cruelty. But the two books published from the trilogy so far introduce joy into the equation. “In fantasy fiction, you can really pile on the magic, I think, and everybody likes it—and I like writing it,” the author has said.

As the nights start drawing in and frosts weave new chills into the evening air, what could be better than a descent into a catacombed city, full of unseen scuttling and theological travesties, where the frailties of human hopefulness are examined and writ large on an epic, sprawling scale? Tense and thrilling, and a fully immersive vision of decadence and decay.”– Eley Williams Anyway, time passed waiting for the Mother of Mordew, and eventually, when everyone was thoroughly wet through, there came a whistle that indicated that the Mother was on her way. THE ASSASSINS employed by Mr Padge were sitting at a table outside The Commodious Hour, his restaurant, shaded by a green and red striped parasol, sipping at pipes of opium and wetting their dried throats with wines of rare vintage. The atmosphere was heavy with late summer pollen and the drowsy humidity of an endless afternoon. They sat, seven of them, a little slouched, long of limb, alert – though secretly so.Playthings gets into the head, with tender attentiveness, of a man having a psychotic breakdown and takes up the story where the Schreber left off.”– The Lancet Time passed, as it must, and to alleviate our boredom let us turn to an illustration of what manner of people these assassins were. The sequel to Pheby’s universally acclaimed and monumental fantasy epic Mordew, this delves even deeper into the vividly realised world inhabited by assassins, demi-gods, occult weapons and the sinister Master and Mistress.”– Waterstones Not often does a book remind one of both Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Ellis’ American Psycho, but here we are: immersed in compelling minutiae. Alex Pheby’s Playthings is simultaneously unsettling and fascinating, tragic and hilarious, the sort of novel with an easily-summarized story but a nearly impossible to summarize experience.”– 519 Magazine

They find neither - and instead become embroiled in a life and death struggle against assassins, demi-gods, and the cunning plans of the Mistress. It was a sunny day in August, and she was far enough away from the battlefront that the smell of burning tyres, something she’d come to believe was ubiquitous, barely registered.Dashini takes them below to a chamber in which the corpse of god – the source of the Master’s power – is contained. An original, unnerving and immersive depiction of dark travesty: a vicious, viscid phantasmagoria.”– Republic of Consciousness Prize Suffolk University Creative Writing MA visit – 10th November, 2020 – interview and reading of Lucia A blend of Great Expectations and Gormenghast, with a cliff-hanger ending that hints at a dynamic sequel.”– Literary Review The Master sends him to see the girl in the blue dress, the imprisoned daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi, Dashini, captured behind a sphere of magical glass.