Locus: Witch King and now Queen Demon are the mature, accomplished work of a writer at the peak of their powers, one whose interest in consequences, power, responsibility, and rebuilding in the wake of destruction – personal, social, societal, epochal – is here both given breadth and depth and sharpened to a series of exquisite points.
This is a fantastic novel, set in a fascinating world with truly compelling characters. It is shot through with grief, with the reverberations of destruction and the aftermaths of trauma: While the past timeline gives us emotional focus on the characters’ griefs, immediate traumas, and desperate choices, the present makes plain the extent of the Hierarchs’ destruction of the rest of the world, the scars in the landscape, in societies, in the vanishing of entire cultures.
But while Wells explores grief, survival, and persistence after mass destruction, she’s also using, in part, the classic structure and furniture of epic fantasy: the quest, the object of power, the threat to the whole of the world. Yet her argument is not, unlike many epic fantasies, that evil is a force that is extrinsic to people, a corruption that arises separate from their choices. The destructive selfishness that makes other people pay the price for your power, that produces an ideology of supremacy and enacts it in violence, is not a single choice but a whole series of choices, personal choices but also social choices of what to build and what to tear down, what to support, and when. A critical orientation towards the genre’s furniture is present throughout: Before anything else, this is a novel, and Wells is an author, engaged in thinking deeply about the world we live in, and the world she’s made.
Queen Demon is a powerful work of art. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.
— Liz Bourke