Donald Maass Literary Agency

Library Journal: The Isle of Wyrd is a place where mundanes can supposedly safely meet the uncanny. Whenever humans disobey the rules, however, Precinct 13 goes out to clean up the mess and pick up the bodies. Not every cop can hack the isle, but newcomer Beth Fahey feels like she’s come home—and the Arcane who control the isle are sure she’s theirs. They also believe that the influence of her past—and theirs—is going to kick off a deadly confrontation on both sides of the Fate River between humans who think the rules don’t apply to them and primeval forces who can’t be influenced, bribed, or bought—only appeased. Bishop’s (“Black Jewels” books) series opener is a story of fate, truth, and consequences, compelling in its description of a world where humans are not in charge yet still have the hubris to believe they are, and where the wild, the weird, and the wonderful are forces that demand obedience and responsibility, as seen through the eyes of a determined investigator who can see both sides of a seemingly insurmountable divide.

VERDICT Highly recommended for lovers of dark fantasy and weird urban fantasy, especially fans of Bishop’s “World of the Others” series.

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